Holy crap. A lot has happened.
○ PARIS WEEKEND!
Friday, 09 July 2010:
Well backing up a bit, I had a pretty eventful Friday. My Gothic Architecture class took a field trip to Ely Cathedral, about 15 minutes north of here by train. It was a HOT day, but it made for nice, sunny pictures. The cathedral was not only gorgeous, but textbook for all the different periods we've been studying. The cathedral is unique because it was originally built in a Romanesque style, but parts of it were later rebuilt into Early Gothic and then Middle Gothic. There are parts in the Cathedral where you can literally line up features and compare, wall-to-wall, pier-to-pier, the differences of each time period. Very cool.
Gothic Architecture has been really great so far. We've visited local Gothic churches/chapels almost every seminar - so about twice a week, we meet out of the classroom and set loose on a church to analyze it first-hand. It's a lot better than reading about a cathedral or trying to stare at a two-dimensional slide in lecture. Walking around a church, tracing pier profiles and sketching windows definitely makes this a very active class, which I love. The professor is also HILARIOUS because he's a ridiculous, self-proclaimed atheist who goes off on frantic (but surprisingly educational) tangents. I swear he is like a cartoon character. But I'm learning a lot! The education here in the UK is interesting, because the teachers are very hands-off in a good way, and it makes the students very hands-on. Usually Professor Oldfield will structure the lecture on what questions and analysis we make ourselves. When we get into a church (even on the very first day of class) he won't give any introduction to the material; he'll just say, "Okay. GO" and let us tear apart what we see and digest it ourselves. It definitely takes some getting used to, but I think I like it.
After we got back from Ely, we went to afternoon tea in Pembroke. They served tea cakes, sandwiches, and scones with tea and coffee, and it was a really nice setting to be in - even on a scorching hot afternoon.
After dinner, some of us went out to Parker's Piece (a giant field about 10 minutes away from Pembroke) to watch fireworks. Apparently every year, Cambridge has a Summer Faire, which is something like Alameda County Fair (or any county fair) at Parker's Piece. They had booths with food, midway games, rides, and a concert stage. It was lively and there were lights everywhere. It was a nice surprise, because we all thought we were just going to watch fireworks from an empty field. English summers are cute!
Anyway, I ended up getting back from the faire at around midnight... which was probably not a smart idea because I had to get to Paris the next morning. After packing and showering, I got into get at 2:00am... which was VERY bad because I had to get up two hours later at 4:00am to taxi to the Cambridge train station. FUN TIMES.
Saturday, 10 July 2010:
After my train to London, I got to the International Rail with plenty of time to spare. The ride was pretty smooth, and with a slight delay, I got to Paris around 11:30am. My foreign country count is officially at TWO.
1. The Louvre
Sam greeted me at the station and we immediately set off on our 46-hour adventure. We took the metro to the Louvre and spent a good few hours there. It was super crowded and hot, but certainly lived up to a full Louvre experience - in terms of how dead my feet were and how overwhelmed I was by all the art. The Louvre is effing HUGE. And it holds. EVERYTHING. Like, when I read The Da Vinci Code and Dan Brown told me to bring running shoes, he wasn't kidding. We first went to see the Mona Lisa, which I actually really liked, and then went off to see plenty of David, Raphael, and Rubens throughout the afternoon. And we saw the Venus de Milo.
GIRL where did your arms go?
There was A LOT of art. Holy crap. I think you could probably spend a decade in here and not see everything. Sam and I got kind of lost, even with all the SORTIE signs. Every time we thought we found an out, it turned out to be a whole other wing, and every time we went to another floor it was just more... STUFF. Each time we took the elevator to another level I felt like I stepped through a time machine - especially with the Egypt artifacts and Roman/Greek floor haha.
This thing really doesn't look that big at a glance, but my feet definitely met their match here, and I'm SURE I didn't even see 20% of what was there. By the end, I was scuffling around, and it took us 35 minutes to actually find the exit. Definitely a good introduction to France :)
2. Arc de Triomphe
After eating pastries on the Tuilleries grass, we metro'd over to the Arc de Triomphe for some friendsie photo-taking, and briefly walked the Champs-Élysées.
3. The Bastille
Sam's hotel/apartment room is about a 10-minutes walk from the Bastille monument, so we passed by that before getting crepes on the way back.
It was pretty humid, so when it started to rain it actually felt pretty nice. I pretty much put my stuff down and crashed on Sam's couch for an hour (or something... I basically have no idea what kind of time frame I went through all weekend).
After I got up, we went grocery shopping, and I walked around by myself for an hour around the area. Sam was super busy with finals and papers (those USC kids were working their butts off) so I was really thankful she was able to take me in this weekend and show me the ropes. It was nice to at least have someone to point me in the right direction.
4. Clubbing in Paris
Anyway, somehow after finding myself dinner and wandering around, it was 11:00pm. Apparently Parisians go clubbing from 2:00am to 6:00am (which I seriously did not believe at first), so in order to get the full Paris experience, we did just that. The club we went to was right underneath a bridge, next to the Seine, so that was pretty cool. Clubbing in Paris... is... interesting. I can't really describe it, but I think Natalie and Katie did a pretty good job in their blogs. Basically, there were a lot of French guys in V-necks, and the only way I can really describe their "dancing" is that they used a little too much elbow. It was awkward, but in a subtle way, and I think it was the elbow and the weird swaying that did the trick. And the MUSIC. The "music" they played at the club definitely did not change once, and I felt like I was listening to one electro-bass drum beat for five hours. House music is very interesting, and after much debating and struggling to explain this to my Cambridge friends, I think I have it. It was like listening to the first 45 seconds of Dirty Vegas' Days Go By, but with a lot more bass and a lot less melody, and on never-ending repeat. Yup. Very interesting. It was still a lot of fun, and we met people from the UK! Or at least Sam and her friends did. I definitely kept dosing off and passed out on a couch multiple times, because I was effing TIRED. By the time we left the club it was almost 5:00am, the sun was creeping up, and we were all dead-exhausted. We staggered around the streets trying to find a bus, and eventually got on one and rode around the city in a very long loop. I saw the Moulin Rouge! But I also remember that the Moulin Rouge was very far from where Sam lived. Then I'm not really sure what happened but I vaguely remember getting on a metro and eventually falling onto Sam's couch and knocking out with a fully-risen sun outside. By the time we got back, I had already been up for 26 hours, with the Louvre and Parisian clubbing under my belt. Crazy tiring, but not bad for the first day.
Sunday, 11 July 2010:
We had lunch near the Bastille and I had steak tartare for the first time! It was pretty good. And raw.
5. Notre Dame
Sam took me to the Notre Dame and showed me what metro lines to get on/transfer off of. Then I spent the afternoon exploring the cathedral and surrounding streets/bridges by myself while she went back to study, and it was really nice! It was great seeing the Notre Dame in context with all the Gothic Architecture I've been learning in my class at Cambridge. I spent a good hour in there taking notes of things and looking at the structure of things. I probably would have stayed longer if it wasn't so hot that day. Phew!
6. World Cup Finals + Eiffel Tower
We had a dinner picnic in front of the FIFA screening of the World Cup Finals by the Eiffel Tower. There were many crazy Spain fans with vuvuzuelas and flags and facepaint.
There were SO many people. It was definitely a good, intense setting to be in for the World Cup Finals... until someone set off a red flares in the audience about 10 minutes before overtime. I wasn't sure why, but about five minutes after the flares went off, people started PUSHING and yelling. At first I thought people were just scared of the flares (and I was like.. big deal... it's FLARES. I'm TRYING to watch this GAME THANKS) but it was definitely more than that. Suddenly, people were legit screaming and yelling in French, and people were pushing at us from all sides. If there was ever a time that I wish I spoke French, it would have to be RIGHT then, when people were screaming frantically and pointing and trying to move away from something. It was like a sea of panicking people. It was so confusing and chaotic, and I wasn't really sure what was going on until my throat felt really constricted all of the sudden.
YUP. That's right. TEAR GAS. Some idiots threw some kind of tear gas bomb into the crowd. By this time, our group started to move it, and I grabbed onto Sam's friends and we formed a chain. I couldn't open my eyes without feeling a burn and tears were flowing everywhere. It was hard to breathe without coughing or sneezing. Tear gas feels more acidic (?) than peppery like I imagined... but it was bad. I saw a person convulsing on the side, and one girl had such a bad asthma attack that her boyfriend had to lift her up and carry her. I remember hearing people just screaming. There was broken glass everywhere because people were drinking before, and there were just MOBS and mobs of people. It was like people trying to rush the field at a Cal football game, but instead of 80,000 eager/happy fans, it was like 10,000 screaming blind people all clawing to get out of one area at once. NOT FUN. I got separated from the group at one point when the crowd pushed me across the street, but I eventually found my way back. We ran around trying to find a TV screen and we got to one outside a small cafe seconds before Spain sealed the deal. Wooo! What a night.
Definitely makes for a great story. Definitely not a great story for my parents. Defffffinitely leaving this one out of the parental email.
Monday, 12 July 2010
I bid farewell to Samantha and left for the station a little before 9:00am. Well, long story short, my train was delayed for 56 minutes and I had fun sprinting to the Cambridge train from the International terminal. When I got to Cambridge I paid the taxi a few pence extra to speed over to King's College, and I somehow still got to class only 40 minutes late. Only. I'm glad I didn't miss too much, because we were analyzing King's Chapel that day. But I got back safe and alive! YAY.
Overall, the weekend was pretty jam-packed and insane. It was a ton of fun, especially because I got to see Sam and she got to show me around and I didn't have to worry about not knowing the area or finding a place to stay. Sam's USC friends were also super nice! At the same time, everything felt very point-and-shoot to me (like, go here, take a picture, go there, take a picture) and I realized that this is what traveling is going to be like if I'm still a studying student somewhere else. If I only have two weekend days to go somewhere, including travel time, it's going to be very hectic. And while there is something very hastily romantic about traveling around Europe every weekend, I think I've realized that I really want to live life in Cambridge as a student while I can. This weekend is going to be my first actual weekend in town, and I want to make sure I get to know the roads, shops, pubs, and colleges before I've left to feel like I really lived here. By the end of this trip I want to know as much as I can about Cambridge. Everyone - people I've visited and people who have been on these programs before - all say the same thing - they didn't regret not traveling, but they did end up regretting traveling too much and not staying enough to get to know where they lived. Plus, it is effing EXHAUSTING! I think I slept a total of ten hours in the span of three days, not including the times I randomly passed out on a public bus, metro, bench, couch, or chair in the club. And coming back from Paris and going straight into a day of class was not a good idea... but the experience was definitely a thrilling one and I'm so glad I made a last-minute decision to go.
Anyway. Back to school!
○ THIS WEEK
Life at Cambridge is usually pretty eventful. The student Programme Assistants (PAs) and adult coordinators REALLY make us get our moneys worth. They usually put up sign-up lists on a bulletin board where we have class, and we get to sign up for all sorts of local things like tea, punting on the river, jogs, pub crawls, restaurant nights, movie nights, game nights, King's Chapel tours, music festivals, museum trips, London trips, botanical garden trips, morning runs, and even yoga classes. I know I've been blogging about a lot of activities I've done around Cambridge - and all of them are planned by the PAs because I definitely don't have the initiative (or knowledge) to go out and do all this stuff by myself. It's amazing to have teachers and students at Cambridge show you the best of the town and the colleges - especially because they live here and know the ins and outs. This trip is definitely making me a lot more flexible and spontaneous. The Daily Bulletin of a day's activities usually goes up the afternoon before or morning-of, so it keeps all of us on our toes. I'll usually have an afternoon or evening blocked off for studying, but that will usually (always) change once the bulletin is up. This makes it extremely difficult to focus on school, more than it already is, but it's nice and it keeps things really lively.
1. Midterms
I had my midterms the day after Paris (yeah... I am just full of great ideas this trip). They weren't too bad and were pretty straight forward. Finals and term papers for this term are coming up in a few days. Hopefully they'll go just as smoothly.
2. Pub Night
On Wednesday night the PAs took us pub crawling again, but this time it was outside of the city centre. We went to less-public "drinking holes" where the regulars were more local than tourist. It was nice to talk with people outside of class, and it's always nice to share a drink with the head coordinators... although sometimes it's weird because it's like sharing a drink with your school principal. The bartender told me he had never seen more Americans in his life.
It turned out to be a really fun night. It seems like everyone here is going through some sort of romantic disaster. Even in the group I hang out with, 5 out of 8 of us are going through a breakup/catastrophe of some sort, and this always makes pub nights more interesting. Two-month summer programs have a certain lack of liability, because to some degree, you probably won't know most people here long enough to be connected through more means than facebook after the trip is over. So during pub nights, people usually end up ordering too many rounds of Pimm's and spewing out their deepest secrets to random strangers on the program.
This is what happens. The British go to pubs as a social thing, so they start pub nights at around 7:00pm, and then go home after a few rounds of friendly drinks. But effing American kids get really confused of this notion of not drinking until you go to sleep, so people usually end up drinking from 7:00pm until they have to go home at like midnight. I found out that there is a lot of drama between certain people here, and even certain PAs. PAs?!??! OMG so much drama. I would start a Cambridge Gossip Girl if I could.
3. Sqaush
I signed up for a squash game on Thursday morning, because I decided that I needed some exercise. Blonde Bill Weasley took a group of six of us to the Pembroke Sporting Grounds, which is a mile away from Pembroke College. We walked past the River Cam, and I saw a beautiful Doubletree Hilton along the river. WHAT?! We have a luxury hotel here?! We also walked past a really nice park with
1. I do not play sports.
2. The last time I even held a racket in my HAND was in 7th grade PE during the Tennis unit.
3. The longest time I've ever been in a squash court is when we had to practice in a make-shift dance room at the RSF.
4. I am not sure why I decided this would be a good idea.
The squash ball doesn't bounce very much, and it's black and more squishy. This involves a LOT more running around and smacking. For the first twenty minutes, I kept swinging and missing the ball because it came up so low from the ground. But after a few more games, I actually started returning the ball like TWO to THREE more times after serving it! YEAHHHHH. I'm glad the people playing with me were patient. It felt good to actually move around and sweat and get my blood moving again. I woke up this morning sore, and it felt GREAT. I'm actually thinking about renting out my own racket and going back a few more times to see if I can improve more before the end of the program.
4. Shakespeare and Stratford
On Thursday afternoon, I signed up to go to Shakespeare's birthplace in Stratford. Stratford is a really tiny town, and I think it is literally built around Shakespeare's house and the four theatres that run plays by the Royal Shakespeare Company. We got tickets to see "The Winter's Tale" which I wasn't familiar with at all. I was sure it was going to be a boring, overly depressing play, but it turned out to be REALLY good. Like really good. At first the set seemed pretty ordinary and bland,
but at the second act the books spilled down from the shelves and covered the stage! They used book pages as a motif to mark the "snow" and decorated the stage and the trees with books, and it was so simple but so creative.
The script was perfect - it wasn't so cryptic that I couldn't understand anything, but it also wasn't so simple that I felt dumb for being there or that it was too easy to follow - like a good crossword puzzle! Side note: DAMN I miss my Daily Cal crosswords right now. The set, music, and costumes turned out to be really impressive and colorful for the second half.
The TREE people!! BTW. Totally not allowed to take pictures. I was so sneaky.
"The Winter's Tale" is half tragedy half comedy, and also has Shakespeare's most famous stage direction: Exit, pursued by a bear for a certain character that (SPOILER ALERT) gets eaten by a bear. The bear they used was this massive, paper puppet thing, entirely made out of book pages. SO COOL. I don't even know how to describe it but I'll get a picture if I can. All in all, a great evening, and now I think I have a new favorite Shakespeare play to go along with it.
Coming up in the next two weeks:
- Postgrads at Cambridge have graduation today (Saturday!) in the afternoon.
Three of the PAs on this programme are graduating - including Blonde Bill Weasley and Less Jewish John!! I'm excited to actually know people graduating from Cambridge at this time. I can't wait to watch them walk down King's Parade in their black robes and fur hoods. Someone told me that it seriously looks like a scene from Harry Potter. Can't wait!
- INCEPTION at the town cinema on Sunday night
- Term paper due on Monday. I have to work my butt off this weekend.
- Phantom of the Opera
- Formal Hall #3
- Finals (blechh) on Friday
- London day trip next weekend
- The Lion King
- Brussels in two weekends (this is my last time out of the country for this summer)
So yeah! All around still having a pretty good time. I've been getting serious whiffs of homesickness and friendsickness though, so I hope you guys are all doing well.
Until I beat Blonde Bill Weasley at squash,
Katherine
I really enjoyed the pub section, haha (I would.)
ReplyDeletewas the beer good?
and glad you got back safely :)