Cambridge

I went to Cambridge about two weeks ago. Yes I'm slow on the updates, but gimmie a break - I'm a graduate student!!

Anyways, Cambridge is about a 1.5-2 hour bus ride from Uxbridge. So I signed up on another day trip with some friends and made the trek. After all, Cambridge is very famous for its many intellectuals and universities.

And while I may not have the privilege (or the wallet) to attend one of the prestigious universities, I was still able to enjoy the many museums and and visit them.

The main college to visit is King's College - a private school that has its own church and chapel and everything. It's really old and very pretty, and has super-pristine lawns that you're not allowed to walk on and make me want to puke at the sight of them. My mother would be jealous of these lawns. For real.



I wandered around King's College for a bit before venturing into the rest of Cambridge. But rather than strolling the High Street like I did in Oxford, my friends and I decided to take advantage of the free museums that Cambridge University had open to the public.

The first stop was the anthropology museum. Cambridge has a large collection of artifacts, sculptures, and photos from cultures all around the world. And they have a small museum that contains them all. And while I was gaping at 12-foot-tall totem poles, and cases filled with old medical tools and African headdresses, my friends played around with a temporary exhibit on the human body. All-in-all an interesting spot.

The coolest museum though was definitely the natural history museum. It had row after row after row of cases completely FILLED with fossils, samples of stones, and basically all things ancient-dinosaur-times related. It also had a casting of a complete dinosaur skeleton (the original is in Belgium), and a T-Rex head. There was also a really awesome exhibit about Darwin and his travels around the globe.

The coolest part about the museum though, was that most of the samples had handwritten tags stating what they were. And most of these tags dated back to the time when Darwin was alive to present day - but they were all from people that worked for or were attending Cambridge. So all of the fossils and samples had been part of projects that had been worked on by Cambridge students and staff. So doing a project and then having it put into a museum for all of eternity - pretty awesome.

Walking around the town, you could almost physically feel the sense of wisdom and intelligence that came from the people that had studied at all of the schools there.

I feel smarter already.