just another day at the best uni in the world; Cambridge
Monday, December 7th, 2009My trip around England began to feel like a bit of a university tour as I left York uni for Cambridge to meet up with Pete, a guy I meet in Romania last year who had somehow convinced the university to give him a grant to travel in Romania and write his dissertation on backpackers. Pretty sweet. So again great to have someone on the inside to check out Cambridge. Uni was winding up for the year and everyone was finishing exams so good time to be around with everyone out and about. Cambridge is set up in colleges, Pete being in one of them where you live and do everything through, very different system than home. Pete’s college wasn’t one of the old original ones, but impressive nonetheless, beautiful grounds with ponds and fountains, he lived in an old house with about 30 other people, all with their own rooms and a cleaner…very cool. I was lucky enough to stay in Pete’s room while he crashed with his girlfriend on the floor below us. I arrived pretty early in the morning and walked the half and hour or so with my massively heavy pack over to meet Pete who had just made it out of bed, there was some serious end of year partying going on. After getting my stuff together we headed out to check out the town.
Basically the whole town is the university with the different colleges spread out around the place. The main colleges are amazing, set in beautiful grounds with incredible buildings. I can’t beleive people study here! One of the colleges dining halls looks like a museum with portraits on the wall and carved wood detailing around the walls. The colleges are closed to visitors so was pretty cool having Pete to be able to get into them all. There is a river running through with everyone punting along it, it beautiful, I loved Cambridge. It would be an amazing place to study, if only I was smart enough!
After wandering through several of the colleges and getting a bit of history from Pete we did what all good students do and headed to the pub where we proceeded to drink a lot of very very highly alcoholic cider despite warnings from a guy at the bar that “Old Rosies cider will fuck you up.” The rest of the afternoon/evening passed in a bit of a blur, something about dinner, a trip to the college bar, then very early bed as we had started the drinking session far too early.
In the morning it was time to move on again, this time to Bournemouth via London, so me and Pete got a much needed coffee before it was on another train into London to find my bus onwards. Cambridge was a cool place to visit, amazing history and would be so interesting to study there, very very different than our 1970’s Canterbury uni, Pete seems to take it all in his stride and is in no way a snobby Cambridge academic, he’s off to London in the new academic year to study at UCL, which will need another university visit.
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