On Friday we didn't do much except trek home. Things in the UK weren't working very well on our arrival. The passport line was drastically understaffed at Gatwick airport and Grace and I ended up waiting in line for two hours before they finally got to us. Then we were through in one minute. After that it took us another two hours to catch a train, then a taxi home. Everyone kind of collapsed after that. It was rainy and, by the time we were up again, it was close to six. So we went for a walk in the neighborhood, and got stranded in a really, really bad rainstorm (shoes like boats with water sloshing around in them, an extra ten pounds of water in your clothes).
But we bounced back on Saturday, getting up relatively early (9:30 is early for jetlagged people) and heading out to Cambridge for a daytrip. We snuck in a punting trip in the one hour of sunshine - perfect timing. And my punting was spectacular I would say. Not very fast, and there was some wasted effort, but we went in a straight line (relatively) and we went where I wanted us to go. Maybe it was easier without trying to simultaneously drink a corona.
Visiting Cambridge is great with nerds. Both Bernice and our friend Keith are in biology, and they are the only people enthusiastic about making a trek out to a monument to the discovery of DNA by Watson and Crick. In my eyes, its not a great monument, tucked off the main path, next to a parking lot. But Bernice, like Keith when he visited, took a picture and seemed pumped.
Otherwise we showed Bernice some colleges (my student ID is valid until January 2009) and the Fitzwilliam Museum. Grace was excited about the museum because it has a large ceramics section and I don't really like ceramics (at all). Bernice does though, so Grace got to see them.
We've also discovered the gardens of Clare college. It's a good garden. No seriously. Lots of weird paths that wind to different plants and sections. You'll be walking along and stumble upon a sunken pond, or a banana plant forest. Here are some banana plants.
We also caught up with some friends living there. One of them works in London and takes the train in. We have the same commute time, which is crazy. It's because she lives a two minutes walk from the Cambridge train station, where she can take a 45 minute express train to London King's Cross. From there it's a short walk to work. I take two buses across London, for a one hour trip, door to door.
Getting back to Cambridge was a bit miserable. We didn't want to leave by 6, when the last express trains leave, because we were still talking with our friends. We decided to eat before we left and had a really slow service at a restaurant, then waited for 20 minutes for a bus. I got fed up waiting and said we should walk, and then five minutes later the bus whizzed past us. Around 10:00 we got to the train station, took the 75 minute non-express train.
Taking the late train to London on a weekend is a bit hairy. It's like the drunk bus in a US college town. Lots of kids get on and are rowdy. We moved cars when the girl seated next to us started to vomit. Grrreat.
The next day we got up even earlier and took a 90 minute train to Salisbury. We were going to see...
Stonehenge!
We took a bus ("the stonehenge tour") from the train station and boom, we were there!
There were audioguides.
They were really, um, informative. Basically it said:
We don't know what stonehenge is for
We don't know how they made this thing, but the stones are from 20 miles away, and 200+ miles away.
It wasn't built by the druids. Don't be fooled. They came later.
Somehow they managed to stretch this out to an hour.
As for the stones themselves, they're puzzling. You can't get close to them, there's a roped off path. They look really heavy. Here they are with some crows, so you can get a sense of scale.
It's a relatively remote place. Almost 10 miles outside Salisbury, in a field (with a road running right by). Really windy out there.
There is one thing I liked. There's this rock placed maybe 200 meters outside the circle, and it's left uncarved and put into the earth at an angle, so it looks like its pointing to the circle. Creepy?
Anyway, we also went to see Salisbury Cathedral, which has a really tall spire. Check it out.
No pictures allowed inside. Sorry.
We made it on the 4:30 train, and were home before seven. No drunkies this time, very classy. The Thommandru sisters fell asleep on the ride and I read about physics - it's a shame no one else living in this flat finds them interesting to talk about, cause I am excited about this book. Upon arrival at our flat, we made dinner and watched I Am Legend. The end.
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