Archive for the ‘Adventure’ Category
For the New Year, Bill and I traveled to visit our cousin Carmie and her husband, who live in the Veneto region of Italy. We flew into Venice and spent a couple of days exploring St. Mark’s Square and other beauties of the City of Bridges before meeting up with Carmie and Matthew. Together, we traveled to their lovely house in Vicenza. On the 29th, we explored a Christmas market in the scenic Asiago. On the 30th, Matthew and I ran the Maratonina della Città Murata, a half-marathon in Cittadella. (Bill and Carmie ran the 6k course.) For New Years Eve, we explored the local Vicenza region, and then flew back to Oxford on New Years Day.
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As anyone who has been following the news knows, the world was scheduled to end today on the strength of the Mayan long-count calendar and a variety of other alignments and predicaments. The only way to fight this fate was to gather with about 5,000 others, including druids, neo-pagans, revelers, and my visiting brother Bill, to greet the sunrise and bring in the dawn that marks the end of the year’s longest night.
My brother and I drove to Stonehenge with a few other Wolfson revelers and did our part. A Getty Images photographer managed to catch us in the act, and we wound up on the BBC’s and Zeit’s coverage. On the way back to Oxford, we visited Salisbury Cathedral, a 13th-century construction housing one of the four remaining original copies of the Magna Carta.
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A few of the NIH OxCam students decided to take a long weekend in the Cinque Terre region of the Italian Riviera. After flying into the Pisa airport (and taking the requisite funny pictures of the Leaning Tower), we traveled on to our seaside flat in Riomaggiore. On Saturday, we rented some kayaks to explore the local coastline, and I took a scuba dive, seeing an octopus, a Moray eel, beautiful jellyfish, and a few barracuda. On Sunday, we took the train to Monterosso and hiked back to Riomaggiore through the Cinque Terre National Park. The journey was about 11 miles up and down the seaside ridges, made a bit more difficult by the detour around landslide-damaged trails between Corniglia and Manarola.
Update: Now includes pictures from Michael Tee’s camera! Click for more!
One fateful night in February, a huge (by UK standards) storm dumped several inches of snow on Oxford. Unable to contain our excitement, several small troupes of Wolfson students ventured out into the night to build snow-creatures of all descriptions. The next day, we returned to the great outdoors to get a glimpse of snow-covered Oxford before it all melted away.
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This year’s search for a Christmas market resulted in a spontaneous train journey to Cardiff, Wales. The market, while not overly exciting, did have some delicious German sausages and mulled wine. The real treat of the day was Cardiff Castle, built as a Victorian mansion over a Norman castle over a Roman fort. We had perfect castling weather — light rain and strong gusting winds — that made leaning out of tower windows all the more exciting.
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Last week, a friend from the States came to visit Oxford. As she hadn’t been to the UK before, we explored the local sights: Oxford city and colleges; the city of Bath, home to hot spring baths from the Roman period; Blenheim Palace, a stately home that was the birthplace of Sir Winston Churchill; and of course London, where we visited the Tower of London, Buckingham Palace, the Houses of Parliament, Westminster Abbey, the Greenwich Royal Observatory, and the Royal College of Surgeons’ Hunterian Museum.
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This weekend, I went to visit a friend in Paris. I’d never been to the city before, and took the time to see quite a few obligatory tourist sites: the Eiffel Tower, the Louvre, the Musée d’Orsay, the Arc de Triomphe, Notre Dame, Moulin Rouge, etc. Between visiting landmarks and exploring the Parisian streets, the weekend was one of sidewalk cafés and chance meetings of new friends.
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This weekend, I took the train out to visit Warwick and Stratford-upon-Avon with some friends from Wolfson. On Saturday we explored Warwick Castle. Unlike most of Britain’s castles, Warwick has been partly turned theme park, with costumed actors, concession stands, bird-of-prey and trebuchet demonstrations, scripted jousting shows, and stuffed “plague rats” for children to practice throwing through a window.
On Sunday, we visited Stratford-upon-Avon, the birthplace of William Shakespeare. This time around, I admit we forewent Shakespeare-related activities to explore the town and markets and enjoy the lovely weather on the river.
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Last week was the International Computer Vision Summer School in Sicily, Italy. Summer schools are relatively common in the UK/Europe postgrad world, where academic-year classroom work often isn’t part of the PhD course. Summer schools like the ICVSS serve as a combination review, survey, and conference, connecting the dots between basic principles and current research through lectures and workshops, as well as giving students the chance to compare notes on their own projects through posters and discussion.
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Last weekend, a couple of Wolfson friends and I decided to head to the southwest of England to enjoy the stunning spring weather. We set out from Oxford on Friday morning, and took our first stop at Barnstaple, Devon to enjoy a bit of a walk around. We continued on to Clovelly, one of the cutest towns in the world. It’s an historic fishing village built into a seaside cliff and still automobile-free, with steep cobblestone streets. From there, we drove on to Bude, where we explored the beaches and pubs and stayed the night.
On Saturday, we ventured out to Tintagel Castle, a ruin claimed to be the birthplace of King Arthur. (If King Arthur did exist, he was born centuries before the castle was built, but there is an ages-old Cornish law mandating that all historic landmarks have Arthurian legend tie-ins.) After a cream tea by the castle, we visited Hartland Quay and its associated headlands before heading back to Bude for the night.
A bit of rain managed to find us Sunday morning, so we toured Castle Drogo, a stately home built of granite around the First World War. We then stopped by Bath to walk around, visit the abbey, and find dinner on the way back to Oxford.
Most of these pictures are courtesy Phill Brown, whose other talents include cross-country driving, instinctive knowledge of Cornish diversions, stand-up comedy, and ultrasound tendon analysis. Click for the rest!
