charles darwin, my room is up on the left, top floor
bloody excellent, i needed these (had just the right colours too :) )
Trinity Lane, cnr Trinity St (thanks Anna!). Looks a lot like harry potter or the golden compass :)
some old building in cambridge (uh, King's College main gate)
i actually saw this clock on tele a year or so ago. There's something special about it, according to Wikipedia, it's based on a mix of old and new technology, and only tells the right time once every 5 mins or something. It's called the Corpus Clock http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corpus_Clock, and the hideous grasshopper is a Chronophage, meaning 'time eater'.
as to WHY anyone thought this skeksis-inspired insect would be something they wanted to look at every day is beyond me
trinity college, meeting for our sunday walk to grantchester orchard for afternoon tea (and NOT devonshire tea, cos we're not in devonshire!) (Any factual comments in these comments are due to Anna, either accepting what I said, or more commonly, as now, correcting me!)
strolling through the fields to grantchester, as a great many famous people have done before us, like Virginia Woolf, and the guy who wrote 'If I should die think only this of me, that there is some corner of a foreign field that is forever England' just before he went off to war and died there. Robert someone I think. [Anna: Rupert Brooke, WWI]
yes, someone had a campfire in the MIDDLE of the path. Like the path didn't go through an enormous field or something.
moo!
moo
At Grantchester, having tea & scones (pinkies in the air everyone!)
it sounds so foul, but it's really quite inoffensive, kind of like runny-ish skyr
the walk back to cambridge. gah. england is so ... neat and tidy. *shivers*
NO PLEBS ALLOWED haha (it doesn't actually say that, but one gets the distinct impression that's what's meant)
finally, some nearly decent-sized trees!
i dunno, are they ducks? geese? They seem quite elegant, with their black and white heads. [Anna: Canadian Geese, or possibly Barnacle Geese (what, cos of the calloused barnacles dripping off them?)]
the punters are out and about today on the Cam River (haha, the punters!)
walking into the King's Chapel to listen to the Evensong
you can't see it here, but I'm completley knackered. We're going to the Evensong in the King's Chapel, basically a choir. They make you stand up when they sing, and I found out what happens when I fall asleep standing up. I fall down. So much for those people who can sleep on their feet - I'm not one of them!
yep, he's definitely on the grass, so he must be a Fellow of the College. Actually, John Payne told me he brought his black robe up specifically to walk on the grass at his old college. Haha, like me - I love walking around in my socks outside specifically because my mother never let me as a kid, but said 'When you wash your own socks...' Amazing the things we do just cos we're allowed to now!
Sunday evening we had dinner in Heydon pub. Some of us took the 30 mile bike ride option (30 *miles*! My god, we're She-Ras the lot of us!). And why is Miles waving around a pair of undies, I hear you ask? ...
... to fix my crappy rental bike of course! Legend.
oh god, it was such an idyllic country lane bike ride, I feel so sorry for everyone who took a taxi. (Although you just *know* there's going to be a gruesome murder just around the corner, and some freaky old person will have to come and find out whodunnit.)
pretty fields and pretty sky. It was such a lovely ride.
plane-spotting to get brownie points back home ;)
There's a place called ICKLETON!! Wtf?? God, no wonder the Brits wrote Harry Potter and produced Monty Python. The whole place is surreal!
Apparently the boys who ride regularly around here have a "Five mile riding then pubstop" rule, which of course we obeyed! Look, i'm telling a very funny joke.
see, it's hysterical (wish I knew what we were talking about... Ickleton perhaps?)
it's a magic eye hedge :)
half-team photo (the boy-half)
we rule
all bike riders rule (even without helmets. God I feel naked without a helmet on a bike, it's been law in Victoria since I was in primary school.)
team photo, anna ducking out of the way 1.
anna trying not to block out everyone else in our team photo (minus me) 2.
anna and the mob (minus me) 3.
omg, we get to ride down that hill in that gorgeous light among those gorgeous fields :) yay for the bike ride!
and we're off!
:)
made it! The King William IV pub
Anna seemed pretty pleased to have arrived. (i love laughing people!)
people photos. Inside the pub was all decorated with equestrian paraphernalia. (Um, did I just drop a non-initial dummy subject? I'm not sure if that sentence is weird or not. Bloody Icelandic, how can it affect my English when I speak it so poorly?!)
people photos
mm, chocolate :) (ísland er stóóórasta land í heimi, but England is the most tidy!)
the next day. According to Anna, this is the Great Court of Trinity College (inside the Great Gate, where we met before our walk to Grantchester). We're heading in to have lunch in the Old Kitchens, that orangey building behind the fountain there.
the ivy on this building reminds me of the xavier's school in x-men. I just watched all 4 movies, and the ivy grows more and more over the building in each movie. Funny how ivy does that. It's the Master's Lodge.
on the walk home from dinner. cambridge was very pretty in the evening (Fitzwilliam Museum)
only 0.6s exposure, but the clock has lovely colours at nighttime!
pretty colours just after sunset, king's chapel
bikes bikes bikes
fyi :)
charles darwin as a young man. Apparently the guy who did the sculpture wanted to change how we think about darwin, by reminding us that he did great things as a young man, and that he didn't always look like Santa Claus. I think he did an excellent job - I'm totally inspired by this thought, and I think seeing CD as a young person rather than just thinking it, really makes the thought real!
handsome thing when he was young, charles darwin!
the conference dinner was at queen's college
the Old Hall at queen's college
apparently this bridge is special, with the arrangement of timbers being a series of tangents, and it's an urban legend that no rivets or bolts were used. It's called the Mathematical Bridge, although its official name is apparently 'The Wooden Bridge'. And that, my friends, is the end of the tour. Yup, no pics of the actual conference - I was too engrossed in being there to take any photos, sorry!
