Tea Party

I've returned from my weekend in Cambridge. Six Techers (including 5 Lloydies) are doing a term of study abroad at Cambridge, plus my friend Vivek (another Lloydie) is there all year on a Churchill Fellowship. I woke up bright and early Saturday and boarded the infamous X5 bus. While the cities are only 85 miles apart, the X5 manages to drive around enough roundabouts to lengthen the journey into a 3.5 hour affair. Apparently back in the day there was a direct train route, but now one has to connect through London to use the train - an expensive and time-consuming affair. At least everyone thinks that the X5 is such a horrible option that it's cheap (I got my round trip ticket for £4.50).

Sunday was a beautiful sunny day, so we walked to a nearby hamlet called Grantchester. Apparently the thing to do is to have a tea party at the Orchard Tea Garden there. The special clotted cream ran out right before we got to the front of the line, so I refused to get tea and scones. My friends were a little better at acting British. Ellen has the dainty tea-drinking down, and Matt's tried to blend in with his dorky tweed jacket.





In addition to the tea party, I spent some time wandering around the Cambridge colleges. Matt showed me Dirac's Nobel Prize in St. John's Library, and we checked out Trinity, which was pretty impressive. The word on the street is that Trinity's wine collection is worth more than the University of Cambridge's endowment. Ok, well I don't think that's actually the word on the street, but it's something ridiculous like that. I wanted to stick around for Sunday night's Formal Hall at St. John's. The X5 doesn't run late enough for me to have caught it after dinner, so I did what any reasonable person would do. I caught the 5:30 am Monday morning bus, which got me to Oxford just in time for class today. I tried to give myself plenty of time to catch the bus since I knew I'd miss my class if I didn't get the first bus. As I tried to exit the main gates of Matt's castle, I found the door padlocked. I'd misunderstood his directions and had to go back to another gate. I got to the park next to the bus stop at 5:27 and saw the bus across the way. I usually don't like to stoop to running when I'm in a hurry, but the last thing I wanted to do was watch the bus pull away from the other side of the park. I boarded at 5:29, and we pulled away right at 5:30. I'm pretty sure I was asleep by 5:32.