Tuesday, April 13. We attempt to go Kensington Palace and the Science Museum by cutting through Kensington Park, but fail greatly in our direction skills and end our journey in Hyde Park instead.
Peter Pan statue & the (Lost) Boys.
Cute dogs that were playing in the park lake.
Princess Diana Memorial fountain. It was a very interesting design. It's circular and elevated so the water flows river-like around the park and kids are apparently allowed to play in it.
Cute British kids in the fountain montage!
We mistook this building for Kensington Palace...
The point where we realized we were on the other side of town.
Wednesday, April 14. I get a craving for eggs, buy them, then get so busy writing my first paper (eek!) that I can't actually eat them. We see a play called Anderson's English, an absurd fictional meeting between Charles Dickens and Hans Christian Anderson. Will likes it, I, to put it lightly, don't.
Thursday, April 15. Instead of going to the Olyvia Fine Arts gallery to check out a neat Andy Warhol exhibit, I sit in bed and blog :) Then around 4:30pm, Mollie, Jenny and I go shopping on Oxford Street. It's the most ridiculous situation I've ever been in. There is a store there called Primark, where the clothes are super cheap and the people buy things like they're going out of style, which they literally are, because the store clerks are running around, taking displays down and setting new ones up while wall-to-wall crowds of foriegn families and hipster teenagers fill their baskets with 3 for 1 deals, and everyone accepts this as the normal way to go shopping! - mind you, there are two floors of this nonsense going on. Jenny makes it out with a pair of sunglasses for 1GBP, while I just barely escape with my sanity. We walk into a few other stores, including this funky boutique called Bik Bok, where I get a great deal on a pair of pants for 4.25GBP (about $7). Crazy!
Friday, April 16. We set off for Cambridge, the land of colleges and more importantly, college boys. Unfortunately for us, the colleges are on Spring holiday still, but those who have stayed behind are, as the British say, smart and fit :)
The first order of business is lunch and Mollie, Matt and I head to a great restaurant called Nando's, a mix of Portugese and South African fair. Peri peri chicken - yes please! We spend the day walking to the river, listening to this amazing band on the street named Coco's Lovers -
visiting chocolate shops, and taking pictures of whale skeletons hanging outside of the closed natural history museum.
Our day ends with getting kicked out of the Fitzwilliam Museum at closing time and losing ourselves for an hour on the way back to our hostel (Matt: "This building looks familiar." Morgan: "I've never seen that before in my life."). Apparently, following the arrows in Cambridge that point in the direction of the tourist information center is not an effective way to become unlost, but a successful way to end up nowhere at all.
After dinner at the hostel, where I learn the actual meaning of "hostel" from a particularly aggravating cafeteria lady who won't let me eat macaroni, we decide to walk around and look for dessert. We discover it at the Rainbow Cafe, a vegetarian and vegan wonderland. Then high on sweets, the boys and Lizzie meet up with us and we walk to a pub through a really terrifying alleyway where someone is sleeping (or god forbid, dead, as they are covered up with a blanket and not breathing visibly.) There were a lot of houseless people in Cambridge, which really contrasted with the wealth of the colleges. I saw a man by an ATM beg this couple withdrawing money to buy alcohol from him. It made me wonder about London, and why there are not as many people on the streets at night here and what the opinion of houselessness generally is in England. At the pub, we listen to a jazz band, then spend all our pocket change on an arcade game version of 1 VS. 100.
Saturday, April 17. Jenny, Mollie and I casually browse the vendors at an open-air arts and crafts fair. There is a woman who handknits animal toys, a guy who had some really cool junk art pieces and tons of jewelry, porcelain, hats, clothes and leatherware to go round. I buy a secret gift for a secret friend named Mabs (I love you!) and a pink handknit headband. For the rest of the morning, George leads us around on a tour of the University of Cambridge's colleges, where more knowledge is obtained and more collegiate men are spotted. I think these pictures are a mixture of Trinity and King's Colleges' grounds and church.
For lunch, we pick out some excellent fudge at a fudge shop and walk to an open-air food market - so much fun! I don't actually partake of the street food - instead I go to a place called "EAT," where the cashiers insisted that I take their picture -
But the vendors have everything from organic olives to locally produced cheeses that I've never heard of. Everyone decides to punt for the afternoon (riding down the Cambridge river on a gondala-style boat ride), but I think trying on everything in Top Shop and avoiding situations where I might drown, is a better use of my time. For dinner, we return to the illustrious Rainbow Cafe - amazing - then stop by this pub called The Eagle with the usual gang. We see a sign there that says someone famous announced the discovery of something even more famous here; Dan was pretty excited, I think it was science-related.
Sunday, April 18. Bury St. Edmunds abbey ruins!
Before long, we head down to Ickworth House, another property of the beautiful and dirty, dirty rich English countryside. We talk to a few old ladies who are waiting for the horse and carriage to pick them up. One says they come to the grounds all the time, and repeats the word "derelict" rather often, while the other sort of comically ignores us.
Congratulations for reading to (or, more likely, skipping through) to the end. Part deux tomorrow. Mwa!
This one has most of my very favorite things.
ReplyDeleteHot Brit boys.
Chocolate.
Weird things with bones.
You in fields of flowers.
Brill Mibs.