finally... Cambridge!

This morning we packed everything up and took the underground and then the train to Cambridge. It was quite an adventure with all of our luggage and us not really knowing where we were going but we got here in one piece and then we checked in to our little bread and breakfast. For those that have seen Gilmore Girls it's exactly like the B&B they stay at when they visit Harvard... the hostess (host in our case) who talks incessantly and is very kind (he refused to let us carry any bags up the stairs to our room), flowery wallpaper where the flowers look like they're moving, stairs we sneak down to avoid a 15-minute conversation with the host... it's the whole deal.

After a short break we ventured out to explore Cambridge. It's graduation weekend so there were kids walking around in robes with their parents everywhere and the streets were packed. But we found our way around pretty well considering how crowded it was and our map only had about 1/4 of the roads on it and most of the roads are really narrow and winding. We saw King's College from the outside but it's closed to visitors and I don't have a student ID yet so we couldn't go in. But then we met up with a couple of BYU students and the BYU professor who organized the program and he gave us a little tour. He showed us around Pembroke College, Corpus Christi College, and King's College. I'll be spending most of my time in King's but Pembroke is also part of our program so we have events and things there too. I feel like I'm going to Hogwarts: the dining hall is set up the same way (long student tables with a high table for the professors in the front), the dorms are rooms that come off a spiral stone staircase, we have a "combination room" ("common room" in Harry Potter and at Oxford) for students to hang out in, we each have our own spot at the library, everything is old and made out of stone. The paintings don't talk but then again I've only seen them from a distance. I love King's College. I can't believe I'm going to be going to school here. A bridge built by Isaac Newton is about 200 feet from my dorms, E.M. Forster lived in my building, we saw the pub where Watson and Crick had their breakthrough about DNA... I love how there is history everywhere and I'm going to be living there.

After touring the campus, we went to Evensong at King's Chapel. It's an evening service that is held every evening in each chapel at Cambridge (there is one in each of the 30 colleges). The Evensong at King's is famous because the Chapel Choir sings which is a choir of college guys and little boys for sopranos and altos (dating back to when the school was an all-men school) and it's held in King's chapel which is a beautiful gigantic chapel. I didn't understand a lot of what was going on and so I'll admit I spent a lot of the service admiring the building we were in. It's huge... there are 26 huge stained glass windows depicting Christ and His apostles, the ceiling is the world's largest fan vault... basically it's incredible. I wish I understood architecture so I could describe it, but alas, I'm a science person and therefore I don't.

me at the entrance to my new school.