Norfolk Terrace, Day 14. 22:35. Cambridge
Yes, I suffered getting up at 8, crafting my breakfast of two pieces of toast spread with peanut butter and topped with banana slices, and treading to the main campus bus stop, but it was all worth it. Cambridge Tour for £15 is hard to pass up.
I sat in the back of the bus with Anna, Michael, Briar (yes, that is her name, spelled correctly; this is the Univ. of Oregon student I mentioned back in Day 7 and I attended an art history lecture on the Canterbury Cathedral stained glass with her and Anna on Tuesday, so Day 10), and two other girls who will go unnamed due to lack of information. I was never introduced to them really. Anyway, at a quarter past 9, we were all asleep as the bus drove us onto Cambridge.
“It’s like Inception. We wake up and we’re there,” said Anna as we awoke upon reaching Cambridge and realizing that the trip had felt like a twenty-minute bus ride, not a 100-minute one. After a long queue at the loo (ha, see what I did there), we all were split into two 20-person groups and began the tour! I won’t cover the walking history lecture too much, just highlights:
Cambridge University is, in a sense, a city centre that holds 31 colleges (the tour guide said 32, but then again, she also said that the central offices for Microsoft were nearby the city…and I just researched another thing she said wrongly: the half-eaten apple that was found near the body of the famous cryptanalyst (and persecuted homosexual) Alan Turing was not the reason why the Macintosh computer logo is the rainbow half-eaten apple. That was merely a poetic myth.). So let me stop and explain “college”: know that this university first began when the Bishop of Ely, Hugh Balsham, founded the first of Cambridge’s colleges, Peterhouse, in 1284. Now, in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, more colleges were built and students came to the university and were put into a college (yes, Harry Potter fans, this is like Hogwarts and its four houses), which was essentially their home while studying there. Each college had a prayer area, dining commons, library, and bedrooms. Even alum from Cambridge in those earlier centuries would say they graduated from such-and-such College, rarely including Cambridge since it was the college that made their experience there.
So basically the entire “campus” is the city centre, filled with streets and pubs and stores and dozens upon dozens of tourist spots and gated entrances for just Cambridge students to pass. One of the best moments was entering King’s College Cathedral and literally losing my breath as I stared up at the highest vaulted arches I had ever seen and then at the sparkling blues and reds and whites, etc., of the fifty-metre tall stained glass windows. You read in novels the moment when a place entraps the character so powerfully that it takes a few seconds to merely take in what he is seeing. That happened now, as my eyes kept moving around and seeing what it meant to be in a place of utter power and glory. There atop a middle wall (dividing the cathedral’s length in two) was the grandest of grand organs I had ever seen, and through the arched pathway, I walked to the second half of the cathedral to see a sight that thrilled me instantly. There were medieval wooden seats upon seats once used for clerical assemblies and all I could think of was the scene in the movie The Da Vinci Code when the Council of Nicaea is assembled in a place exactly like this!
I visited the cathedral with Anna, Michael, Briar, Ella, Cat, and Haley, and also walked around with them to the fudge shop (oh my God, I can’t even describe the bliss that occurred in my mouth at the moment I had the free sample and later some of Briar’s and Michael’s fudge purchases) and before that to this vegan and vegetarian Rainbow Café. The pasta marinara was incredible. Worth the price definitely.
The tour guide, as I hinted earlier, was not the most credible and somehow she kept believing that we couldn’t speak English, so she would taallkkk realllyyy slowwwwlllyyyy. Yeah, it got a bit annoying, but it was still cool to learn about Queens’ College, King’s College, Trinity College, and a local pub The Eagle. Did you know that all examination scores were (still are?) posted in a public hall in May (they took their exams in April) so EVERYONE knew if someone passed or failed and by how much. Talk about intimidating. Oh, and it’s worth mentioning that the Cambridge University Press was a fantastic bookstore, located in the same spot for oh-so-many-centuries. At this point in the tour, I remember our tour guide saying that a certain businessman Ronald McDonald had tried to put in his business at that spot and had failed, but um, I can’t seem to find anything online about this. That seems a too bizarre of tourist-shocker to be true.
After a day of photographing and walking around Cambridge, our group retired to the meeting place and the coach took all the groups back to UEA. On the bus, I had a really good talk with Briar about our universities back home, Greek life (more of its cons than pros), Shakespeare, Tin Tin, and the ridiculous cost of living in college towns. Sleep occupied the rest of the ride.
First thing I did back at UEA was walk into my flat’s kitchen, not my room. Apparently Dan and Steff had been at it for hours playing monopoly and as I made myself dinner, I witnessed Steff win as had been foreseen by the third cycle around the board. Still, they were both beat after the game.
I watched a bit of Sherlock and started Sir Walter Scott’s Waverley but almost fell asleep. Then I remembered I’m behind in this blog so might as well get up to date. So this was the day at Cambridge, the university of posh British kids (who Marie referred to as “twats” at some point), but hey, there is no denying that the place is incredible. The history is embedded in the buildings—I saw the bed chambers of Sir Isaac Newton. And the King’s College Cathedral is utterly breath-taking.
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