Europe 2004 Day 8

It doesn't seem like I've been away from Oregon that long. I guess moving around a bit helps. Anyways, today we actually headed out of Bury for Cambridge. I got to drive all the way there, including on the A14 dual carriageway! Very exciting, and sometimes befuddling, especially once inside Cambridge, but we got to a car park okay. We explored the center of town, had some lunch, and went for a 2-hour walking tour of the town. Of course any tour of the town includes the University.

The way it was explained to us, the University of Cambridge is a public institution, but a student needs to be the member of one of the 31 independent colleges to matriculate. The University essentially handles the instruction, while the colleges provide housing and other support for their students. Each college enrolls students from a variety of disciplines. The system sounds very comforting to me, it has worked well for hundreds of years here, it is confusing then why it hasn't been replicated more widely.

Our tour included a look around three colleges. Trinity College, which is the largest college, was the first we visited. Each college has a chapel, a hall where meals are taken, a master's lodge, and one or more courts and/or greens. It was quite lovely. The second college we visited was Trinity Hall, which is different than Trinity College. You can blame the confusion on Henry VIII. We actually went in the Trinity Hall chapel, which was quite nice, but nothing compared to what we were about to see.

The last college we visited was King's College. As part of the tour, we were granted admission to the King's College chapel, which was simply outstanding. The interior hall of the chapel is huge, with amazing fan vaults that I guess aren't equaled anywhere. The enormous expanses of stained glass windows are almost entirely original to the 13th century, with the upper course telling stories from the old testament, and the lower course from the new testament. The stories adjacent to each other are complementary- for example, Eve giving into temptation is above Mary's obedience to God. And there are hundreds of these panels. It was as impressive as Sainte-Chappelle, on a much larger scale.

After Cambridge, we drove to RAF Lakenheath, and Trevor showed me around. It was interesting to see "Little America," as they call it. There were a lot of British things about the base, like driving on the left, but everyone was American. At the gas pump you pay in dollars, but you pay by the liter, not the gallon. Things like that made it a strange combination.

January 22, 2004 11:59 PM

Comments (2)

01/23: Brent said:

Interesting fact about Trinity College... There have been more Nobel prizes awarded to Trinity College graduates than French citizens.

Goes to show what an incredible institution it is (and how much France sucks).

01/31: Bill said:

I know I didn't drive very much over there, but it did kind of mess me up a little bit. I haven't gone driving on the wrong side of the road yet, but a few times I've been a tad confused in my head. It is weird. I think it is probably because I paid a lot of attention to it while I was there.

The same sort of thing was happening to me after returning from France; I kept wanting to say "pardon" instead of "excuse me." Amazing how quickly you can get into a different frame of mind.