RTUS Post #1: Cambridge.

I wrote two blog posts at various airports, during my 20 hours of travel from the UK back home.  I will now publish them postlapsarian, on my second full day RTUS (Returned to the United States; pronounced ar-tus).  I hadn't had time to do so before I left because I was running around packing and all that jazz.  But I still wanted to document the last few insights I had in England.

The last place I absolutely had to see before leaving England was Cambridge.  This is mostly due to the fact that Professor Johnson went there, so it was kind of like a scientific ancestry pilgrimage or something.  Cambridge was lovely.  Like Oxford, the town is clearly structured around the university (though don’t tell anyone that I just likened the two places).  I first went to the Downing Site, where a lot of the science buildings are concentrated.  I was hunting down Johnson’s PI, Christine Holt.  When I'd wandered around long enough to finally run into the right into the place where she worked, by which time it was about noon, the secretary just said, “Yeah, I haven’t seen her yet today, you know scientists…”  Haha.  I nodded and smiled and left.  On my way out of the Downing site, I was pleased to see a brand new Lotus gleaming bright blue in the parking lot.  Apparently being a professor will pay well!

It was very pleasant just walking along The Backs – the back of all the colleges, which run along the River Cam.  You could watch people punting along the water, and if you were lucky, you got to see some of them punt themselves into the water.  Entertaining stuff.  Unfortunately I couldn’t get into the colleges to see their campuses because, again like Oxford, it’s super touristy so you actually have to pay to visit.  This was frustrating, except that it did mean that there were security guards everywhere watching the entrances, and they all wore bowler hats so it looked like everyone was dressed up as The Son of Man, like in the famous scene in The Thomas Crowne Affair. 

Not able to see the campuses, I contented myself with glimpsing them from The Backs.  I sat on a bench, eating a sandwich and watching the ducks.  It was all very idyllic, although there was one duck who thought he was being pretty sneaky and kept inching over to me.  I told him I knew what he was doing, but he kept averting his gaze like he didn’t know what I was talking about.  At the point that I realized was anthropomorphizing a duck, I decided I’d clearly had too much time by myself and needed to go into town and be around people again.  I headed to the market square, but not before seeing one tourist wiggle his way through one of the gates!

He, like I was too cheap to pay to see the campuses, but had more guts.  Kudos to him, I say.  The “downtown” was all very adorable, like the rest of England.  In wandering around, I ran into The Eagle, the pub where Watson and Crick were known to work and famously announced their findings before publishing in Nature.

I finished my solitary Cambridge adventure with a trip to the Fitzwilliam Museum.  I would say it was the best collections museum I have yet seen – and there are a plethora in London.  It was absolutely beautiful, and the collection was impressive.  It was surprising to find on the outskirts of this quaint town, which truly has as many churches as it has ducks.