Freezing my Bum off in Cambridge!

So I awoke this morning as I do every morning: to the possibility of any kind of weather. The sky had just that sort of gray tinge that could mean a torrential downpour or the parting of clouds and the potential of a beautiful fall day. I have to prepare for either situation. The Key: Dress in layers. I had a light T-shirt, followed by a wool sweater, followed by a poofy down jacket. It could have sizzled or it could have snowed. I was ready.

And it's a good thing too. Because upon arriving at the bus stop, my weather.com-checking friend informed me it was supposed to be 0 degrees in Cambridge. Mind you, that is Celsius but it's still 32-freaking-degrees Fahrenheit, and last time I checked, that was freezing! And freeze we did. We took a two hour walking tour around the town and "The Other University," as Oxford calls them. There is quite a rivalry there that puts Beaver-Duck fans to shame. It was really fascinating learning the history of all the different colleges, their founding, their rivalries with one another, and the different buildings. We went inside the famous King's College Chapel, built by Henry VI before the War of the Roses, and saw the partition King Henry VIII put up between the secular and religious part of the chapel in honor of his love for Ann Boleyn. And when I say "chapel," do not be mistaken. This "chapel" is literally as huge as many a Cathedral, including the Cathedral of Norwich! Maybe Henry VI was compensating for something....HA!

I am definitely going back, though, because my friend Ayesha and I decided we MUST see the King's College boy's choir, that is famous throughout the world. Little known fact: Four boys train for the solo at the beginning of the internationally-broadcast Christmas performance, and the boy who gets the solo is only notified by the conductor the minute he is about to start singing! It's supposed to keep them from getting too nervous, but in my opinion, it would make it worse.

We also got a great sense of the historical greats that have gone to Cambridge. We saw the bar where Francis Crick and James Watson took their celebratory drink after cracking the "secret of life," or how DNA carries genetic information, the great research lab, the Cavendish, where Rutherford discovered the electron, Darwin's school, and a bridge rumored to be designed by Sir Isaac Newton! Although literary greats such as E.M. Forestor,William Wordsworth, Lord Alfred Tennyson, and Salman Rushdie attended Cambridge, we really didn't see anything connected to them. Boo!

I spent the too-short free afternoon warming up in a little coffee shop, and perusing old book stores. Which introduced me to my newest obsession: Old Books! The smell, the paper, the binding, who's read them, what they thought... all reveal me to be a hopeless English major. It also presented a roadblock: Old books are ridiculously expensive. I even found in one store a very old-looking copy entitled "Jane Austen Papers" that I almost justified for the purposes of research, but couldn't pay the 80 pounds in the end. Pity. I spent the rest of the afternoon wandering through the winding streets, the market, and the colleges you didn't have to pay for. Before I knew it, it was time to go. I will definitely be coming back tho.