It's that insane American!: Traffic cones, Windsor Castle, Christ Church, fancy cheese, and martial arts

It's been a pretty intense past few days.

First off, somebody partied hard and put a traffic cone on top of a statue near the Bodleian Library.

Rock on witcho bad self.

Thursday, I joined part of the group in going to Christ Church for lunch. It was really good! No idea what the main dish was (some sort of mysterious meat casserole thing), but it was delicious. Gooseberry pie I could probably do without, next time. It was awesome eating in the place that Harry Potter ate in.

And, a random Space Invader up on somebody's window.

We had plans to go see As You Like It over at Worcester College that evening. We got there at 6:30, the porter told us to go away, and we went to an Italian place to get some grub. Unfortunately, I had stopped at a Pret a Manger (a little Starbucks like deal) and grabbed a sandwich, so I wasn't terribly hungry. One of the types of sandwiches has "posh" cheese on it. Just in case regular cheese is too plebeian for your tastes. POSH cheddar. Pah. After dinner, we went back to Worcester, but they had sold out tickets! I think they just didn't want any Americans there. Well fie on them. We ended up going to the oldest pub in Oxford instead, The Bear. It's a cozy little pub with ceilings slightly taller than I am (5' 7"). So if you're tall, have fun with that. It was amazing standing in a pub that is more than twice as old as the USA, though.

On Friday, I went to my second tutorial. It was entertaining. We talked about Merlin in the old Welsh tales and in Geoffrey of Monmouth's History of the Kings of Britain, which was a great read. Those Welsh come up with some crazy tales. On the way back, I stopped by my favorite food truck and picked up a falafel and halloumi wrap. Usually I get the lamb shawarma, but I decided I'd go wild this time around. It turned out to be really good. While munching on that, I ran into a few martial artists outside of a church. They were chopping wood in half and doing acrobatics. Drumming up interest for a show later that day, I think. I've included a couple links to videos to what they were doing.

Here are the dudes doing some flips and kicks and such http://youtu.be/H2Y4qREd1YM

Here are the dudes chopping a plank http://youtu.be/1p_YY7gmZrQ

The rest of Friday consisted of going to a pub for dinner. I had liver and onions. Not going to repeat that experience.

Saturday, we went to Windsor Castle. I had been there before, so I wasn't wowed out of my mind, but it was still a cool experience. Especially St. George's Chapel. They had a room in there that was constructed in 1291. 1291, man. That's older than the idea of COLONIZING the New World.

They did have there an area called the "Pug Yard." I was very disappointed to see that it had a distinct dearth of pugs.