my first blog!

Finally we’re here… Well, we’ve been here for a week. We were jet lagged, setting up this blog, and doing other things around Oxford. Actually we’ve done so much around Oxford that I’m worried that there will be nothing else to do here!

We went to the Ashmolean Museum of Art and Archaeology we entered the door and there were a hole bunch of statues, sooo many. We looked around and found one that did not look like the others and there was a sign. The sign talked about the the statue, it said, “Thomas Howard, Earl of Arundel.”  Apparently he was a collector of Roman statues, he travelled around and dug them up to bring them back to his home in England! 

But just as we were walking over to look at the other sculptures we were told to leave the Roman section because of a private event.

We went to the section labelled “Egypt” where we saw a mummy! It had 3 coffins that were covered in paintings and the top one had a statue of a cat. Is the word coffin what you call the  box mummies were put in? All 3 boxes were hanging above the mummy, so you could see the mummy inside! There was also a video playing on a tablet that talked about the mummification process. I would not want to have to do that! We also saw a lot of scarabs. It turns out that scarabs are a family of beetles, the one the Egyptians worshipped was a dung beetle and it was considered the manifestation of the god Khepri or Ra.

On another occasion we went for a walk down the canal near our house and we saw lots of boats parked on the side of the canal with people living in them! There was also a person going down the canal selling coal and propane to all the people living in boats. The boats were small and were just big enough for 2 people to squeeze by each other and barely tall enough to crouch in. 

At the end of the canal was a lock going into another canal and we learned how to operate the lock then helped other people go through. It was hard to push the giant lever but it was super fun!

We also visited Mama’s college because even though Oxford is a university it is made up of colleges. Mama’s is called St. Anne’s. 

We also went to a pool, and waked through a giant field full of cows, ducks, swans, and humans.