Wednesday, January 31, 2007

Catch-up round 2

The day before David and I left for home we walked around Cambridge for a bit, taking pictures. A bunch of them aren't fit for posting (by my standards), largely because I'm very very bad at taking pictures of landscapes. It's surprisingly difficult to take a picture of a nice expanse of lawn with buildings behind it and make it seem pretty and interesting. I'll try again some time and hope it comes out better. =) But in the meantime I have no pictures of the backs (the part of Trinity along the river); all I have are pictures of the main section.

First, you enter Trinity through Great Gate

which is a darn big gate. Over on the right-hand side you can see a bike, for scale. Above the entrance are two "lions" holding the Trinity crest:

The reason I put lions in quotes is because I can't really take the that seriously at lions. I mean, could you take lions whose heads look like this

seriously? ...I didn't think so.

Once you walk through the gate (actually a small door in the smaller gate) you are in Great Court

which is a very big courtyard with grass and a fountain

in the middle. (The fountain is very nice, although it would be even nicer if there was a place to sit next to it.) The part of the building on the right in the picture of Great Court is the "buttery" (the strange British term for the cafeteria) and most of the rest of the court seems to be dorms, for both professors and students.

If you head out of Great Court you end up in a little alley, on one side of which is New Court (which is obviously very old) --- which I am apparently incapable of taking a good picture of --- and on the other side of which is a street which looks like it's from forever ago:

Most of Cambridge doesn't look like this, although it doesn't look like a normal street at home either:


Cambridge also has a market,


which happens every day. The market confuses me: it's very expensive, and the food that it sells isn't any better than the stuff in the grocery store (and is, in fact, often worse). So what's the point? Who shops there? It's a mystery.

Next to Trinity college is St. John's, which I include here just because it's very pretty and easy to take nice pictures of:




I don't really know much about it other than that it's cool. And looks like a castle. Oh, and the students get free laundry.

Of course, no series of pictures of Cambridge would be complete without a couple of pictures of the Cam



as well as a picture of people punting

which they seem to do in the worst of weather. One of the funniest things I've seen here is punts (those flat boats) filled with umbrellas and some poor student getting wet poling the boat along. When everyone in the boat has umbrellas it sometimes gets to the point where you can't really see the people sitting under them, which always makes me wonder about the point of being out in such weather (if I can't see them, can they see me?).

Last, and probably least, some silly signs around Cambridge:


2 Comments:

Anonymous Anonymous said...

Beautiful!
Can't agree more on the comment about sitting places near the fountain. It seems to be an English tradition not to try to make you enjoy things in comfort -- for example, there is absolutely no place to seat near Westminster Abbey and enjoy it and Thames in a good weather (at least it used to be the situation til 2002). Or do they count only on the rain?

6:28 PM  
Blogger Inna said...

They do only count on the rain... and they think that places where people can count on weather to say the way it is (instead of changing it's mind every 10 mintes) as too "boring." =)

11:04 AM  

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