16 posts tagged “cambridge”
So get this: I move out of Cambridge about two months ago and then a waffle joint opens up across the corner from my building! What's up with that?! I avoided the English breakfast as often as possible. Though I must admit that these waffles aren't necessarily the breakfast type. "Savory" waffles could include anything from tuna melts to bolognaise (not unlike the amazing street crepes in France). Check this menu out! It is absolutely ridonk!* In a clever marketing scheme, the proprietors have named the waffles after different colleges. Of course King's receives the most liberal waffle: you can choose your own combinations! How fitting! AND they have free wifi! It's probably just as well that this place popped up after I left. I would've been eating waffles all the time (especially since they're only four quid a pop). I WILL have some waffles when I visit.
I do love me some waffles though.
*As in "ridonkulous," "ridonkadonk," and any number of other variants.
I started taking apart my room today.....tossed the stuff I knew I wanted to throw out, took down the posters. My walls haven't been this bare practically since I arrived nearly a year ago. It's really weird; maybe it'll help me get used to the idea of leaving.
Praveen left yesterday. He was one of my best friends here, and seeing him off made the fact that I'm flying home in a week all the more real. Boy will I miss this place.
Last night Praveen and I set up a campfire in the fields between Cambridge and Grantchester. It's not really allowed but people do it all the time anyway. It was pretty great. We're both former Boy Scouts, but neither of us had built a fire in ages. Praveen found the jackpot wood pile on the way over. We managed to get it going on our first attempt thanks to some firestarters from Sainsburys (but no lighter fluid or anything). I brought along supplies to make smoors. They don't have Hersheys chocolate here though, so Galaxy had to sub in. AND they don't do graham crackers! That substitution was a bit tougher. I ended up going with tea biscuits. They were still delicious. We had a really nice spot along the river. Some more people showed up and we just chilled out for a few hours. It was a wonderful way to cap off the summer. It's turning cold here. More people are leaving this week, and I'll be gone next Sunday. So it's all ending.....
So yeah, May Week has officially begun.
What is May Week, you ask? It's basically a week-long party that takes the colleges by storm. It is so named because it traditionally took place before exams began, which is toward the end of May, rather than after they finished. Having the festivities after exams makes way more sense, but the name stuck.
What goes on during May Week? Garden parties. Loads of drinking. Punting. Fancy dress. Oh, and May Balls, of course. It's basically the light at the end of the tunnel for the undergrads and most of the M.Phil students as they doggedly revise for exams and work on dissertations throughout Easter Term. The colleges explode in a waves of euphoria as everyone finishes. It happened in a sort of staggered fashion. Some people finished two weeks ago; others wrote their last exam just a few days ago. But now they're all finished, and it's time to cut loose.
For King's, the party began on Sunday, which was our annual FUNDAY! And oh what fun it was! All of the activities took place on the back lawn, which was very nice. The weather was perfect: brilliantly sunny for the first few hours, and then some nice (not depressing) cloud cover set in but it was still warm. They set up sumo suit wrestling, bouncy jousting, bouncy boxing and......A BOUNCY CASTLE!!! I hadn't been in one of those for years, and it was quite a lot of fun (though it did leave me surprisingly winded). We played a game of rounders, which is like baseball except they've perverted everything that is good and pure about the sport. When that debacle was over we tried our hand at the punt races. I'm a pretty skilled punter, but I couldn't handle the short distance and the underhanded tactics of the other teams. We ended up coming in second in our heat. Later we joined in the wacky races (egg & spoon, wheelbarrow, etc.). We also played some (British) Bulldog.
In between all of this stuff we just chilled out on a blanket on the grass, it was awesome. Tons of people came out. I brought my juggling stuff and ran a bit of a clinic. And then there was a free barbecue in the evening. This country has a lot to learn about barbecues, but it was alright anyway. We ended the evening with a game of capture the flag. I was pretty bushed so I served as a line judge.
Robinson College kicked off the May Ball season on Friday, but tonight was the first night that any of the heavy hitters came out; Clare and Trinity both had their balls. Clare are our immediate neighbors to the north, so a bunch of people always try to crash by going through the Backs at King's. The balls are truly decadent affairs, and very expensive (if you want to go to the Trinity Ball and you aren't a member, a pair of tickets costs 235 pounds, double that and you have the price in dollars). Entertainment includes live music, DJ's, fireworks, jugglers, bumper cars, casino games, and whatever else the ball committees think of. Trinity also has unlimited free champagne all night. Nuts.
I wasn't willing to drop dough for any of the balls (King's has the Affair, which is totally different and goes down on Wednesday; watch this space), so I decided to try and catch the Trinity fireworks from the river. Of course, all of the King's punts were take by the time I checked at the porters lodge. So I went to Plan B: kayak. I ran into Kevin on my way to get the kayak key, and he eagerly joined in on the adventure. Some of our friends were at the Clare ball; we saw them as we raced under Clare Bridge with the fireworks going off above and the light reflected in the water just below. We managed to paddle up to Trinity just as the finale touched off. It was really incredible.
The river between King's and Trinity was amazingly clear on our way there, but afterward a huge armada of punts came toward us. Practically every punt on the Cam had pulled up to Trinity to watch the show, and we watched them all go by in an amazing flow of humanity. Some of them had candles at the stern. Kayakers were darting between them. I felt like I was in the middle of one of Canaletto's scenes of Venice.
I still marvel at the power of this place. May Week has only just begun, but it is already shaping up to be one of the greatest experiences I've ever had. The city feels so full of tremendously positive energy. The nights are magical, and the people are wonderful. Must this end?
After two terms of work and frustration, my M.Phil group's project has finally gone online. It's a virtual exhibition that combines objects, photographs, and archival documents from a 1934 expedition to Greenland and Baffin Island. I selected the photos and generated the text of the site with the girls in my group.
The site is also a Google Maps mashup, so you can follow the chronology of the journey that we reconstructed from several journals and articles. It turned out to be pretty good; the museum people are very happy with it and it's substantial piece of work with my name on it (and one that potential employers can see from across the world). We had an opening for it in the museum last night.
So please check it out. "Expedition" leads you to the content, and the icons at the bottom of each page bring you to the photos and objects they represent. Let me know what you think. Feel free to leave comments (every page has a comment box built in).
On Sunday I witnessed what surely must be one of the most whimsical things I've ever seen. It was a beautiful evening in Cambridge and I was contemplating what to do with it. A couple of my friends were going punting, but I had been on the river each of the previous two days (burning myself in the hot sun the day before) so I was considering catching "Ocean's 13" with Ben and Jeremy. Then I received a text from Ben informing me that the Trinity choir was performing a concert from a flotilla of punts on the river behind the college.
I quickly ran over to the King's backs, where my other friends were preparing to embark on their punting adventure. I told them about the concert and we planned to arrive just as it was starting. We made our way past Trinity and turned around a bit past Magdalene Bridge. I took over at that point, and we managed to slip into the concert about two minutes before the choir came out. The banks of the river were packed, but we were able to get front row seats on the water and watch from our punt. It was pretty awesome.
The singing was wonderful, but the fact that it took place on the backs made it even more beautiful. I can't imagine something like this happening anywhere else in the world. Say what you will about Oxbridge culture (see Tim's recent post); it still has the power to inspire. Swans and geese swam by as the evening went on. As twilight approached they illuminated the punts with strings of lights. As if all of this weren't enough, for the finale they set off from the banks with a punter at each corner of the five-punt flotilla and slowly floated around the bend in the river. They stopped just as they were about to go out of sight and performed an encore. They disappeared as the song ended. Magical.
Two of our friends showed up at the other side of the river during the intermission, and I took the opportunity to show off my punting chops by popping over to pick them up. It was a great night; we got to do a little night punting after the concert as we went back to King's.
Here's some video that I took of the concert.
Lately my presence in the blogosphere has been somewhat diminished. This is because I had exams today and yesterday, so I was feverishly preparing for those and the only way I could do it effectively was to divorce myself from the internet save a few email checks. Now the exams are finished. Hoo-freaking-ray. Hopefully I won't have to take another exam ever again.
And now for your pleasure (more like my catharsis) I shall post the sets of exam questions. *'s denote the ones I chose to answer. We had three hours for each exam and had to choose three questions for each one.
SOCIOPOLITICS OF THE PAST
1. Discuss the advantages and the disadvantages that could arise from a precise definition of the word "heritage."
2. There is a tendency to refer to meanings of the past. In your opinion, are all possible meanings equally relevant or should heritage be associated with a particular range of meanings?
3. How would you interpret the implications of the phrase "The Past in the Present"?
4. In your opinion, which are the most important contributions to the study of the links between heritage and identity?
5. Outline and discuss the use of the term "value" in Heritage Studies.
*6. "Heritage is always political." Discuss this statement using examples.
*7. What do you see as the most important challenges for the protection of heritage worldwide in the 21st century?
8. How do different concepts of ownership and property affect the conditions of heritage? Discuss with examples.
9. Discuss reasons for and against "hot" interpretations and the argument that emotional involvement should be stressed in heritage presentations.
10. What would you consider the most important factors affecting the relationship between heritage and the public?
11. Large numbers of unprovenanced cuneiform tablets from Iraq are appearing on the market. Discuss whether or not these tablets should be bought, studied, and published.
12. EITHER *a) Are national and international laws an effective means of controlling the trade in illicitly acquired archaeological heritage?
OR b) Can the illegal subsistence digging of archaeological sites be justified?
MUSEUM PRACTICE
*1. Early modern museums were spaces of "wonder" and "curiosity", but today's modern institutions are very different. Evaluate this statement.
2. How and why do museums "reach out" to their publics?
3. Describe the context which saw the emergence of museums of archaeology and anthropology in the 19th and 20th centuries.
*4. How, if at all, is the relationship between museums and "communities of origin" changing? What impact is this having on the managements and perception of museums?
5. For institutions like the British Museum, inextricably linked with an imperial past, their historical legacy is more of a burden than an asset. Do you agree?
6. Is meeting demands for access to collections compatible with a museum's other responsibilities?
7. Documentation to a good modern standard is the best way to ensure universal access to collections. Discuss.
8. A major museum typically shows a small portion of its collections, and says only a little about each object it shows. Discuss what is shown and what is said about it.
9. The museum form has been exported from its European roots around the world, but expectations of museums differ widely in different national and cultural contexts. Elaborate on this statement with reference to at least two examples.
*10. Is legislation, such as NAGPRA (Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act), or protocols for repatriation, the best way to resolve the ownership of cultural property?
11. In a world of ubiquitous digital pictures, can the physical objects in a museum still impress?
12. Is it important that museums are publicly rather than privately owned?
This place is warping my perception in small yet strange ways.
Example: Cambridge, despite its quasi-urban setting, has many nice open green spaces. Most of them, however, happen to be in the middle of colleges. Every college has its own rules about who can and cannot walk on the grass. Churchill College is a very modern place, and its layout more or less requires one to walk on the grass to get anywhere. Many of the older establishments like St. John's, Trinity, and King's guard their grass as though it were an endangered species. The two huge lawns at King's may only be trodden upon by senior members of the college (a status that I will obtain once I finish my MPhil) or those accompanied by senior members. As laid back as King's is (we don't have to wear gowns ever except at graduation), the fellows still retain this silly tradition meant to remind you of your place in the institution. You are lower in the pecking order so we shall make your life just a teeny bit inconvenient. BECAUSE IT IS OUR RIGHT! Very silly.
So nowadays, when I see a lovely stretch of lush green grass I automatically assume that I'm not allowed to walk on it. Case in point: my recent visit to Audley End, a completely over the top country estate near Cambridge that used to be a royal residence.
Oh well. I suppose it could be worse. I hear that the fellows at Peterhouse make the newest fellow at any given meal serve the more senior ones. That's crazy if it's true; those guys aren't even students anymore and they're still getting dumped on.
The weather here has been amazing recently. It was a little overcast four mornings ago, but other than that is has been fantastic. Yesterday I decided to take advantage of this by doing some work in the fellows' garden.
Lee, Steve, Kevin and I went kayaking on the Cam today. King's has six or seven kayaks that are only available to members AND they're free! Which is crazy, since the punts are four pounds an hour for students. It was loads of fun. It was only my second time kayaking, but I think I got the hang of it fairly quickly. Kayaking in a straight line is much harder than it looks. I sort of felt like I was in a rocket car compared to the punts; the kayaks are so responsive to every move you make, even which way you lean. And we were going a lot faster than most of the punts on the river.
I'll probably try avoid going kayaking on Saturday though, because once again the river was full of tourists in punts who don't know what they're doing. They're definitely the greatest danger to kayakers on the river. If they hit you at speed you're the one who will get jostled around; the punts are much heavier than the kayaks. Lee learned that the hard way. Some jerkass teenage guys hit him when they were going pretty fast and he capsized. And they guys just laughed about it and went on their merry way.
I bit it later on down the river. I foolishly got boxed in on the left side of the river when there were two rather large punts coming straight for me. I tried some very hasty evasive maneuvers, but I just ended up laying right across both their paths. I rolled over (luckily my pockets were empty, but I went in jeans as it was a sort of impromptu outing) and managed to shimmy out of the kayak while I was under. The scariest thing about the whole experience was the at first I was underneath one of the two punts, so I couldn't surface until I popped out from under the starboard side. Fortunately I was wearing a PFD. The section of the Cam that goes past the colleges generally isn't very deep (otherwise punting would be impossible), but it's still a smart idea to wear one if you're kayaking.
Steve ended up in the water down near Darwin College, and he had a hell of a time emptying the water out of his kayak. Other than that, it was an awesome time. I might try to start doing it on a regular basis, especially since it's free. Kayaking is an great way to work your upper body.
"Curse of the Golden Flower" tonight, potentially...
