Apologies to family and friends for the nearly week-long break I’ve taken on posting to the travel blog. This week was incredibly busy. In addition to my regular teaching, I attended the Oxford City soccer match on Tuesday evening, and Theo arrived in Oxford on Wednesday. I opted to postpone continuing my ramble in order to spend time with him and Tara, which we did on Thursday and Friday, touring around Oxford (which Theo last visited a decade ago when he was in middle school), visiting Oxford Castle, and doing all of the boring-but-important logistical work needed to make a week-long European excursion go off without a hitch.
On Friday I had a great visit with one of the employees at the Pitt Rivers Museum, a major anthropology and cultural artifacts museum in Oxford. I have a lot to share about the museum in a future post, but quick snapshot: for my ethics class I’m planning to spend some time with students exploring moral issues are British colonialism and the ethics of empire. The Pitt Rivers Museum is perfect for this, so I’m going to visit with them about having the students into the museum to learn more about efforts on decolonializing the collection. Historically the museum is a prominent example of some of the problems I’m exploring in my ethics course. I’m hoping to get some local experts to contribute to our conversation. More to come!
It’s Saturday evening. I am sitting in the third floor of a hotel in Paris looking out on the Chinatown district where Tara, Theo, and I just finished a meal at a nearby Vietnamese restaurant. The food was great. The trip to Paris was long and tiring. We waited a long time to get on our plane from Luton airport to Charles De Gaulle airport on the outskirts of Paris. Note to self and future students traveling to Paris: getting from CDG to central Paris is a pain. Take the chunnel. It’s worth it. Or if you go to CDG, go ahead and get a taxi. At 58 euros it was only a little bit more than what public transit would have been to our hotel. The bus system was not working efficiently, so after 45 minutes waiting for a bus to central Paris we gave up and got a taxi, which was perfect.
Our agenda for the week: we will be in Paris through Tuesday. From there we travel by train to Lucerne, Switzerland, where we will stay through Friday morning. We leave Friday for Vienna and head back to Oxford on Sunday. My access to internet may be spotty over the coming days (in fact: I am typing this post in my hotel room without internet access and plan to post it when the internet is accessible).
Best wishes to family and friends back home. To students who are traveling this week, stay safe!
I agree that the Eurostar is the best way to get to Paris (and Brussels) from London. And fun, too!
I would love to have an ethics conversation over that museum!