The last day trip we picked was to visit Blenheim Palace and Oxford and it happened to be there was a special car event going on at the palace. We took the train at Paddington to Oxford and arrived at around 10 am. We walked out of the train station and took the Stagecoach bus to get to the palace. We purchased the round trip bus ticket (£6.50) plus the palace ticket (at a discount of £12.80 for student and £16.00 for adults) from the bus driver. Note that the driver only accepts cash so I was carrying enough cash to pay for 5 of us!

We finally got the front row seat on the upper deck for panoramic views! The bus also has free wifi but quite slow!

I had no clue how many stops to the palace but I assumed the driver will announce since majority of the people in the bus are tourists heading to the palace.

Anyone know what’s this symbol, is it speeding camera? Traffic was quite bad as we approach the palace, I guess it’s a big event for locals as well!

The driver did announced the bus stop and we got off. The entrance gate to the palace:

Wow it was already filled with cars!

Along the way we walked to the palace, the parking lots were filled with luxury cars!

The parking lot itself is a car show! Bentley, Maserati, Porsche, Ferrari, you name it all there!

It started to drizzle so we didn’t spent much time outside taking pictures of cool cars! Here are few:

The smallest Porsche I ever seen!

Antique cars vs modern cars!

Endless red Ferraris!

The smallest car I have ever seen?

The entrance gate to the palace!

Across from the gate is the Pirelli Prestige and Performance Competition! It was raining so no thanks we ain’t going to stand there to see the competition!

As soon as we walked in pass the gate, there were more super cars!

The palace made a great backdrop for the car show…usually car shows are indoor and with boring white and black backgrounds!

OMG it’s a Bugatti!!!!

Not only one but two Bugattis!!!

I have seen videos of Bugatti on Top Gear as the fastest street-legal car but I never thought I could see it in person and up close too!!!

And brands that I have never even heard of before!!!

Keep going……we walked into the palace and had to queue up to convert our “bus” tickets to admission tickets. According to its website online, they charge extra because of this event but the lady didn’t ask us to pay extra for it! Pictures of some of the rooms:

There is an awesome exhibition of Winston Churchill as he was born and grew up in Blenheim Palace. How lucky to grew up in such a beautiful palace. I love the yellow-golden color of the palace!

The details of the ceiling fasade!

I love the pastel color combinations!

We walked out to the garden and fountains:

Picture of us two 🙂

 

The palace is huge!

We walked quite a distance in order to fit the palace within the photo! The grass on the yard is like carpet! I wish my lawn is like this!

The VIP only Salon Prive!

My favorite is this private Italian Garden.

I snapped a few photos outside the rope hehe!

It makes a perfect backdrop for fairy-tale wedding photos, don’t you agree?

And we walked out as we were getting hungry and wow another Bugetti!

Love the gold-plated gate!

How cute is this car and its color?

We took the bus back to Oxford and instead of a parking lot, it’s a bicycle lot outside!

Oxford has quite a lot Chinese restaurants, this one has a long and funny name haha!

We searched yelp and found SoJo at 9 Hythe Bridge Street along the way from the train station to Oxford center. It was surprisingly good!!! We ordered a lot of food too because we were starving!

Seafood stir-fried noodle, tasty:

My favorite “water boil beef”, yay finally beef not pork. And it’s spicy, yummy!

Curry chicken, it was just okay though.

The Shanghainese dish – salty duck yolk stir fried with jumbo shrimps, this was my first time having this dish and it was my favorite!!! Love the “sauce” with rice, more rice please!

Crab meat with fried tofu – delicious!

We finished all the food!!!

Our filling lunch was $110.60 included tips. I couldn’t believe a college city would have such great Chinese food, probably a good population of Chinese and oversea students in Oxford?

After lunch, our lazy group decided to head back to London to rest so it was just my husband and I continued to explore Oxford 🙂 We saw many beautiful buildings!

The whole city architectures are like Blenheim Palace; yellow-golden tone!

The Museum of the History of Science:

Their Bridge of Sighs like the one in Venice:

The Radcliffe Camera:

On the back is the University Church of St Mary the Virgin:

We went into the church, the interior is simple but beautiful:

The reason we went into the church was to go up to the tower for the panoramic view of Oxford! It was full so we had to wait in line for few minutes.

Finally our turn, we paid the admission fee of £4, totally worth it, you’ll see why 😛

On the way up to the tower:

And it gets narrower and narrower!

A wonderful map of famous buildings in Oxford:

There!!! WOW beautiful!!!

They only allow a few people up at a time because of this….barely can fit two people going opposite direction!

The view from up here was unbelievable!

We walked around almost the full circle around the tower but it doesn’t get you completely 360 degrees around. You’ll need to turn back eventually; there’s only one entrance/exit.

 

Like a fairy tale city from a book!

This is how much space you have!

The view of the Radcliffe Camera:

All Souls College:

Walking down:

A sneak peek into All Souls College:

Oxford is actually a city with many colleges and universities and of course the most famous is the University of Oxford. We have no idea which is which college as they are so close together! On our walk back to the train station, we passed by many beautiful buildings on High Street. Oxford city is a very pretty college city!

A cute little clock tower?

Oxford Castle:

We took the train back to London and joined our lazy group in our apartment to decide on where we’ll be having dinner. We wanted good soup dumplings and after reviewing reviews and looking at the menu online via Yelp, we found Dumplings Legend.

Dumplings Legend was like a “high class” Chinese restaurant inside Chinatown, its decor is very simple mostly white tone. We were seated up at the 3rd floor.

When I looked at the menu, I was shocked by the prices; they were at least 25% more than the menu posted online….what a scam!

And the food wasn’t great either! The best dish was this egg tofu:

Other than that, other dishes were urg….I felt like I got scammed GRRRR!

The soup dumplings….not much soup inside! I wondered are they really freshly made?

It was definitely not filling and not satisfied! And it took a long time for the waiter to get us the bill OMG! Total for the dinner was $123.89! The lunch we had in Oxford was 10x better!!!

We took a stroll after dinner to the casino street on back of Chinatown:

Then, took the bus to Big Ben for more night photos!

The London Eye….hum..why they chose to lit up with red? I think other colors would look better!

Like I said before, London is one of the best places for night photos; there are so much landmarks to photograph at night!

Our last night in London was enjoyable, especially being able to go out for night photos! London is huge, we hardly even scratch a little small part of it!