Taxis

I just called the taxi company here in Cambridge to have a taxi come pick me up at 1:30 to take me to the bus stop. The conversation went something like this.

“Hi, I’d like to get a taxi to come pick me up at about 1:30 from Selwyn College Old Court.”

“What road is that on?”

“Grange Road.”

“Okay, so that’s Cripps Court, it’ll be here in about ten minutes.”

“No, Old Court, and I need it at 1:30.”

“The one on Grange Road?”

“Yes.”

“By the Porter’s Lodge?”

“Yes.”

“Selwyn College, Cripps Court, in ten—”

“Old Court at 1:30.”

“Okay, Sewlyn College Old Court at 1:30… Right.”

I have no idea if my taxi cab will be here at 1:30 to take me to my bus stop. Maybe it’ll arrive at noon and will be be under the impression that it’s taking me straight to London, which would be a problem, since I only have £20 in cash right now…

Last Night in Cambridge

My suitcase is in the corner, my clothes neatly folded inside, or as neat as I was willing to make them (if I know my mother, she’s going to wash them all on Friday night, even though I just washed them yesterday). I bought an extra duffel bag that will count as my carry-on, stuffed with the souvenirs I absolutely needed to buy — a bust of William Shakespeare from Stratford-upon-Avon, a pewter figure of Sherlock Holmes from 221b Baker Street, books, presents for friends and family.

I had to trudge across Cambridge today looking for the student computer center (which they’ve tucked away in a very obscure corner of the city, clearly intending to confuse poor international students who are used to clearly posted street signs). I printed off my coach ticket to London and my hotel confirmation, then I ran to the Cambridge Press Bookstore to get a few last minute gifts.

It was when I was walking back that I looked up at King’s College. It’s the iconic building of Cambridge; do a Google image search and most of the pictures that come up are of King’s. It’s very medieval looking, with spires and turrets and walls and gates and grass they cut obsessively; it’s almost like what I imagine Gormenghast to look like (even though I’ve yet to read Mervyn Peake). I walked past King’s College every day to get to the open market where I bought my lunch, and I realized on my trek back that I wasn’t going to see it for a very long time.

When you’re forced to walk around a city (and not take public transit or your own car), you learn it very well. I may have spent almost my entire life in Battle Creek, but I got to know the city of East Lansing (or at least Michigan State’s campus) in a shorter time span. I look at a map of my campus and I can immediately point to any spot on the map and tell you six different ways to get there. (Of course, once you get even slightly off campus my abysmal sense of direction comes swooping in to steal the show.)

Likewise with Cambridge, or at least the small chunk of it I got to know. I’m looking at the Google Maps page for Cambridge now, and I can easily trace my route down Sidgewick Avenue to Silver Street, up to Trumpington and then to the market — and even further, down the alleyways where all the cool shops are hiding, towards some of the ancient churches standing guard over the cobbled streets.

I’ve trekked across this campus on a daily basis, and I’ve gotten to know it, and I’m realizing right now that I will miss it. I’m ready to go home — I squirm with excitement when I think about moving into my first ever apartment in three days — but I wish Cambridge weren’t so far away. If I could, I’d want to take family and friends here, to show them around the places I’ve found, point out where my room was in the stately Victorian dormitories at Selwyn College, to lead them down the alleyways to find the good restaurants and stores.

When some people study abroad, they rush off to far-flung corners of the earth, going to places that are not easily found on a map. One of my good friends spent the last month in Kenya working with orphans; he got to enjoy the wilds of Africa and do something fulfilling for a few weeks. But I’m not jealous. If there’s a life experience to be found in Kenya (or Israel, or New Zealand, or the Galápagos Islands), there is most certainly a life experience to be found in a place like Cambridge.

The air hums with the cerebral history of the place. John Maynard Keynes developed his world-altering macroeconomic policies down the street from where James Watson and Francis Crick discovered the double helix structure of DNA near the spots where Isaac Newton and Francis Bacon made revolutionary hurdles in science close to the place where Virginia Woolf and C.S. Lewis wrote. In a country as compact as the United Kingdom it becomes easy to stumble across an influential place where a historical discovery was made, and in Cambridge you practically trip over them.

I don’t doubt that I’ll return here one day. I am enormously blessed, coming from a family that can afford to send me to the second highest ranking university in the world for a month to take classes on the Soviet Union and Shakespeare. I am furthering my education in a field that will, through a combination of hard work and serendipity, give me the resources to return. But I’m only young and formative for just a little while longer; while I’m certainly no longer a child I’m still taking baby steps as an adult. This city, this college, this country has imprinted on my being a way very few other places have, and for that I am eternally grateful.

Winding Down

As hard as it is to believe, my time in Cambridge is winding down quite rapidly. I don’t leave for the United States until Friday morning, but here is my schedule for the rest of the week:

• Tonight: Talk to my parents on the phone, do my laundry, and put said freshly clean laundry in my luggage. Discern whether or not I’ll need to buy another (small) suitcase to fit everything. The answer is probably yes.
• Wednesday: Go to class. Go into town, visit the University of Cambridge Bookstore to buy a book by a professor here (who gave an excellent speech, and the book will make a great gift for a friend of mine) as well as the potential new luggage. Find the student printing site in the innards of Cambridge to print off my coach tickets and hotel confirmation. See Inception, get a group dinner with all the people from Michigan State here. Potentially go out to the clubs one last time, depends on how exhausted I am.
• Thursday: Last day of classes. The second they get out, shove some food down my throat and call a taxicab to take me to the coach stop. Sit on a bus from 2:00 until 6:00, wait 45 minutes for a bus to take me to the Holiday Inn at Heathrow Hotel (or just take a cab there, if they’re available.) Eat dinner at some point in London, and then wait.
• Friday: Get to airport by 8:30 AM (3:30 AM Michigan time), wait, sit on an airplane for eight hours, dink around in Newark Liberty Airport, fly to Detroit, go through customs, go home. By this point it should be roughly 8:30 PM Michigan time, so 1:30 AM Greenwich Mean Time, meaning I’ll be traveling for 17-some hours on Friday.

Never mind the fact that when I get home I’ll have all of one day to readjust myself to Michigan time and unpack before I have to pack my bags again (and my bed, and my dresser, and my nightstand, clothes, toiletries, desk, electronic miscellanea, and life in general) so I can move into my apartment on Sunday. It makes me exhausted just thinking about my life on Thursday, and I very much look forward to sitting down in my new apartment on Sunday so I can stay in one place for more than 10 hours.

I’m surprised that my month in Cambridge has gone by so quickly. Everyone says this, but it really does seem like yesterday that I was battling my way through the London Underground trying to figure out which tube line to take to get from Heathrow to Cambridge. It feels like barely any time has gone by.

I’m ready to leave, though. I’ve gone 24 days without seeing any of my really close friends, and I want to see them. (I’ve gone lengthier stretches of time not seeing my parents, so that’s no big deal. I only say that because they’re probably the only ones reading this.) I’m ready to drive my car again; I’m ready to not have to carry around £13 in change (I counted my change up yesterday, that’s what it’s up to); I’m ready to have at least two hot days in a row; I’m especially ready to know what it is I’m eating for dinner every night.

Not that this hasn’t been great. It’s been a terrific experience. I won’t say it’s one I’ll never have again, because in all probability I’ll come back to the United Kingdom. This is the only time I’ll ever be a student at the University of Cambridge, though; I’m apparently counted as part of Cambridge’s alumni network now, which puts me among the august ranks of individuals like Stephen Hawking, Douglas Adams, and that guy who played the villain in Pirates of the Caribbean.

Altogether, I’m dimly surprised that it’s almost time for me to leave.

Stratford-upon-Avon

I went to Stratford-upon-Avon yesterday.

It felt less like a field trip and more like a pilgrimage for me. It was very important that I see the grave of the man who did more for my two great artistic passions — writing and acting — than any other in history. I’ve never met an actor who’s come out of performing a Shakespearean work unmoved by the process, and as a writer, I can only stare in amazement at the mark the Bard left on the English language.

Make no doubt about it, Stratford-upon-Avon is a tourist trap. While other towns in England have patron saints, this place has a patron writer, and do they ever milk it. You can tour his purported birthplace (for £11.00), you can tour his wife’s childhood home (for £8.00), you can tour his grandparents’ house and the house of his granddaughter’s first husband (for about £5.00 each), and you can tour the tavern once owned by the man who inspired the character of Falstaff. There’s also Shakespeare gift shops, Shakespeare-themed hotels, Shakespeare restaurants, and even Shakespeare ice cream. My friend got As You Like It Vanilla.

We skipped out on a lot of that and made straight for Shakespeare’s grave. We only had an hour and a half to really look around the town before the play we were going to see (As You Like It) started. Like all the other cities in England, the streets in Stratford-upon-Avon eschew order and normality; instead, they sprawl out from the center of town until reaching its bucolic outskirts, bending and turning whichever way they please. It took us nearly 45 minutes to make our way from the parking lot to the Holy Trinity Church, where he’s buried.

The grave site is inside the church a little bit; you have to cross through the graveyard outside the building, and then go into an annex in the back of the church. It’s got impressive stained-glass windows and a few busts of Shakespeare looking out over the place, and then there’s his grave.

It was a little underwhelming at first. It’s just a stone slab in the ground of the church, and you can’t even read the epitaph. They do keep it cordoned off, and there were two vases of flowers on it. But I stood there for a long time, looking at it. It’s difficult to describe the feeling of standing in front of the pinnacle of literature — or what’s left of him, at any rate. It makes one feel very small and insignificant, but not in a bad way.

The play itself was all right. As You Like It isn’t one of my top ten Shakespeare plays, but there were still quite a few funny parts. Obviously anything put on by the Royal Shakespeare Company is going to be ably performed.

On another note, my time here in Cambridge is winding down. I have four more days of class — we’re discussing the fall of the Soviet Union in one, and my favorite Shakespeare play of all, The Tempest, in another — and then I’m spiriting off to London on Thursday before flying home on Friday. It’s stressing me out just thinking about going from Cambridge to London, let alone London to Newark to Detroit to Battle Creek (and then to East Lansing on Sunday). I’ll have a few final thoughts about my stay in Cambridge in the coming days.

Cambridge at Night

I went out for the first time last night, and I finally got to see the city of Cambridge after dark.

It was unusual at first, because I’m so used to walking around this place and seeing nothing but a sea of people, and dodging traffic in the very narrow streets. Last night, on my way home from the club, it was an entirely different experience; it could not have encompassed the term still more perfectly.

In America at night, cities are still alive. In places from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania to Battle Creek, Michigan (and everywhere else in between), night just means the volume gets turned down a little. Traffic still zooms along the road, lights are still quite fluorescent, and cities still hum.

I imagine London never sleeps, but out here in the fens of southern England, the world does settle down for the night. Everything was quiet, and everything was dark. There weren’t industrial-grade lamp posts lined up every few feet along the main drag here, there were just a few flickering bulbs that gave off this weird, unearthly yellow glow. The buildings and the sidewalks are very close together in this town, and when I walked down the street, my footsteps echoed around the entire alley.

Strangest of all are the cathedrals. England could very well be the Land of Churches, because there’s a cathedral every few hundred feet. These aren’t like the churches in America; back home, traces of our Puritan (not to mention Protestant) roots are clearly visible in church architecture. Our churches are modest affairs, bereft of any of the grandeur of the Roman Catholic church, because the Puritans believed that detracted from God.

Not so over here. Even though the English are very Anglican (if they go to church at all), they never got rid of the countless Catholic cathedrals that sprang up during the dominance of the Catholic Church in Europe. This is a city of spires and flying buttresses, rose windows and gargoyles, and massive, massive doors that seem far too impractical to actually try and open. In the daytime they look impressive.

Once the sun sets, they suddenly become imposing guardians of the city, standing straight and tall. They absorb what little light there is and throw it all into unnatural shadow, making their spires look like imposing sentinels of God Himself. The faces in the stained glass windows transform; looks of benign piety in the daylight look like grim diligence in the shadow.

Pity America, we have nothing that borders on the grandiose quite like that.

English Weather

When I woke up today and decided to head out to lunch and explore Cambridge on my own while my friends were out touring Windsor Castle, it certainly wasn’t sunny out, but it was warm and more than a little muggy.

By the time I made it to the Quayside shopping area to go to Subway (McDonald’s was too ungodly crowded and I didn’t quite feel like subjecting myself to more English-style food) the sky had darkened noticeably, but that was no surprise. I think I’ve seen maybe three days with blue skies in the two weeks I’ve been here.

Cambridge on the weekends gets a little crowded — a lot of tourists from around Southern England like to come and see all the colleges and churches, and there were busloads of French people wandering around, too. So the line in Subway was long, and I waited about 25 minutes to get to the front and order my food. By the time I finally got my food and sat down, it had started raining.

Great, I thought, and I don’t have an umbrella. My mother’s shrill warnings that I would need an umbrella when I came over here, until now hiding in the bike corner of my closet with the Anorak she snuck into my luggage last minute, now replayed in my head. Fortunately, by some act of providence I’d jammed a £2 hat from H&M on my head before I left, so I was protected from some of the rain. My bare arms and legs, however, shivered in the cold wind that was now roaring across the River Cam and nearly sent my lunch tumbling into the river.

My proactive plans for the day were ruined, but I still had some shopping I wanted to get done. I managed to push my way through the crowds of people (who in large part, like me, forgot to pack umbrellas) and go into a candy store to buy some fudge. The rain was still going down when I got to Heffer’s, a local bookstore, to buy a British version of the last Harry Potter book. When I came out, the rain was gone, and I hurried over to a clothing store to get some shirts with Cambridge regalia on them for my parents. After I left the store, the sky was darkening up again, so I ran back to Selwyn College as quick as I could, wanting to beat the rain.

As I wrote this, it started and stopped raining twice. The sky is a colorless mass of clouds, but none of them look malignant enough to downpour on us again. I’m still not taking any chances to explore right now. If I do, maybe that stupid Anorak my mother made me pack will get use after three years of leaving it in the bag it came in.

“Stupid Americans”

It’s about the worst-kept secret in the world that Europe generally looks down on us back in the good ol’ US of A. George W. Bush’s disastrous run at the helm of the country didn’t help any, what with his braggadocio and “with us or with the terrorists” mentality, but in general I’ve found Europeans have a few preconceived notions about Americans.

Europeans generally regard us as rude. They think we’re stupid, loud, obnoxious, culturally irreverent and pushy. And they treat us exactly like they think we are.

I will grant that there are quite a large number of Americans that are just that: rude and obnoxious. But there are plenty of Europeans who are the exact same. And I’ve found I get treated differently over here as soon as I open my mouth and my clipped Midwestern vernacular meets their right and proper Queen’s English.

In particular, I’ve been treated poorly by servers and waiters over here. I went out to dinner the other night at a nice Italian place down the street from Selwyn College; the waitress there acted like it was criminal when I asked if I could have a refill of my Coke when she came to ask how everything was. She got irritable and stalked away — and I never got my Coke. At the same restaurant on another day, a different waitress got offended when I asked for the check after I’d been sitting at the table, done with my food, for a full forty five minutes.

The servers in the dining hall at Selwyn are no better. Last night, my friends had saved me a seat in between a few of them when I didn’t get down to the dining hall at 6:30 sharp. When I walked in, the stuffy old man who seems to be the head maître d’ at the place (and looks the part, with a bushy mustache and an upturned nose with his glasses sitting right on the edge of it, too) gave me the dirtiest look. Tonight, one of my friends asked for the vegetarian option for dinner, and the server shrieked “No! You are not a vegetarian!”

The kicker, though, came from an Italian man who was sitting next to us. Now, I will say this: We are American college students, and we treat dinner here like we treat dinner back at Michigan State, a very informal thing with lots of talking and laughing. From what I’ve gathered, Europeans treat dinner like they used to treat Mass — sacred and unalterable. I’ve complained about the precision of the meals here before.

Anyway, we were talking and laughing, no louder than anyone else in the dining hall, and the Italian guy turns to us and says, “You all talk very fast and then you laugh very loud after it. AHAHAHAHAHAHA.” Then, after any of us finished a sentence, he would cut in and go “AHAHAHAHA.” Not laughing, just mimicking the sound of our laughter.

I hesitate to characterize all Europeans this way, though. I think this guy was just a Grade-A Poop Head. He started yelling at the server for ketchup for his french fries, and then proceeded to tell her how to do her job.