Kew Gardens and Boat Race

Lent term came to an end about 2 weeks ago. I gave a presentation at the end of term about some of the mathematics for the essay I am working on. I felt it went well.
Also, I will not be attending any more lectures this year. However, this doesn't really mean that i suddenly have more time on my hands. Actually, now that I'm not going to lectures, I can finally figure out what happened in the lectures I went to before.
These last few days I've been trying to finish up a draft of my essay to show to the setter for comments. However, this morning, I got rather stuck with both pieces of mathematics I was working on and decided to give up for a little bit and do something else.
So, I thought I'd post about the most recent non-studything thing that I did. Last Sunday I went to London for the Oxford-Cambridge boatrace. During the morning I went to Kew Gardens, which is fairly close to the part of the Thames which was used as the race course.
Kew Gardens is a really nice park area with:
some redwoods (smaller than the California kind but still big)
Lots of birds that I wasn't able to recognize:

There area also some buildings and lakes and stuff on the grounds (I realize, very descriptive).

It was a really pretty day. It had started out cold but warmed up by midday when I was walking around Kew.

Then after leaving Kew Gardens I walked all the way to the starting line of the boat race, which was at Putney Bridge. The first and second mens' teams from Oxford and Cambridge raced. Tens of thousands of people were watching the boat race and five of the eight guys rowing for Oxford were in the last Olympics. I'm told that it looks likely that a lot of the Cambridge rowers will be in the next Olympics. This year Oxford won both races. There was a really big screen on the other side of the river so we could see the entirety of the 7k race. The main race was pretty exciting.

The boats raced side by side, and the Cambridge boat looked like it was going to pass Oxford. Once one boat can get all the way in front of the other one that effectively means the boat in front has won because the boat behind is stuck in the water behind them, which is harder to row in. But, as Cambridge started to make a move to pass Oxford, the boats clashed oars. It disrupted both boats, but it was worse for Cambridge because it was their 5 and 7 but only Oxford's I think, 2 and 4, and the 5 and 7 are more technically important for the boat. Cambridge pulled it back together, but they ended up getting passed by Oxford after awhile.

It was a fun day, and I thought it was particularly funny to watch people cheer as the boats came past, because for all the rivalry between the schools, everyone was really polite, just cheering for their school, not saying bad about the other team (unlike what Americans usually do).