England, Wednesday Apr 14 (day 8 of our trip)

I had been holding back from much shopping during our trip (except for the Guinness factory where I picked up some cool items), so we decided today would be the day. Ben isn't really a shopper so he stayed home, and Cole and I headed towards town. I started out by buying some beautiful scarves on sale (3 for 10 pounds), then continued through various shops. Ben had requested a 2X or preferably 3x shirt or hoodie if I ran across one, but we soon found out that those sizes, along with size 13 shoes, don't really exist in England. In fact, we went into Top Shop (a store I recognized from Bridget Jones books), and the men's clothing started at XS and generally ended at Medium. Hilarious. I did manage to find a shop selling the cutest teapot shaped like a phone booth, some tea, and a mini teapot by Queensware (very British-ey). We also visited the Alice and Wonderland shop, where I picked up a white rabbit snow globe for my friend's daughter.

Once we were ready for a break, we visited a shake shop that specialized in throwing all sorts of random stuff in a blender. Cole ordered the strawberry poptart shake he'd been wanting to try, and I ordered treacle tart (an item I recognized from Harry Potter) with strawberry. We agreed that his tasted like blended bread, and mine was fantastic :). Then we went to the theater to check movie times (remember, this was a sort of throw-away day to recover from the whirlwind week we'd just finished up), and called Ben to join us for How to Train Your Dragon. The screens here are a bit small, but their 3-D glasses were awesome looking, and the movie was great.

Next, we would be meeting a few more of Cole's friends at a sushi restaurant. I think that's one of the biggest bonuses of being in Oxford—Cole has all these great friends that we can talk to to gain a greater understanding of living here! The sushi place was great—they had sushi items rotating on a conveyer belt, and each plate was priced differently. Of course, it would all add up ridiculously quickly, but we're on vacation ;). Another bonus of YO! sushi was that they had unlimited water spouts, offering still and fizzy water, for a pound. For some reason, around here, asking for tap water is somewhat frowned upon, and we generally have been a bit dehydrated on the trip. So we enjoyed some spicy tuna, rainbow rolls, nearly-raw beef, refreshing fizzy water, and other great items.

Then, in following British tradition, we headed to a pub for a few drinks. We tried Fruilly, a strawberry beer, then were lead to an after-hours bar by a friend of Cole's for one more drink. Bars around here close at 11pm because apparently drinking is a bit of a problem in Britain, but apparently this Irish place was open late!

While in the bar, I made a comment about how women can multi-task better than men, so we decided to conduct an experiment in which we took turns: 2 people talking at the same time to 1 person, and then the 1 person repeating back a summary of what had been said. We started out telling stories: I mixed up an important fact about bicycles and Ben called it quits like 3 seconds in, but then I think we skewed the results because Ben started giving out hockey stats and Brooke started reciting sonnets. But in general I think Cole won the competition. Score one for the men ;)

Then we walked our exhausted bodies home. We would be meeting some other friends of Cole's at 10:00 the next morning to leave for London, so we went straight to bed to catch as many Z's as possible.