Cambridge

A couple weekends ago we took a day trip to Cambridge, one of the most world-famous seats of academia and the home of notable minds and great contributions to thought and ideas for centuries. Strolling through the picturesque town, majestic college buildings and gorgeous gardens was not just a nice breath of fresh out-of-London air, but also a day spent soaking in a place. We really enjoyed ourselves.

 Cambridge, like many old universities, is more an amalgamation of individual colleges and faculties spread out around town than a university with a proper 'campus', so to speak. As far as we can tell, the role of the "college" was something in between offices, classrooms, residences, faculties and research facilities without really properly being any of those things. But they're all housed in gorgeous buildings!

 There were a number of bustling pedestrian streets and quaint markets in the centre of town.

King's College Chapel. i.e. The Big Famous One

I think this is where the University Governors work. Rick (the tour book) said that the only way students knew if they'd passed their final exams and earned their degrees until less than a decade ago was a slip being left in a green box in front of this building. Nowadays they get a brief email too, apparently.

This clock, pulled forward by the grotesque time-destroying  locust, beats irregularly and is only accurate  once every 5 minutes. It's supposed to be a symbol of uncertainty and the unknown. Stephen Hawking was involved in its dedication, apparently (which makes sense since Cambridge is where he works)

The Eagle: The oldest pub in Cambridge and home of a couple famous brains, including Watson and Crick (the blokes who discovered DNA)

 One big highlight was walking along the river Cam. University students with the day off aggressively market the punting tours around all the big tourist spots in town, but a quiet stroll along the river is just as pretty and enjoyable, and an awful lot less expensive. Lots of things were closed on account of it being a Saturday but enough was open that we managed to get some nice photos and enjoy some green.

This tree, outside King's College, is reported to be a descendant of the apple tree under which Isaac Newton was contemplating the universe when he "discovered" gravity. The science teacher in me wants to grumble about what "discovered" means, but the history teacher wants to shut up and soak it in.

 One other nice surprise was that we could walk right in to Magdalen (pronounced "Maudlin") College, where CS Lewis went to school before defecting to teach at Oxford. Incidentally, the current Archbishop of Canterbury is set to step down soon and he'll be taking over as Master of the College here when his predecessor is chosen and set up. The College has some really awesome gardens!

Hidden in a little grove, we found a pet cemetery. Some of the dog and cat stones are more than a century old.

Inside the Eagle. This part of the bar has burnt grafitti on the wall from RAF pilots who were based here in WWII

This is the spot where Watson and Crick stood up and declared their discovery of DNA. Cool, huh? Of course, their technician, Rosalind Franklin, had done most of the work and the thinking. But the Nobel prize people didn't believe that women could be real scientists back then, I guess. 

We came home to King's Cross Station, the auspicious home of the Hogwarts Express! And a trolley some wizard evidently forgot to push all the way through.