I started off to go to the city library. My paper was about Oxford and all the resources I wanted to get at seemed to be in some special resource center there. However, when I got down there the city workers were on strike. Seems they didn’t get a raise and somebody else did. Libraries, schools, garbage collectors, caretakers, the city museum, everything run by the city was effected. I talked with the gal and her big sign for a while and she passed me off to the guy in the wheelchair. He was rather busy conducting business in the open air and passing messages and assignments to folks who were going to work.
I went to the Continuing Education library instead where the clerk spoke English with a Czech accent and I could actually borrow books. On the way I stopped by the twice-a-month antique and Farmer’s market. It had everything you’d expect at a flea market here – somebody’s overpriced junk, some imports, veggies and sausage. So I went home and did laundry. I really did think $5 for a wash and dry was too much to pay, but I was sick of rinsing stuff out in the sink and draping it all around my room.
Our professor was out doing a field trip that afternoon so we had a special speaker. She lectured for the first half of the afternoon and then we went over to New College (actually one of the oldest Colleges in Oxford). The gardens have a piece of Oxford’s original city wall and the chapel was stunning. The wall behind the altar is all niches filled with statues of saints and heroes. These were all destroyed as Catholicism fell out of favor, but have been ‘restored’ – which in this case means redone altogether. Very stunning. Then we got a little history of the Merton chapel and she answered the one burning question I’d had since I arrived: why are all the doors blue. I’d stumped two experts with that one and felt very much like the proverbial three-year-old. She attributed it to ‘Oxford Blue’ which is a very traditional color to the town. Now I just need to go back to Croatia and ask them why all the doors are green.
