I finally went punting on the river today! It's been on my to-do list since I got here, and now, after two full weeks, I've finally done it! I wasn't at all brave enough to hire one and take it out on my own as some people do, so I went with a group of other tourists with a guide who did all the punting. It was quite a relaxing experience: the boat sits quite high in the water, it rocks gently as you're propelled along by the punter's pole, and the sites along the Backs are incredible. The Backs is the name for the route that the water course takes, which is literally along the backs of some of the colleges. You can see King's college, Queen's college, the university library, St Clare's college, Trinity college, and several others. Our punter gave us a brief history of each of the important buildings we passed, the bridges we went under, a short history of the town itself and of punting. And we only bumped into a few other boats.
This week I have started a new schedule of classes. In the morning after breakfast I go to my class called Versions of the Tragic, and each lesson we talk about a different tragic play that we've all previously read. I'm not at all well-versed in tragedies, so I took this class to learn more about the genre of tragedy. After this class we have a plenary lecture, which we must all attend. These are a series of lectures given on the theme of triumph and disaster, and we've heard about topics as diverse as Virginia Woolf's 'To the Lighthouse', Shakespeare's 'Antony and Cleopatra', and the psychology of C.S. Lewis. These lectures are given by various members of Cambridge university teaching staff, and it's really interesting to observe the different teaching styles and the different approaches to the topics we've heard. After the plenary lecture we are given an hour and forty-five minutes for lunch, which we buy for ourselves. There is a sandwich shop directly below my room at St Catherine's, so I usually buy a panini from there for lunch. At 2:00pm we go back to class, which for me is Power and Wonder in 'The Tempest'. This class is a bit more in-depth than other classes I've had here because we focus on only one play and are going through it act by act. This is very helpful for me because I am writing an essay for this class.
Breakfast and dinner are provided for us at college. Breakfast is a large buffet in the dining hall with everything from cereal to croissants with cream cheese: orange juice, grapefruit juice, tea, coffee, cereal, toast, yoghurt, you name it! We can also go into the kitchen where we can have bacon, eggs, sausages, fried tomatoes, hash browns and porridge.
Dinner is a served sit down three course meal. Each night is different, but it's always delicious! For example, last night we had fruit for entree, kebabs, rice and stir-fried vegetables for mains, and mango sorbet with wafers for dessert.
The weather has been very erratic the entire time I've been here. It was raining when I first arrived, then overcast the following day, then sunny the day after that! And that pattern has happened more or less every week: it will be sunny for an afternoon, then at night it will rain, then the whole next day will be dry but overcast. All the locals I've talked to have said that it is very unusual for it to rain so much at this time of year, and I've heard that there's even flooding in other parts of the UK. Fortunately I brought an umbrella :-)
~ Jemimah
