Those Lesser Provincial Colleges up in Oxford...

I'm pretty sure Howard Davies (the LSE's president) or some other authority figure described the schools in Oxford or Cambridge, or maybe both, in this way when comparing them to the LSE during one of my orientation events. In any case, Oxford, in my opinion, was pretty incredible and I've heard that Exeter and Christchurch and the many other schools there are rather prestigious (eat your words Davies!). In any case, Laura and I had the opportunity in the middle of November to go up there and visit with some friends of mine from SDSU (Shane and Wendy) who are both in Ph.D. programs as well. We went via bus early in the morning and spent most of the morning and afternoon just wandering around the city. It's rather incredible. If you didn't know, Oxford is not, in and of itself, a university. Rather, it is a small town which contains about a dozen universities all of varying age, the oldest of them being established in the 1200s. This means, that there are numerous old gothic buildings from the 13th, 14th, 15th, and 16th centuries scattered around the city. They're incredible! The LSE has nothing like that since it was established in the late
1800's. Indeed, the whole town just has a much more old world feel to it than the hustle and bustle of London, so it was a nice break for us. In any case, that afternoon we met up with Shane and Wendy for a beer in the smallest and one of the oldest pubs in Oxford, Ye Olde White Horse. It was great! We later had supper with Shane and his girlfriend at a spectacular Greek restaurant and finally hopped back on our bus back to London just in time to catch the tube home before they closed for the night. Overall a spectacular trip. Just a note on some of the pictures, the hazy one with the square building is Christchurch Uni, I believe, the one of us is inside the White Horse, the one if the round building is the Bodleian Library, and the last one is a big vine growing up a university building, but I can't remember which university.