IIRC, ‘et al’ is used for people and ‘etc’ for things. I don’t know which of those categories countries fall into.
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I think I’d rather visit Blenheim if I was in that area.
Also, gotta agree on the size of the place. That’s twice the size of the (to my mind, very large) village I grew up in.
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At a tangent, a pronunciation note for non-Brits: ‘Bicester’ is pronounced ‘Bis-ter’. Which is something I didn’t realise myself until I had to ferry some Chinese tourists there.
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Thanks bro! I always wondered about that.
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Smaller “villages” can’t handle the bus traffic.
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SPEAK ENGLISH. YOU"RE IN LITTLE BRITAIN NOW!
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I don’t personally know any, and this is horribly judgmental but I can’t help myself: I can’t imagine someone who runs an unlicensed rodent zoo (rodents!) carefully noting anything.
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Note to self: renew capybara petting zoo license
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I think this is only myseterious for people who don’t travel. if you do travel, how many times have you taken a picture of that quaint stone street, that narrow alley, that cool door.
This is a great example of ‘everything is strange and different but me.’ Which is to say: maybe it’s the deeper echoes of White imperialism… Everything else is exotic. When did we become the one in the zoo that other people come to look at?
If you get outside of your bubble, you see we’re all strange and different to each other.
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Oh, right! They’re rodents, too. That puts a whole new face on it. I read “unlicensed rodent zoo” as “rat-infested apartment.” 
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Alan Watts used to point out that in China and Japan, Buddhism (especially Zen) is the square and stuffy establishment, to whom Western obsessions with it can seem comical.
Maybe this is the same thing, but the other way around. We find semirural Oxfordshire bland because it exists in the context of our experience. But to someone who has never seen a postwar UK brick house it could well register as a form of cultivated minimalism. To an older Asian couple tired of the local norms, those shabby gardens with their scruffy, low-maintenance perennials: transience and imperfection.
One man’s crummy suburbia is another’s reasonably-sized modern home built with traditional materials in a millenia-old environment where humans and nature live in easy harmony.
But of course they’ll turn it into fuckin Rivendell now to optimize for the wrong Englishness, then wonder why the tourists went to Slough instead.
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“Would you like to see the village from The Prisoner that the government traps the former spy in?”
“No, that we have.”
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Just outside Sheffield there’s an alpaca farm that’s really popular with our Chinese students. I always found that a bit weird until I learned about the Grass Mud Horse meme. I’m sure some genuinely go there, but photographs with the sign and the alpacas are really popular.
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It’s basically the tour company putting in filler material. They promised you exciting places when you signed up and payed up, and you probably will go to some. But, they’ll also bus you to places that they pretend are interesting, but really, they are actually just free for the tour company, offer free public restrooms and give the tourists the opportunity to blow an hour of time, some money and some energy.
I see his all the time, when tourists are loaded off at a terribly mundane public park, but proceed to look at everything with great vigor.
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In terms of physical geography, I thought the UK was in the Atlantic Ocean.
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We’re so close that it’s possible to swim to France, or you can pop over for an afternoon on the train. The Atlantic doesn’t really start until the other side of Ireland.
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