Since about two weeks ago, as I wrote here, I have been trying to do or see something new each day. This has been pretty successful, notwithstanding my being ill last week. Success! I also realize now that I have all of 7 days left in Cambridge, so I need to woman up and go see the rest of the things I’ve hoped to.
In case you’re curious (are you?) my typical days are as follows: wake up most likely a little later than intended, eat a light breakfast washed down with tea (less than boiling if I’m too lazy to trek downstairs for the kettle.) On good days, this is followed by a 45-minute or so jog in one of my favorite places in Cambridge, which is a big community garden and forested area by the river. On a map you could easily miss it, but when you’re there you feel like you’re in the middle of the woods in the middle of nowhere. After this, I clean up and head to Pembroke College’s most splendid cafe for a panini lunch and to do the day’s reading for classes. In the early afternoon I usually try to squeeze in my adventure–recently I’ve seen a lot of colleges. A lot. Surprisingly they don’t all blend together, and a highlight was sneaking my way into Gonville & Caius college to stalk Stephen Hawking. Success! Well, I didn’t track him down personally but I did photograph his office nametag. Limited success.
Usually I have classes from 3:25-6:05 (hardly ideal as my brain is convinced this is naptime, but I make do.) I then meet up with friends at Pembroke for dinner and proceed to whatever is happening that evening. Tonight, it was a performance by the Avant Garde Literature class, which was quite splendid. Now I’m doing laundry and heading to bed. Can’t complain.
So this boring entry has been brought to you by my guilt at not writing in the blog more often. Due to lack of time and bandwidth, I will refrain from posting most of my pictures from my travels until I get back home.
Today I took the train down to visit Lennie for a few hours. It was a very brief visit, but it was delightful to see her and keep up with the family. We had coffee in her cheerful kitchen while the rain poured outside. She was so sweet to drive me around to the train station and back, especially as I missed the train I was meant to take.
I’m off to bed perchance to read before passing out…much love!

One for the road: a representative picture of my adventures, having climbed something tall (castle mound) to see a view only to look a little silly in the wind.

It seems I may have been over-ambitious in my attempts to seize life by the horns (mixing metaphors?) and my lingering occasional cough has morphed into what looks like a big cough and a fever. No fun. Tonight I’m taking some knocker-outer cold medicine and sleeping until I no longer want to…I suppose I had to learn sometime!

In any case, the last few days have been splendid. After cricket and karaoke on Thursday evening, I headed out with some friends for a half-weekend in London. We spent some wonderful time in Gordon’s Wine Bar, a fantastic 15th-century cellar full of atmosphere converted into a crowded location for Londoners to enjoy some wine and cheese at the end of the day. Way out of our price range, but worth a look.

We spent the evening in Trafalgar Square and Soho, and then returned to our Kensington hostel for a brief sleep before we got up bright and early on Saturday to head back to the West End. We chose our sold-out play of choice and then waited in line for three hours to fight for tickets to the matinees: a friend and I saw Hamlet with Jude Law, and others went for Waiting for Godot with Ian McKellen and Patrick Stewart (yes, Gandalf and Captain Jean-Luc Picard. Excitement!) Following that we had some delicious Indian food and killed some time playing cards in a pub before our late bus back to Cambridge was to depart–unfortunately, the remarkably cheap “funfare” we booked was fun only in that you get to guess whether or not the bus will pick you up at all. Long story short, we ended up in Cambridge a little later and a lot tireder than intended.

On Sunday I went with a different friend to Great Yarmouth, a delightfully tacky seaside resort town. It was very much like the Santa Cruz Boardwalk, with an unironic 70’s American theme and lots more cheap neon clothing. Priceless. We had travel difficulties this day too, but it took us to an unintended lunch stop in Norfolk on the river, which was quite splendid.

All in all, a good weekend, even if I did wake up this  morning feeling like several of my internal organs were in open revolt. Today I napped liberally and managed to go to class, an afternoon cream tea, and a lecture on “A 21st Century View of National Security” by a former head of Britain’s security body (ever-so-slightly unsettling, for reasons that are hard to describe) but got home and regretted my optimism. So now I’m bundled up and I’m calling it a day.

Will post more pictures and stories soon, I promise. For now I’m determined to get over this and be able to enjoy my last three weeks thoroughly! Of course, I’m also getting very excited to be home and see David and family. Everything is good.

Cheers!

Hello lovely people,

I’m feeling bad that I haven’t kept more in touch with this blog. I’m off to London today after class–we’re staying there tonight, maybe going to Kensington gardens or seeing a play in the West End tomorrow evening. Saturday night I’ll be back in Cambridge to sleep, then off again on a day trip on Sunday to Great Yarmouth to see the sea and relax. Anyway, I’m going to start writing more often to keep in touch.

Quick version: yesterday I was feeling a little bummed that I tend to have class all afternoon (3:25-6:05, generally), which means my mornings and early afternoons are free when all my friends are in class, and prime afternoon adventure hours are spent learning things! The horror! So I made a pact with myself that, whether I can find a morning adventure buddy or nay, I will do Something Novel every day. This may mean–gasp–waking up early, but I will get up, go somewhere neat, go on a jog (this may or may not be to somewhere new, or it could be my usual “dusky-rusky” run through the woods), and thus make the most of my mornings. Adventuring alone around Cambridge bright and early? That actually sounds pretty fantastic.

Yesterday’s novel things were seeing Little St. Mary’s Church, which is I suppose my neighborhood parish church, and playing cricket for the first time. The church was lovely: just a smallish, one-room stone building, but I was struck by both the preserved oldness of its appearance and the life of its community. A man was praying quietly in a pew, and the back of the church was full of flyers for donations to charities and local community help, like finding college-age companions for house-bound people here. Anyway, a nice start. And on a much different note, in cricket I scored two runs! But then quickly struck out as I became cocky and convinced that ball was headed nowhere near my wicket, only to watch it thud into the sticks I was meant to be defending. Oops. My friend Jess and I then proceeded to our local ice cream shop, where we are swiftly acquiring loyalty points. Only four more cones and a free one is headed my way!

I must  now run to class, and then my bus leaves directly after for London. Love to all and look for more updates soon! Huzzah!

In the vein of the previous post, I’m finally getting around to telling you all what happened in parts of my trip I haven’t talked about yet. This may or may not be related to the final paper, final exam, and midterm project I’m working on this week. Um.

In any case, here are some pictures from the day trip to London we took last Saturday, which was rainy and a pain in the incorrectly-shod feet but still ten types of awesome.

We all bussed down there in the morning and promptly hopped on a commuter ferry boat that took us across the city by river, which was a great way to see some of the sights.

I’m a terrible blogger, as I’m sure you’ve all noticed…this is hardly a travel diary if I only post every two weeks! Still, I promise I’m doing my best and if it wasn’t for all the homework and peer pressure to go out and be social, I would be gracing you with daily essays of genius. Oh well.

I have pictures from the first week I was here, wayyyy back in the end of June! Shall we go rummaging through the not too distant past? Unfortunately it is late and so I will not be narrating much…I hope it all makes sense!

Yesterday I came to the startling realization that I am indeed here for classes, and that set off a flurry of book checking-out and associated reading and much fierce scribbling of questions that were due today, as well as assigned reading. Now, of course, having done all that and having fairly little to do for tomorrow, I’m naturally much less inclined to do anything useful. However, I am very excited to update all of you on what I’ve been up to! Consider yourselves lucky.

So, since I last wrote I packed up and got on one of several busses (“coaches,” excuse me) to leave for Edinburgh. We took off from Cambridge at 8:30 in the morning and didn’t arrive until about 8 that night, but the trip was lovely. Partly it felt like an experiment in total hedonism: when I was hungry, I ate from the lunch I had packed. When I was sleepy, I immediately slumped over and fell asleep. I listened to news podcasts or music or chatted with my friends at will, all while some poor soul drove all day in intermittent rain. Luxury!

On the way we stopped at Fountains Abbey, a ruined Cistercian abbey in Yorkshire. It was beautiful weather for it–just misty enough to make the skeletal building Wuthering Heights-worthy rather than just sad. A few hundred yards away on one side is a 17th-century mansion partly built with the crumbling stones of the Abbey, and a half mile or so in the other direction are 18th-century “water gardens.” Lots of layers of people there over the centuries…

Yes, I may have a great deal of reading to do before my classes but I got distracted by trying to upload photos to share with you all of the first week. Unfortunately, all the free sites I’ve found that allow you all to save copies of my pictures seem to have a pretty low space limit (I exceeded Flickr’s just by trying to upload a tiny selection of last week’s photos…I realize this may reflect more on my excessive picture-taking than on the sites’ capacities, but there you are.)

Do any of you know of a free site (or one that allows monthly payments, as I don’t want to pay for a whole year) that has high picture-holding capacity?

In any case, I promise sooner rather than later I will figure out a way, or a mosaic of ways, to show you where I’ve been.

This week continues to be a whirlwind, but I’m still having a great time. I’ve been meeting lots of the Americans on my program and a respectable number of actual British people! Last night a few of my friends and I held a housewarming (streetwarming?) party for everyone who lives in this area, as we can be a little cut off from each other in our separate houses. It went very well and now I’m happy to know my neighbors! Also, we did a little shopping yesterday so I was able to have some morning tea and yogurt with fresh raspberries for breakfast without having to drag myself to the cafeteria, so it’s looking more and more like home all the time…

The Formal a few nights ago turned out to be a blast. I had to run home and drop off my backpack, so I ended up arriving after everyone else had gotten seated. One of the only remaining seats was at the end of a table next to two of the professors on this program, and talking to them was a highlight of the dinner. I grilled them about politics over here and one of them, a film professor, told me about his years living in Africa and elsewhere. Also, while most of the cafeteria food here is somewhat shy of gourmet, the food was amazing.

I’ve also been doing a lot of exploring, both on my own and with friends. Yesterday I went on a lovely jog down by the river, and was amazed to meander through pastures with cattle so near to a busy town center. I’m making a list of all the places I want to make sure I see before I leave–there are still seven more weeks, but there are so many museums and colleges and nearby little towns that I don’t want to risk missing any of it.

Classes so far are rather more intense than I had been led to expect (and, if I do say so myself, more intense than my friends’ as far as I can tell. Hmph.) The History class, “Conquest and Colonisation in Britain, 400 to 1330″ kind of blew me away in the first two lectures by explaining that entire time period in just under three hours of class time. The lecturer pauses ever-so-briefly a few times to spell out a particularly difficult word, but most of us still emerge from the room with an overwhelmed look and aching note-taking hands. Apparently the pace will slow down now that she’s outlined the time period, but I have a feeling the several hours of daily reading will remain in place. The subject fascinates me though, so it’s worth it.

My other class at the moment, “The Scales of Biology,” is similarly overwhelming–doubly so, because the whirlwind of information the lecturer has covered has been complicated (to me) cell biology I haven’t even thought of since my freshman year of high school. I emailed him to explain my concern that I wouldn’t be able to keep up, especially if this was just the simplest background material, but he reassured me that it will be doable at my level. He also explained that I shouldn’t have called him “Professor,” and I’m not sure if I offended him by accidentally implying he was rather more senior than he is…oops.

Anyway, this has been kind of lengthy and I see the aforementioned pile of history reading for this afternoon looming ever larger on my desk, so I will go tackle that. Tomorrow we leave for Edinburgh all weekend, and then on Monday or Tuesday I will hopefully get to see Grandma & Paul while they stay here.

Love to all and take care!

Hello, friends. Since I last wrote I’ve been in the country and didn’t have internet access, so there will be much updating to do in the next few days. I still have a lot of scurrying about to do so this will be brief, but there is more to follow!

Important word from our sponsor, my mailbox: please write to me!

Kate Abbott

c/o Pembroke/King’s Programme

King’s College

Cambridge CB2 1ST

UNITED KINGDOM

Cambridge so far is lovely and amazing: it’s been gorgeous weather (a little hot and humid for my taste, but I’m not particular) and I’m having a great time. On Sunday mom and grandma left and I checked into my program(me) here. I’ve got my own quite generously-sized room on the first floor of a house just south of my colleges. For your amusement, I have pictures!

I’m currently in MacDonald’s (the Mecca of free wireless internet!) and have a brief time to post while I’m milking the end of my surprisingly short battery life.

We arrived here at the crack of dawn yesterday and did our best to disguise our jetlag and lack of sleep while we walked around the city with Enid and grandma (for all the non-family members who may be reading, Enid is my grandma’s sister). We spent the day walking from our hotel down to the Thames amid waves of commute-hour foot traffic. We wandered around various bridges and around Big Ben and the Houses of Parliament. We did the tour of the Westminster Abbey, which was very curious. All the life-size carvings of various people buried there made parts of it seem like a crowded, haphazard terra cotta soldier collection. Highlights: the creepy distinction of being next to the graves of various illustrious people (Queen Elizabeth, Geoffrey Chaucer) and my predictable delight at finding the self-styled “Oldest Door in Britain.” Ooh.

In the afternoon (after an embarrassingly long nap) we strolled through Hyde Park and had dinner at the pub across the street from our hotel before hitting the sack very, very early. Today all I know is that we’re off to the changing of the guard and later tonight we’re seeing “Wicked.” More updates to follow, and perhaps even pictures! I know you’re excited.

Another piece of news: I have a UK cell phone. If you want to call or text me, my number is 077-428-689-54. That means you. (Not entirely sure if you need a country code for that. 044 maybe?)

Up too late of course, leaving for London tomorrow morning early early. Somehow I’ve convinced myself that if I’m sleepy enough I’ll conk out on the plane, but maybe I’ll just be cranky when I get up tomorrow at–ugh–4:15. But there are good things to come. Look here for updates…