I still think it's pretty boring but as I've matured (or rotted) I'm become more attracted to the quiet life – walks in the hills, riverside pubs, etc. Oxford (and yes I'm thinking really of the more picturesque parts, and especially in spring and summer) seems like a much more appealing place to live than it used to, although of course I'm totally unable to afford to do that.
When I was young I thought that the idea of being an academic - someone who was actually paid to delve deeply into a beloved subject, who lived in free accommodation in a lovely old building in Oxford or St Andrews or something, surrounded by others who truly loved knowledge for its own sake, ate dinner in the grand hall every day and drank so much free red wine that he developed gout - was basically the best life imaginable. Then I discovered music, drugs, girls and stuff... and also, more importantly, I realised that those people I was idolising or simply envying were - despite likely being world leaders in their own incredibly specialised and obscure field - basically overgrown children who had chosen to be eternal students with the chance to play dress up at formal dinner once a month and be looked up to by kids - no doubt perving on any of the girls who gave them half a chance - instead of ever going out into the real world (whatever that means, it's definitely not this) they were indeed embedded in their own kind of fairy tale (the well chosen descriptor that someone appositely picked above).
What Shaka said about the architecture, although I like it much more than he does, it's true that it's childish and like something from a fairy-tale – and for precisely that reason I often think it must be a quite magical place to go and study when you're still half a child, and especially if you've never been there or anywhere like it before. (I suspect that academic life at Oxford is also a bit childish – like Hogwarts with booze.)
I know what you mean about the architecture I think. It's almost like a caricature of a picturesque English village but bigger (obviously I'm talking about the "good" bits here), such a good example that it seems unrealistic and thus childish. But I also think that you could kinda say the same thing about certain parts of Lisbon... and that makes me suspect that it's true of any city that is a too-good-to-be-true example of beautiful old architecture.
Certainly it has quite an effect on people seeing it for the first time. There was a long period during which I was going out with this girl who was doing her phd or something there and I was back and forth between London and Oxford almost every week. One time though (I forget why, maybe there was a party or something) I took a load of my friends from London down with me, I think we even went into her college somehow and for some reason (it's the one with the famous unicorn statue with a hilarious penis above the dinner table) and... well, most of the group of people I was with were native Londoners who lived in Bow at that time and it was really funny, they were gawping at everything like yokels in the big city (except in reverse) ooohing and ahhing at every college or overly ornate sandwich shop, and they almost lost it completely when we actually went inside (what's it called now, it's near the library and so on, kinda opposite that posh light blue coffee shop) her college. That was fascinating for me to see, cos it was something I'd taken for granted for my whole life but these worldly wise Londoners found it overwhelming. I'm thinking maybe
@Mr. Tea was there too, does that ring a bell with you?
Another time we had a friend visiting from Germany. In fact he was Russian but lived in Dusseldorf and had a business trip vaguely near Oxford which meant that we were able to concoct some scheme whereby we registered my parents' house on AirBnB, set the price per night as the absolute maximum his company expenses would cover and then split the payments between us he he he... er, where was I, oh yeah, but the point is, one day we enticed him to come into Oxford and spend a day punting - two ideas that he responded to with extreme scepticism, in fact he almost flat out refused.... but, much as with the Londoners (in fact more so cos although they were clearly impressed they were also very cynical, bitter and negative about everything at the same time) he was captivated by the architecture and the town's beauty. He simply hadn't known that there were places like that in the UK and by the time he was ensconced in the punt with a glass of champagne in one hand and a punnet of strawberries or equivalent in the other, a massive blissful smile on his face (admittedly this last may have been aided by the enormous quantity of heroin consumed prior to casting off) he looked like a native, three hours there had made him into Sebastian Flyte. After a day spent punting, wandering around those corny olde worlde pubs, drinking lots of CAMRA approved type ales (and, yes, smoking heroin in every single one of the toilets) I was almost expecting him to invest in a blazer and start looking at houses for sale in Jericho.
I'm not trying to sell the place here by the way, I could never live there and there are loads of things I hate about it, I just think that these reactions were noteworthy.