Quest for the Golden Post Box

Our journey began with a challenge; a challenge uttered by our liaison at Oxford-Brookes, Peter Forsaith. While in London we passed a post box painted gold and he said, "There is one of these in Oxford. If you can find it I will get you a Mars bar."

Challenge accepted.

I am sure you are wondering, what exactly is a gold post box and why would we want to find one? Since the 2012 Olympics and Paralympics were held in London, the British government decided that every time a British athlete won a gold medal, they would paint one of the Royal Post Boxes in their hometown gold (they are normally red). The one in Oxford is in honor of paralympian Lily van den Broecke who was on the winning coed rowing team.

Now, I will admit that we did not just wander around Oxford looking for the box. That would have taken forever and we never would have found it since it is located in a neighborhood and not in the city center. Amy found its location online. There is actually a website devoted to documenting the locations of the gold post boxes. The site can be found here.

We decided to look for it on Thursday, September 20. After a slow, relaxing morning we departed for the U1 bus and rode it to the Glebe Street stop. Three very cute German boys got off as well and we walked down Morrell Avenue behind them. I knew that we needed to turn right at some point and go over several blocks so we chose randomly what street to go down. Well, it wasn't completely random because we chose not to turn right when the German boys did. We did not want to seem like we were creepily following them.

Turning right, we strolled passed more homes and a daycare center. It was interesting to see how different each of the houses looked, even though they are the same architecturally. Some have beautifully cultivated flowers in the front yard and others are just growing weeds. One even had several junky cars crammed in the minuscule front yard. It reminded me of a house on my street at home that constantly has broken down cars scattered out front.

We kept walking and ended up on Cowley Road which meant we had turned off of Morrell Avenue too early. However, this wrong turn was fortuitous because we discovered the Tesco. Tesco is a cheap, chain grocery store in the United Kingdom. The branch on Cowley Road is the largest in Oxford.

Divinity Street

Retracing our steps back to Morrell Avenue, we continued onward deeper into a residential district looking for Divinity Road. One house we passed was surrounded by a stone wall but and apple tree, branches laden with small fruits, peeked over the top. It may seem strange, but seeing that apple tree made me incredibly happy. I think it is because that tree reminded me of home. At my house we have two apple trees, two pear trees, and a cherry tree. It was my job to harvest the vegetable from the garden and pick the fruit trees. None of the apples at home ever got very big but my mom has made delicious apple butter from them. I was definitely not expecting it to be a tree that would trigger my first bout of homesickness since arriving in England.

We finally found the street that the post box was on, and of course we had to walk straight up hill to get to it. The street it is one actually brought to mind neighborhoods in San Francisco because of the similarly styled houses situated close together on a steep hill.

Success, our quest was completed as the gold box came into view. Now, had to go into super tourist mode to take pictures with it. We did not trek all that way just to go home without photographic evidence of our success. I personally felt really awkward taking pictures. People kept driving by and staring at us. I am sure we looked funny posing with and inanimate object that only has one purpose, holding letters and other written correspondence. One man even drove up and asked us to deposit his mail for him. Unfortunately, we did not think to take a picture of ourselves inserting the mail in order to have a more realistic photograph.

 All this picture taking took less than five minutes. Yes, of course we are the kind of people to ride a bus and then walk for over twenty minutes one way simply to take touristy photographs.

On our way back we decided to go back to Tesco and do some grocery shopping. Everything I got was pretty random since we are still trying to stock the kitchen with basics. I did finally find some baking soda and baking powder. That was a quest all of its own. I had been looking for those things every time we went shopping but I never could find them, even when I systematically looked at every item in the Home Baking section of the Co-operative Grocery Store. Things were hard to find in Tesco as well. The layout was inefficient and confusing in my opinion. In the one store there were three different baking sections, each holding their own different products. I have no idea how people can find things using just the aisle headings for guides.

Since we felt we had not met our daily walking allowance for the day (that is sarcasm if you couldn't tell, since for days before we had done nothing but walk) and it was a ling time until the next bus, we chose to walk back to Clive Booth Student Village via Marston Road. This route would allows us to avoid walking all of the way up Headington Hill, only to have to walk down another incline to get to the flat. I thought that the flats were not that far down the road, but it turns out it was more like a fifteen minute walk. However, it might also have seemed longer because there was nothing interesting to look at, just the new Centre for Islamic Studies which is a construction site. Other than that it was mostly just trees and bushes on either side of the road.

Our adventure for the day came to a close with our arrival back at our flat. The rest of the night was spent relaxing and resting out tired feet.