Photos from punting

I went punting on Wednesday afternoon, and it was a very relaxing experience :) Here are so photos I took from the ride - a punt's-eye view of the buildings along the Backs of Cambridge.

Setting off from Scudamore's Punting Shack.. (It's not really called that... well it is called Scudamore's)

The rather attractive legs of our very own punter.

Other punters

Heading upriver - the current was really strong because of all the rain we've had.

Both ends of the Mathematical bridge 

The whole Mathematical Bridge.

:-D

A punt's-eye view of King's chapel

And King's college

School kids trying to punt by themselves... not a good idea, it made for much banging into each other.

The Jerwood Library, built to look like a ship setting sail into the two-metre deep canal.

Another punting company

A famous library built by a rich guy. All the books are kept on the second floor because sometimes the river floods and breaches the banks.

There were lots of these little doorways onto the river, they were the back service doors where market-punts sold their produce to the big houses

A typical English green house

The first bridge put across the river Cam, the first version of it was put there by farmers and townspeople in 760 AD to be able to buy and sell produce to the rest of East Anglia.

Pigeon-holes! Nests for the messenger-pigeons of professors before they invented the internet, where a pigeon would return with a message and it could be taken from them on the other side of the nesting box, hence the term 'pigeon-hole'!

Cambridge's answer to Venice's Bridge of Sighs. The Venetian Bridge of Sighs was built between the jail and the gallows, and people would be led from their cells to meet their doom, whereupon they sighed as they crossed the bridge. This bridge goes between one of the colleges and the place where students receive their exam results, hence the reference to sighing in the face of one's doom.

Ducklings :-)

Wednesday 18th July - Punting!

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

Trip to the British Museum - the history of clockworks

Photos from the special exhibition about the history of clocks and clockworks, the craftsmanship that goes into these things is incredible

A large collections of old fob watches

Grandfather clocks

An amazing (Swiss?) carved wooden cuckoo clock

Trip to the British Museum - the ancient to present day Americas

Photos of the exhibition of the ancient South Americans - Incas, Aztecs and Mayans

A scary ceremonial adornment for blood-rituals, the teeth are real. The blue parts are tiny little pieces of turquoise fixed in a perfect mosaic

Another adornment for ritual - a monkey skull covered with mosaic and fixed with shark's teeth

An anatomically accurate carving of a rattlesnake - the underside was carved as well

Another scary blood-ritual mask

The darker blue patches on the cheeks of this mask are butterflies, which represent a particular deity who was responsible for particular rituals

The double-headed Aztec serpent mosaic

Details from a carved-stone wall tablet

The following set of photos are from the exhibition of items from North America

Intricately beaded slippers

A mask representing the god whale-hunting hunting - this was made by a  Native American contemporary artist in a style similar to an ancient original

Items from Captain Cook's first meetings Native Americans

A traditional Intuit fur jacket

Spirit poles carved from red cedar that were placed outside the home