In which a bar and a grasshopper are visited

Nasty little thing about Orientation Week -- about a million things happen at once.

So, first off: the trip to Cambridge. We (the other interested exchange students and I) left Colchester in a coach around ten in the morning and reached Cambridge a bit before noon. What hit me first was that despite the buildings all seeming to have been built somewhere between 1600-1800, despite cobbled streets turning to pavers turning to asphalt, despite the pack of tourists taking photos and gaping at the stone gargoyles and the mechanical time-eater -- everything worked. Nothing looked out of place.

We were first turned loose; Paula, Miriam, Kersten and I wandered through the open market, which was kind of like a regular flea market in the US, except smaller and there was a cheesemonger and a butcher set up as well. For lunch we stopped at a tea shop -- the sort that serves avocado and prawn sandwiches -- and wandered outside again. We took way too many photographs and gawped at everything. I think it finally hit me here that I was in England. Friggin' England. At one, we met up with the main group again for a short guided tour, where we learned that nearly every single crumbling building is a monument to something. The Eagle, a fairly nondescript English pub, was once popular with American Airmen, who burned their names into the beams. These have been left there (by now, in most American buildings, I bet they'd have been painted over). A second-story window is left permanently open -- seriously, it's written in the lease of the building that that particular window can never be closed -- in memory of two young girls who died in a fire in that room. The Chronophage is a new structure built into the side of a library belonging to Corpus Christi College: a mechanical clock made of overlapping discs. Small blue lights around the edge of the discs read the time, with the outermost circle marking the seconds. But unlike most clocks, sometimes it hesitates or even moves backwards, but it always stays on time. Atop all this is a grotesque metal grasshopper that walks along the rim, legs jerking, eyes blinking and tongue lolling. More than a couple students were unimpressed: "It's ugly." Our tour guide, however, couldn't stop expounding the symbolism of the ripple-like discs (representing the big bang), the jerky forward movement (unpredictable but inexorable, like time itself), and even the grasshopper itself (the device used to keep the clock in time is called a grasshopper). To top it off, she thought that most of us couldn't speak English (very untrue; everyone in our group had quite a good grasp on the language), so she repeated herself quite a bit. Regardless.

We also were treated to a visit to the chapel in Kings College.

It was utterly magnificent. Impossibly high ceilings, impossibly detailed stained glass -- a picture Bible hundreds of years old. The Tudor stonework and the oaken screen (a rare monument to Anne Boleyn). These windows...I could give measurements, but I don't know how to communicate the presence they had. The brilliance of the colors. . .the carefulness that had constructed the individual faces of the saints -- of Adam, of Joshua, Judah.

I am about as far from Christian as you can get, but these were so beautiful my heart broke.



The inner sanctum had been reworked in order to contain Rubens' "the Adoration of the Magi" -- one of the few works of art here that was separated from visitors by a barrier. This and the lawns were the two things we could not touch (the windows, too, but they were designed for this and placed far above the reach of a human man). Otherwise, we could trail our hands along the stonework, run fingers over the oaken screen, lean casually against it. History, here, is preserved alongside what progress is necessary. This chapel was built for the everyday people to marvel, for hands grubby with ash and clay and shit with nails broken and palms callused to touch. And it was all so, so beautiful.


Leaving the chapel left us a bit drained, so we stopped at another tea shop and had tea (with milk) and scones. True British scones are amazing. 'nuff said. Then we wandered through the nearby mall, in and out of a few designer shops, and back to the bus (we did get slightly lost here and detoured back into the Eagle. For the record, I couldn't find the burned names anywhere. Perhaps we were in the wrong rooms).

Then a return home, back to my flat for dinner, and out again to the student union bar. We sat and gossiped -- joined by a few other girls who had gone on the trip, as well as John, who hadn't. They poked fun at me for ordering liquor -- I poked fun at John for ordering light beer. All was good -- but I was exhausted, as I've been mostly unable to sleep since I arrived here, and headed home again around eleven.

By the next morning, most of my flatmates had moved back in. More on them later. Right now, I have class in less than nine hours and should probably at least attempt to get some sleep.