Higher education

Pausing now between clearly critical games of computer mahjong (nah, I don't have homework to be doing) I thought I'd take a moment on anachronistically update this blog. You see, before the lovely trip to London that Susan so elegantly wrote about a few days ago, we went to the great educational city of Cambridge.

We had heard it was a nice place to go, and we thought it seemed reasonably low key. Susan was only just getting over sickness and we wanted to avoid any Everest-like tors, if you know what I mean. So we picked Cambridge. And what a lovely city it turned out to be!

So we get into Cambridge reasonably early. We wander into town from the trainstation, taking in the fairly banal parts of town. Even this we enjoy though because as we've noticed England is extraordinarly regionalistic, and even cities not that far apart from eachother have such different regional flairs to them. They're all quite unique and in sometimes unexpected ways -- be it architecture (Bath has so much sandstone) or cuisine (Leicester with its Indian) or what have you, even the most "boring" parts of the city provide us something neat to look at and think about.

As we're wandering, we've got only a fairly general idea where to go. We're following what we call the handy tourist signs towards "city centre". We think we're getting close, but we're not too sure. Then we turn a corner and our jaws drop:

We shuffle aside so as not to be in the way of pedestrian traffic and stand staring in near silence at King's College Cambridge. Now you have to understand that by this point we've both had almost a full semester of art history classes, more than half of which at this point have been about architecture. And this... well let's just say you don't turn corners in Vancouver and see this kind of building. Interestingly, the next art history class we were lectured about the chapel at King's College. The professor asked if anyone had been to it and we both shot up our hands rather excitedly and the prof kind of chuckled and was like "ok then... that's good."

So we tear ourselves away from King's College and wander down to the river Cam. On the way we stop at the most adorable of little bakeries with the most delicious looking baked goods and get ourselves some goodies to go with lunch. We get to the river. We had heard of this thing they do in Cambridge called punting. A punt is a small flat bottomed boat, kind of like a gondola in Venice. A dude stands at one end with a long pole and pushes you through the water. So we took a punting tour down the river Cam, along the banks of which sit the colleges of Cambridge University. We got to see all these amazing buildings and were told a bunch about their history. We went under the most quaint of bridges, saw ducks paddle by... while we were on board we brought out our baked goods (having eaten our lunch while waiting for our punting appointment) and the punter asked if we had gone to FitzBillies. "Uh... maybe?" we reply, and check the box. Indeed, that was the name of bakery. Turns out it is apparently a famous bakery. Go us. The goodies were amazing: A chocolate eclair, a Napoloeon slice, and a chocolate mouse truffle.

After punting we went back to King's College and took a look at the chapel. We were planning on going back later, but wanted to have a chance to look abotu inside. We were excited to check out the perpendicular style of gothic architecture (yay nerding out). Then we went on a bit of a wander through town, ending up at the FitzWilliam museum. They had a bunch of neat artefacts from all over and we spent a grand time just looking about. It was named the best small museum in Europe by some group or other -- small isn't quite what I'd call it!

Wrapping up at the museum, we made our way back to King's College Chapel (it sounds like we spent more time there than we did...) this time to take in Evensong. You see, King's College Chapel has a world famous choir -- you might have seen them singing their carol service on CBC sometime at Christmas. Every day there is a free choral service given and Susan and I were so on top of being a part of that. Yes, it was an actual church service, so it was something of a change of pace for the both of us, but we both really enjoyed it -- definately a highlight of the day. The singing was so beautiful and set up such an amazing atmosphere. I'm glad we were able to be a part of it.

After that we went towards the general direction of the trainstation, looking for somewhere to eat dinner. We ended up deciding we wanted Chinese food because there was a much better selection of that in Cambridge than there is in Leicester. We ended up at a place called Charlie Chan's (oh I know, the political correctness is enough to blow one's socks away) where we enjoyed a great meal, the hightlights of which were the chashew chicken in yellow bean sauce, and the toffee bananas we had for desert. Mmm.

Then it was time to head home. That... didn't quite go as planned. You see, we took a wrong turn and got temporarily lost. We had to double back a bit to get to the train station, and in so doing missed the last direct train to Leicester. This shouldn't have been a problem because it was only like 9:00 and the website had said there was another way to get home that just involved changing trains somewhere... Well we got all the way to Ely and then was told we couldn't get back to Leicester until 5:26 the next morning. We had to get back on a train. We needed to spend the night. NOT in Leicester. If you wanna hear more about how that went down, ask us in person. It's a much better story told with voices. Trust us.

All in all it was a fantastic day out. That list bit about the trains only served to teach us that we had to be just that much better with our planning. And we were! Note the London trip where nothing went wrong. And while Cambridge may not be on the very top of a tourist list, it turned out to be a city that we enjoyed even more than we thought we would. Yay!