Quiche and My Weekend

I ate quiche for lunch today. I think it is about the 6th time I have eaten quiche since arriving in Cambridge. It is a vegetarian dining hall staple, and I think if I eat it again that I will turn into quiche. The dining hall also serves leeks regularly, chopped up and cooked. They are actually pretty good. During the first week I was here I had another interesting culinary encounter. I bought a prepackaged sandwich at the buttery in Churchill; I was hungry and it was the last one left and the label said that it had cheese and pickle.

I bit into the sandwich, only to discover that "pickle" means something different over here. It's this brown gunk that most definitely has been pickled, but does not have cucumber. Apparently it's some sort of vegetable scraps. Also, the tendency over here for food not to have any artificial coloring added would seem like a good thing, but it seems to result in a lot of food in the dining hall that looks sort of brown or gray. Maybe that's just the Churchill dining hall, but in any case, it's not horribly appetizing.

Tonight I made myself a peanut butter and banana sandwich for dinner, and it was one of the more satisfying things I've eaten in a few days.

Anyway, my weekend was pretty good, despite the fact that I have class at 9 and 10 in the morning every Saturday. Friday evening I biked to Tesco, which is kind of like Wal-Mart... it's big and gloriously, gloriously cheap. Saturday afternoon I went with a friend to see the Fitzwilliam, a museum in town, for an hour or so. I only saw the lower level, but it has a really nice collection particularly the Egyptian artifacts, which included several mummies:

and would a museum in Britain really be complete without suits of armor?
Then on Sunday I played some squash first thing in the morning and then later I got to go rowing with some other people at Churchill who were new to it. It was a lot of fun. The Churchill boat house is a 10-15 minute bicycle ride from the college (I'm getting more used to cycling here; I still haven't been hit by a double-decker bus). Then Sunday night I went to one of the clubs in town for a party for graduate students from across Cambridge. The drinking culture here is such that people have no problem attending an event involving lots of drinking and being up really late on a Sunday night.

St. John's, Trinity, and King's

So I thought I would go ahead and post some photos that I took almost two weeks ago. One particularly beautiful afternoon I went and looked at some of the other Cambridge collges. This first is St. John's.

St. John's Chapel. Part of the courtyard at St. John's.
The Bridge of Sighs passing over the Cam; this bridge belongs to St. John's College.
The courtyard at Trinity College.

King's College. Part of the chapel is on the left.

King's College, including the front of the chapel.

More about Churchill

I started attending lectures on Thursday, so things have been a bit hectic lately. I feel like an overwhelmingly large amount of things have happened to me in the past several days, and so it's hard to know where to begin. Each day seems to be full of embarassing questions like, "How does this door work?", new challenges, like riding my bike into town on the left side of the road and hoping I don't get hit by a double-decker bus, and fun information, like finding out about real ale. Real ale contains live yeast, so it will spoil relatively fast if unused. The beer is unfiltered and unpasteurized, and the bartender actually has to pump the tap to pull the ale up, since it's not under vacuum.

So I thought I'd say a little bit more about Churchill College. We are the only Cambridge college which is a national memorial. Apparently for Winston Churchill's 80th birthday, it was decided there would be a national memorial in his honor, which turned into this college. The college has a lot of students studying science as well as a lot of graduate students. Also, the college colors are pink and brown, so the boats that the Churchill rowing team uses for crew are bright pink, which I think is fantastic.

The weather these past few days has turned absolutely beautiful, so I was able to take some photos of the Churchill site.

OK, so this is the Winston Churchill tree, planted by Churchill himself, located in one of the dormitory courtyards. It doesn't seem very tree-like because at some point it fell over, and apparently the groundskeepers work really hard to keep it alive.

This is the slightly forbidding entrance to Churchill College. If you go up those stairs, the Porter's Lodge is on the left.
This is one of the many sculptures around the grounds. I am told people like to climb up on it and occasionally get stuck on the top.

The top of this building is the second highest point in all of Cambridge. It belongs to the Moller center, where people come to have conferences a lot.

Below is the Chapel on Churchill's grounds. Francis Crick (of Watson and Crick) was among the first fellows at Churchill and was vehemently opposed to a chapel being established on the grounds. He was so irritated that he sent Winston Churchill 10 pounds and requested a brothel be opened on the Churchill campus. I read his letter at the Churchill Archive, which goes so far as to specify that a madam should be hired and that she be given a place at formal College dinners.

Margaret Thatcher's Handbag

So today was fairly eventful. This morning I found a mall here, called The Grafton, and found the pound store, called Poundland. That's right, the equivalent of the dollar store, just British and, due to exchange rates, more expensive, but still an awesome deal for here. I got a big tube of Colgate toothpaste for 1 pound, so that was pretty exciting.

Then I came back to campus and ate some spinach and granola bars in my room for lunch because I'm weird and haven't quite figured out my meal routines yet.

After a bit I walked to the University Societies Fair, but realized the line was insane and that I needed to leave without seeing any of it so that I could get to my appointment to set up a bank account on time. I made this appointment last week on Thursday and was set to come see someone today at 2:30. I got my bank account, but I didn't get out of there until 4. I had to rush as fast as possible back up to my college and then the maths (that's right, I'm starting to say maths because people won't understand me otherwise) building to meet with a professor who is my Director of Studies. After the 10 minute conversation, I went back to Churchill College for the tour of the Churchill Archives, which I can see from the window of my room:

It's the building on the far right which has the vertical white cement sort of pattern on the outside. I actually got to see the shelves upon shelves of archives where Churchill's papers are stored. Also, Margaret Thatcher's papers are there as well. As for some non-paper artefacts, they have John Cockcroft's nobel prize as well as one of Margaret Thatcher's handbags. It was black and sort of alligator-patterned. Sorry to be disappointing and not have a picture.
I also got to read a letter from Francis Crick (of Watson and Crick) to Winston Churchill involving a chapel and a brothel... it's a good story and I'll try to post the highlights tomorrow as it's getting late and I have my first meetings for part iii maths in the morning.

Sometimes, it's a little bit amazing that I live in a town that looks like this. I took this photo yesterday, when I was running an errand. I was walking past "the backs," that is, a parklike area running behind some of the more famous colleges. Also, these were the first cows I saw in Cambridge, and they made me feel a little more at home. In the distance is (I believe) King's College.

Arriving and Settling In

So much has happened since I've arrived in the UK. I've met so many new people and had to adjust to living here so much that it's still hard to process everything that's happened. I think I'm going to like the year here.

The trip here was difficult. It was two hours from the time the plane landed in Heathrow to the time Sandra and I made it to the Heathrow coach station. The coach took about two hours to get to Cambridge. After arriving, I took a local bus over to my college. Before I could get on the local bus, I had to wait for a new bus driver to come since it was the end of someone's shift, so I had the fun of waiting for a long time at the bus stop with my luggage in the chilly Cambridge air while being stared at by an elderly English couple.

Then, when I made it to Churchill College, I stopped by the Porter's Lodge to get my room key. As I struggled some with my luggage, one of the porters said to me "Well, you've brought too much, haven't you?". Apparently the British sense of humor includes trying to give people a hard time. The porters are the campus security, but they seem to have more administrative tasks than campus security at schools in the US. They are also good at answering questions about where to find things in town or how to get something done around the college. Some of them are really nice.

But anyway, once I made it up the stairs to third floor, I was pleased to discover that my room is awesome. I took some photos once I got more moved in. I have a really large window, which has a good view when it's not all fogged up like it is in the photo.

I also have a lot of furniture. Clearly a desk and bed, but also a bookcase, extra cabinet, as well as an "easy chair" and coffee table.I also have a closet, as well as a sink, which both are behind sets of doors:

I feel pretty happy so far with where I live. My room is very spacious compared to singles at Grinnell (by the way, no one ever has a roommate here). My room is what's called a staircase room. In the main part of the college the rooms are organized around courtyards in units called "staircases." The reason for this name is pretty self evident when you actually see them. They're rather boxy structures in which the student rooms are organized in several floors around a main central staircase. Something like 10 people usually live in a given staircase.

I've gotten a bad cold from the abrupt switch to chilly weather here and I had a late night last night (grad fresher's hostel crawl... apparently people at Cambridge play beer pong, too) so I'm not going to write any more for now, but I'll try to post regularly.