Oxford

To round off my fabulous week of holiday, Jamie and I went to Oxford yesterday. Our main purpose was to check out the Christmas market and see what we could manage in terms of starting our Christmas shopping, but we realised there was plenty more we could do while we were there.

Oxford has many gorgeous old buildings, but this one was my favourite

Upon the advice of my friend, who got all excited when we mentioned we were going to Oxford and insisted we go to see the dinosaurs, we took in the Oxford University Museum of Natural History. 

There were indeed dinosaurs

There are many awesome things in the museum. So much crammed into such a small space! The rather menacingly posed T-rex skeleton was particularly cool.

These dodos were pretty dead

It's quite tricky to take photos of a lot of the exhibits because they are either behind glass cases or, in the case of all the big mammal skeletons, were crammed so close together and against such a busy backdrop that it was impossible to frame a good shot. Most irritating!

These are the claws of the aye-aye skeleton. Aye-ayes are cool

I didn't really take any photos of the Christmas market, but we did pick up a few things for my Secret Santa swap partner, some mulling syrup to make mulled cider with and an enormous joint of ham for next weekend's Christmas buffet.

The only real downsides of the trip were that Oxford was very cold indeed, and we didn't stay in town long enough to meet up with the lovely Mooncalf for a post work coffee and cake!