Sausages and Science

Despite the fact that the circus family is still with us (St. George's wife and children were supposed to fly out Friday morning), you would never guess that a volcano in Iceland was a) erupting or b) grounding all flights out of Western Europe. The sky was blue, the sun was shining--thank you, ash cloud. (Not quite so much to it's credit, apparently the reason they are grounding flights has less to do with visibility and more to do with the ash melting in the plane engines and filling them with molten glass.)

Between the Volcano and me setting off the fire alarm at the Pickwick trying to make a grilled cheese sandwich we had an interesting start to our weekend in Cambridge. After arriving, it's only about an hours drive, and unloading stuff at our hostel (certainly a step down from the Alhambra Court Hotel at York), we set off for the city center.

Our room and another quad were the first to get St. George's tour of (some of) the Cambridge Colleges. First up was King's College and it's perpendicular Gothic chapel. This building may carrying in the medieval tradition of building sacred structures that can't stand up under the laws of physics, but it's a beautiful church. Unfortunately, the colleges are out of term, so we couldn't hear Evensong sung. Mostly we looked at stained glass and listened talked about Tudor religous politics. Next up was Trinity, which was were our professor had studied for a year in grad school. The highlight of this tour was not the chapel, which was also cool, but St. George pulling rank on one of the porters and getting us into a usually off limits court because he had been a member of Trinity College. We finished the tour by walking by the Cam river back into town and getting St. George's opinions on Cambridge pubs (the Eagle came highly reviewed), the life of British waterfowl (they have it good), and East Anglia's strategic importance to WWII as an airbase (flat and close to places you can bomb).

(What you can't tell from this picture of Corpus Christi College is that the boy in silhouette is wearing and University of Minnesota t-shirt. We got pretty excited.)

We had dinner in our hostel, which included chili and more jokes about summer camp. Then my roommates and I headed back into town to see the nightlife of Cambridge. After wandering a bit-including through a field of cows-we found we couldn't quite work up the courage to actually go into a pub (bear with us, we'll get there). Instead we assumed an air of sophistication and stopped into the Cafe Rouge for dessert and tea. I had a really good tarte tatin. I should have taken a picture, but I was already wearing sneakers in a fancy restaurant (this will one day be the title of my memoirs Sneakers in a Fancy Restaurant) so I didn't risk it. Suffice it to say that it was amazing. Then, despite three cups of Earl Grey, we went back to the hostel and crashed.

We had way more free time in Cambridge than in York. Saturday morning we headed over to the Fitzwilliam Museum, hoping to see Keat's manuscript for Ode to A Nightengale. It was not on display, but they did have William Blake's colored engraving for "The Tyger," so my IB English pilgrimage was complete. We then traded Romantic British art for the Fitzwilliam's super modern (but still British) Sculpture Promanade. This one was my favorite:

After lunch and some wandering around Cambridge, the whole (or most of) the program met at the river for a punt boat tour. Punt boats, which apparently are all the rage here, are sort of a cross between a canoe and a gondola. Exhibit A:

Being a Saturday, especially at what appears to be the start of tourist season, the river was insane. It was a lot of fun though to sit on a boat, float under famous bridges (including one apparently built by Newton which could withstand any weight without bolts. Some students took it apart to see how it worked, but couldn't put it back together, so the Mathematical Bridge now has bolts.)

After the punt tour, the acquisition of icecream, and dinner (mushroom and beef pie, so fewer summer camp jokes), Diane and I headed back into town. We were hoping to see the Cambridge Arts Theater production of The Glass Menagerie but didn't think we had a snowball's chance of getting tickets. To our bafflement, we waltzed up to the stage door at 7:15 (for a 7:45 curtain) and got twelve pound seats together--four rows back in the balcony!! These seats were at least three times as good as the seats we weren't about to pay 23 pounds for that afternoon. The world works in mysterious ways.

The production was very good. It was really interesting to see a British theater do a very American, and for that matter Midwestern, play. With the exception of their interpretation that everyone in St. Louis has a slightly different southern accent, you never would have known it wasn't an American company.

After breakfast (tomatoes and mushrooms! I have fallen in love with English Breakfast as a concept), we packed back up into the bus and headed for the second set of medieval ruins of our term. St. Edmund's Abbey, unlike Reivaulx, did not just fall into disuse, it was sacked by angry peasants. As a result, there is a lot less of it.
After climbing around on the Abbey (which was an activity no limited to St. George's children) and exploring the cute (entirely closed on a Sunday afternoon) town of Bury/St. Edmund's, which included the first self-lighting street sign in Britain and a pasty shop, we head off to Ickworth house, fancy aristocratic house and gardens number two of the term.

The ancestral home, but no longer lived in, home of the Herveys--the Earls of Bristol. By this point I was very tired and a little sick of the British aristocracy, but it turns out I have developed a real love for decorative arts. So I spent an hour or so wandering around by myself, staring at tea services, and asking the guards annoying questions.

Next week we have a whole weekend in London.

Love,
The Mouse