July 23rd: Day at Cambridge

Thursday was our day trip out to Cambridge, located about 50 miles north of London. A bunch of us were running late, so we had to rush quite a bit to catch our train, but we made it with 4 minutes to spare! When we arrived at the train station in Cambridge, we stopped for some drinks and pastries. After two days in a row of having hot drinks and pastries in the morning, I’m convinced that it should become a daily occurrence. It makes for such a better morning. Our booking with our tour guides didn’t start for a while, so Darrin led us around Cambridge to the point where we would need to meet, and then gave us about 45 minutes of free time. It wasn’t much, but it was enough to get stuff done. I ran back to the post office to grab some stamps, which was really convenient because it’s the only chance I’ve had to get to a post office during business hours since we’ve been in London. The woman at the post office was really annoyed with my debit card. Apparently, in the UK, writing ‘see id’ on the back of your card does not count as a signature (in the US, ‘see id’ is accepted as a signature as long as you can present id). She finally sold me the stamps, but was really discontent with the idea of my signature being on my driver’s license rather than my card. I had two credit cards with my name on them, a government issued card that also had my name and a photo, plus a copy of my signature, and she was still skeptical that the card was really mine. It was a little bit ridiculous. But oh well, I got the stamps. After the post office, I went back to our meeting point and waited on a bench. There was a little old man sitting next to me, who was quite entertaining. There was a map posted on the wall behind us, and every time somebody would come to look at the map, he felt the need to stand up and explain to them that the map was situated in the wrong direction (north was not up), ask them where they were going, and then proceed to show them where it was on the map and how to get there. I think he secretly wanted to be a tour guide. After a few minutes, the rest of our group started to come back and we headed off to meet our guides. We split into two different groups, and the group that I was in headed off to tour King’s College Chapel. Our tour guide, Sally, made various stops on the way to point out different sites and throw in different bits of Cambridge history. She told us about a Cambridge University holiday, May week. May week actually occurs in June, after final exams, and is two weeks long. It’s kind of like our spring break, where everyone just relaxes and has fun, regardless of how their grades are turning out. She explained that an old May week tradition is night climbing, which is where students climb up buildings to pull pranks on certain nights between the hours of midnight and 6am. Some of them over the years have been pretty creative. Big pranks don’t happen as much anymore, because measures have been added to make sure students can’t climb certain buildings. Eventually, we made it into King’s College Chapel. The architecture was similar to other churches that we’ve seen, but the interior was completely different. The stain glass windows were there, and there was beautiful fan vaulting, but that was the most elaborate of the decorations. Everything was unpainted inside. There were decorations on the wall that had been placed by Henry VIII. The chapel took over 100 years to complete, due to consistently running out of money. It is done in perpendicular Gothic style, which came late in the Gothic period. The building of the chapel was started by Henry VI, who wanted it to be very plain with no interior decorations, because he felt that this was more righteous than embellishing the chapel with décor. Even the small amount of decoration that was added by Henry VIII was more than Henry VI wanted. Our guide explained some of the implications of the decoration. Above one of the stained glass windows that has a full image of Christ in it is an H, for Henry VIII. This symbolizes that Henry was putting himself above Christ and God. She also pointed out interesting historical points, such as different parts of the church have the initial H with different attached initials, indicating the different wives of Henry VIII. It was interesting to be able to see exactly when certain parts of the church had been built due to the initials that were on that part. After King’s College Chapel, we went to All Saints Church, a much smaller church. The most interesting part of this church was a large stained glass window at the front with images of different saints. William Morrison helped design this church, and in one of the images on the window, the face of the saint is believed to be the face of William Morrison, and another is believed to be his wife.
After this we broke for lunch. We went to the Eagle Pub, which has been in Cambridge for many years. The ceiling in part of the pub is covered in signatures of American soldiers from WWII. Across from the pub is the laboratory where the double helix was first mentioned. For lunch, I had fish and chips for the first time. It was not what I expected. The fish is like an entire fish battered and fried. I was thinking strips of fish filets. The chips were fries that were very greasy and fried (but really good). It was served with ketchup and tartar sauce. For some reason, I was expecting different types of condiments. It was not quite as good as I expected (the fish was a little bland for my tastes), but it was still really good, and I had to try fish and chips in England. I’m sure I will try some again. I’ve heard that the best places to get it are actually little hole in the wall places rather than a pub or a restaurant.
After lunch, we met back with the rest of the group to complete our tour. Megan and I ended up getting switched into the other group, so now we had the other tour guide. He was still pretty interesting. We went to a museum, and he showed us different paintings from different movements. I actually really liked him because he analyzed the paintings and explained what was happening and the significance of that particular painting to the movement. It made it a lot more interesting that just looking at more classical paintings. We were in the museum for a little over an hour, but it really went by pretty quick. After the museum, we went punting, which was by far my favorite part of the trip. Punting is an activity where a group of people sit in a little row-type boat, and a punt chauffer stands on the back of the boat and ‘punts’. This is done with a 24 foot pole that the punt chauffer pushes off the bottom of the river with to propel the boat. It was so much fun. Our punt chauffer was a boy named Orlando, who actually was a student at Oxford, but he worked in Cambridge. He was hilarious. He was a classic example of that dry British humor. He chatted with us the whole time, occasionally tossing in historical facts about Cambridge. We learned about a couple of the different colleges (there are 31 total so it would’ve taken days to learn about all of them). We got to see the first bridge put over the river, which gave the town its name (the river is the Cam river, so when the bridge was built, the Cam had been bridged, making it Cambridge). Also, we got to see some of the spots that had been used to film the Harry Potter movies (we seem to be seeing a lot of those places here). Punting really was a fantastic way to end the day…I think it should become a worldwide activity. Punting down the Logan river? I think so.