Ely

Yesterday, Tanya, Alex, and I went to Ely, a small small town just 15 minutes north of Cambridge by train. We're in English Architectural History together, and will be studying the Gothic style this week, so Ely was the perfect place to see it up close and personal. The train trip further proved that everything in this part of England is flat, and most of it is green. And look, blue sky again!
Ely Cathedral is over 900 years old (100 years older than Cambridge University!) and was built when the town of Ely was originally an island in the marsh. Folklore says that the town got its names from the large number of eels that were swimming around the island. The Cathedral, also known as "The Ship of the Fens" is huge. HUGE. This tower is 215 feet high.

It was built and rebuilt over hundreds of years, though, so it isn't all Gothic per se. There are rounded arches and other Romanesque features, but the whole thing is just simply beautiful, and remarkably coherent (at least to my untrained eye). This is a look down the center of the Cathedral, or the nave:

In one of the little side chapels, they had embroidered pillows hanging off the backs of the chairs, for people to rest their knees on when praying:

This is the octagonal "lantern tower" that rests over the cross of the Cathedral. It was constructed in the 1300s and is definitely my favorite part of the church:

Posing in front of the church:

Flying buttresses!
I really liked this little crest that was on the city's trash bins:
Goodbye, Ely! Just in time for the weather to turn back to that typical English sky...

A beautiful day

Today is Laundry Day for me. At Emma, you have to sign up for a time to use the machines, then get a key from the Porter's lodge, and then do your laundry in your time slot. Interesting.

It was very cold here yesterday, colder than it has been in a while. You can see your breath again, which hasn't been possible since we first got here, really. I can withstand the cold way better than I expected to. This is a very good thing, too, given my intention of grad school on the east coast and all. So, yay for that! It might snow again in a day or two, so that would be quite fun.
Yesterday and the day before I had my second round of classes. My individual class, Philosophy of Art, went well. I turned in an essay and got it back with no grade (are we not getting graded assignments here? that's strange...) but plenty of positive comments. Yesterday I my large-group class, Space and Time in Contemporary Art, which was fine but nothing to write home about (literally...). After that was a walking tour of Cambridge with my small-group English Architectural History class. We started at the round church:and then walked down Trinity Street/King's Parade (because no major street here is satisfied with having only one name) and around Kings, Gonville and Caius, Queens, Trinity, and maybe another college that I'm forgetting. They were beautiful! Our teacher is a young Scottish PhD student, very earnest and happy to be teaching, but a little bit nervous at first. I think he warmed up to us yesterday, though. Here are some pictures from our walk:

Trinity College, from inside the first courtyard:

Behind Queens, I think. The sun was out, and the Cam was beautiful!

The river Cam, at the Backs. Gorgeous.

One amazing part was King's College Chapel, which was just this gigantic Gothic church (it really shouldn't be called a Chapel anymore) that was built by Henry's VII and VIII. At the part where Henry VII stopped building and Henry VIII took over, there is an obvious and delibertate change in the style of the church. Suddenly, it goes from simple Gothic style (well, simple for a huge amazing church) with little ornamentation, to carvings and statues and initials and "look at me! I'm the king!" everywhere. Pretty funny, and also very cool how visible history can be.

Took my breath away when we first walked in.
Look at that height! And those windows!

From the altar-end of the church, looking back down the nave.

Ornamentation added by Henry VIII. Lots of gates and roses and crowns.

Sorry for the slight blurry-ness, but hopefully it won't
distract you from that beautiful fan ceiling.

Before our walking tour, I got coffee and a pasty and sat in a window and looked out on the passersby. I actually hadn't had a pasty until getting here, but they are SO GOOD. Basically a flaky dough pastery stuffed with whatever you want...sausage (if that's your thing), cheese, potatoes, onion, chicken, etc. Perfect to eat on the go and SO damn tasty, and fill you up forever, too. My friends say that in the US we pronounce them "pay-stees" and here, all the Brits say its "pah-stees." Not even just because of the accent, either...I'm supposed to say "pah-stees," too, and I always have to pause before ordering to make sure I'm getting it right. So, before class I got a delicious pah-stee and a nice cup of coffee on the go. Lovely. Anyway, I'm off to laundry!

And in this episode of language confusion...

Band-aids are called plasters. Ok, England, you go ahead and do your thing...

The Library

I mentioned in a previous post that I absolutely love the Jesus College library, and here's why:
It is spacious and airy and beautiful, but still a small and manageable 3-story building.
You can find your books with relative ease, and there are great little nooks and rooms to sit and study in.
Also, the architecture is really cool. This is a view from the second story, looking out over the circular central lobby.
This is definitely my favorite place to study, too bad its not just right outside my door, or I'd be ahead on all of my assignments right now!

This and that

Bikes with baskets: adorable, practical, and everywhere.

There are no laws against J-walking. Fabulous.

Lights switch up when they are off and down when they are on. ??? We're in England, not Australia!

Standard ballroom dance is called Modern here.

Cobblestones are loose on the streets. I feel like Indiana Jones navigating the name "Jehovah" written on the floor.

Another day, another walk...

Today, I decided to keep wandering around Cambridge in an attempt to connect the dots of the city, and by dots I mean streets/where the heck I am. They don't have street signs! I mean it, like at intersections, nothing hanging over the streets by the stoplights, nothing on poles in the sidewalks...every once in a while, if you look really hard, you'll see a sign sort of buried in some bushes or embedded in the side of the building, but there seems to be absolutely no rhyme or reason to it. I have no idea how these people know where they are, short of sheer memory.

So, I walked all around a very commercial part of town, and got my bearings, and poked into many a cute shop. I bought notebooks, which I needed, and stopped myself from buying numerous other cute things...

I saw two adorable pugs, which was absolutely great. I spotted them in the open-air market and actually changed my path to follow them for a little bit, simply because they made me so damn happy. They were a little big smaller than my two pugs, but just as lively and adorable. Those little wrinkly faces just brightened my day.

Everyone here smokes! Well, not everyone, but way more people than at home, it seems, and enough to make it feel like it's everyone. And they just smoke while they're walking down the street...very strange.

The sky is blue today! Sweet, glorious blue! I will never under-appreciate the sun every again. :) And, it is the warmest it's been yet, 46 degrees, which means I wore a jacket that wasn't my coat for the first time since getting here. Yay!

A word on groceries, bikes, and other things.

Apparently, I don't go to the grocery store to buy my eggs, milk, pasta, etc. I go to the supermarket. Which is normal enough, because we say that in the US too, but we also say grocery store which, apparently here means exclusively fruits and vegetables.... As far as these supermarkets go, there is a very cheap one on the walk between Jesus and Emmanuel colleges called Sainsbury's, which is proving to be very useful. Sainsbury's is quite affordable but also always very crowded. They have your basic things, and then a ton of meal-in-a-microwave stuff, too...they seem to be really big on those here. And they love small, individual things, which is great for me! Small jugs of milk, little bits of cheese, 6 eggs at a time, etc. Perfect. A major difference, though, is that they don't have people who bag your groceries, at either of the markets I've been to in town. It's smart, in a way, but also makes for incredibly long and slow lines as you have to wait for the person to bag their own stuff before the next one can really start checking out. Oh well, it gives me time for some good people watching.
The streets are very crowded on weekends here, and generally well-populated otherwise, because everyone walks everywhere. It's not quite New York City status, of course, but it sure isn't the San Fernando Valley either. Also, the city is incredibly bicycle friendly. There are SO many bikes, and they are everywhere. For the most part, the people don't really lock them up to anything, either...they just lock a wheel to the body and stick it on a sidewalk somewhere. Weird. They'd be stolen in a second back home.
I'm still getting a kick out of all the old architecture. One of my classes is called English Architectural History, so hopefully I'll be learning a lot about the buildings around me! One of my favorite things is that the churches and some of the other incredibly old buildings (and I'm talking OLD) are actually set about a foot or so below ground level. I had an inkling that this might be because the ground level has actually risen up over the centuries of people building on this exact spot, while the churches haven't moved for hundreds of years, but would anyone like to confirm that? I'll get a picture of what I'm talking about up soon!

Mmmmm

I've been spending far too much of my food allotment money on coffee so far, so today I went out and bought myself a small french press and a small bag of ground coffee, in hopes of saving some cash. With that bag of ground coffee in my room, it now smells like heaven whenever I open the door. Mmmmm. Nothing quite like it. :)

Library

I went to the library for the third time (I really like it there!) and I checked out "Aesthetics and the Philosophy of Art: The Analytic Tradition" and "The Philosophy of Art: Readings Ancient and Modern" for my...can you guess?...Philosophy of Art class. I'm still really not sure about this class. Looks like a really deep dive into aesthetics, which I'm not so interested in. Oh well, I hope to get something out of it, and, it's only for half the semester anyways. I also checked out, for my own pleasure reading, because I am a huge Dork Extraordinaire, "In Whose Image? God and Gender," which, after 3 pages, I already have problems with (which of course I love, because, well, see the previous discussion about challenging one's beliefs and pursuing knowledge!), and "An Introduction to New Testament Christology" because I don't know enough about Jesus or the New Testament yet. In case you were like "wtf is Christology?" my handy-dandy book tells me that it "discusses any evaluation of Jesus in respect to who he was and the role he played in the divine plan." I'm stoked. :-) The library doesn't have return dates, unless your book is called back by another student, so I can just chill with them for a while, which is cool. There's a 10-book limit, though, and I will probably need to swap some out as the term progresses.

That's it for today's random update! Hope all is well back in the states!

My room smells weird...I think it's my radiator. :-/ In other news, I am eating toast with jam and drinking milk, so I am very pleased with things right now.