Fake Statues of Liberty

The strange thing about going near the Statue of Liberty (ie Battery Park type area) is that there are lots of people who dress up as the Statue of Liberty and try and make tourists have their photos taken with them (for a dollar or two).

One guy had gone quite far to get accuracy with his costume. Most of the impersonators were standing on chairs or stools to get the requisite height. This one guy though had had his own plinth carved out of actual stone, and was only posing with tiny tiny people to get the proportions right:



It'll never catch on.

This was proved elsewhere in New York where we didn't see people posing as the following things for money:
- The Empire State Building
- King King
- Tramps
- Donald Trump
- Donald Duck
- Hamburg

Almost completely unrelatedly, there did seem to be a tramp in Montreal who had a laptop computer. I have no idea where he plugged it in. I would have taken a photo but I figured that any tramp who had a computer would also have a gun, knife or access to my bank records. Hello if you're reading, Mr Smelly-but-computerised!

The Sights of Oxford

I went down to Oxford this weekend to visit my sister, BiL and the Nephs. Never having been there before, I wanted to have a look around (even though Oxford is officially the enemy). It was probably not quite as nice as I expected... I was expecting something more like Cambridge, but in fact it's more like any old small city with a few older buildings in among the newer ones. Maybe if you bother to go inside the colleges it's more interesting, but to me these days, one college is much like another.

The main hobbies in Oxford are rugby and sword-fighting. In the following picture, you can see people participating in both of these activities. I didn't get too close in case a blade were to go astray and nick me.



The next picture is particularly exciting and I think really captures the essence of the town. It shows three tramps sleeping on benches in a graveyard:



We spent the afternoon having a wander around and then headed back home. In the evening, I took a two-year old to the off-license, had some nice tea and then drank beer, cider and port, ate some 100% cocoa chocolate and some ginger Wensleydale. The cheese was very good indeed...

Incidentally, anyone who says that I only went down there because I knew that they had recorded Tuesday's Life on Mars, which I had forgotten to do, is completely wrong. :-)