Monday May 4th, TP and I made plans to go to Cambridge and take a walking tour! Unfortunately, when the time came to head out, TP was not feeling well and I headed off on my own. Because there was no bus that took us directly from London to Cambridge, I ended up taking a train to Cambridge. It wasn't a very long train ride, only about an hour or so, but it was nice to be on the train instead of the bus. (I had no chance of getting carsick that way.)
It was a bit of a walk between the train station and the tour meeting spot. Thankfully, I had quite a bit of time to kill and so I made my way to a Starbucks to eat a muffin and drink some tea. At 10:45 I took off to the meeting point which was across the road from a beautiful building that looked a bit like a castle.
At that point I just figured that each of the buildings in Cambridge and Oxford were just old and beautiful and regardless, would just make me feel inadequate to be there. (Mostly because everyone was rich, smart and had posh accents)
Now, I don't remember many of the colleges of Cambridge, but it's set up around the same way that Oxford is. The campus is widely distributed around the city, and each of the colleges represents a different academic pathway for the students.
One of the first stops we made was to stop at strange looking clock.
If you can't tell, that's a grasshopper on the top of the clock. I know it doesn't really look like one though does it? (I think it looks more like a locust)
Anyway, Stephen Hawking unveiled it in 2008. It's made out of 24-carat gold plated stainless steel. It's called the corpus clock or the time eater. As you can also see, there aren't any hands on the clock, you're supposed to be able to tell the time from the ticks in the clock (don't ask me, I have no idea). And, not surprisingly, this clock cost over £1 million to make and it breaks down consistently.
This were some of the buildings that we passed while on our tour.
I love these types of buildings:)
This was the entrance to Queens College. The cool thing about Cambridge was that there's a King's College (Which we got to later) and a Queen's College. Of course the Queen's College wasn't as elaborate because the Queen wasn't given the same funds that the King had access to.
On the other side of Queen's College that crossed the river Cam (technically the bridge of Cam or Cam-bridge), was the Mathematical Bridge. The reason this is so cool is that all of the wood that was used to build the bride is straight timbers, but the bridge is curved. Weird concept right? People say that Newton designed the bridge, but he died 2 years before the bridge was constructed.
We walked behind the buildings and took a picture of one of the most recognizable sights in Cambridge. (Unfortunately we couldn't get closer because we weren't students or members of the college)
Our last stop was on the other side of these buildings, at King's College, where our tour finished.
As you can see, it's definitely a lot more grand than Queen's College. Also fun note, this is where Prince Harry went to school, while he was at school, he had body guards trailing him to classes and when it was time to take final exams, they received permission from the headmaster or board members to take the exams. I believe it's said that they actually did better than Prince Harry!
After our tour ended, I headed back to the main square were a market was going on and I stopped and hand a lunch of a hot dog and a strawberry & banana smoothie:) On the way back to the train station I passed this awesome looking church.
Thankfully, I didn't have to wait very long for the next train and I headed back home to pack for my flight to Denmark!
No comments:
Post a Comment