YESTERDAY I’ve been to Oxford, taking advantage of the Erasmus’ club event to get some cheap train tickets. The train company required us to travel by groups of 4, but we haven’t seen anything even remotely looking like a train conductor. The BBC weather people once again lied through their teeth, promising us some heavy, dirty rain, but the sky was crystal clear.

In Oxford I met Antoine whose blog emerged from sleep earlier this week. He took me on a tour around the town, which is not big, but holds some great architectural jewels. He also explained to me the way Oxford university works (or at least tries to): there is no central organisation, each students and professors belong to a given College. A College is a set of building as well as a social structure, which provides accommodation and food for its members. Almost all events in the uni originates from a given College. On the academic side, the university is divided (like any other) in departments (Physics, history, etc.). Since Oxford is (or was) chiefly a ‘humanities’ institution, the natural sciences departments are located on the rim of the city. Antoine seems to have taken advantage of this to maximize its daily travel duration by settling on the opposite side of the city, with respect to (w.r.t.) the Mathematics department. Thus we can conclude that Antoine really appreciates Oxford architectural features!

We’ve also been to the Museum of History of Science, which holds nice, old ‘instruments’, ranging from astrolabes to microscopes, including weird computation tools. The museum also hosted the Steampunk exhibition, which is quite hard to decribes, have a look at the Wikipedia article. I real like this sort of old, ‘pipes, dial and metal’ items, which I can now name !

Mechanical womb

Doggy dog

Antoine’s College

Inside one of Oxford dozens libraries

“UNG JE SERVIRAY” wtf ?

Undoubtedly twin sciences

Radcliffe Camera, some have tried to take picture of the stars with it

Freaks !

Geekiness from last century

Holy hand grenade

Don’t run away, it is the one afraid, look !

My googles !

So many, tiny things on it, but I doubt the sail is OK

Mech-O-Arm

“‘Torus’ for Thermonuclear Fission experiments”

George III microscope

Fire-fighter ?

Nice gate, with pumpkinish lamp inside the building

The hole in the door

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