Cambridge

Today I woke up early to get to Bedford Square at 9 so I could take a bus with some NYU kids to go see Cambridge (it was either Oxford or Cambridge, and I chose the latter).
It is the cutest town I've seen yet. Little tiny streets that meander with close buildings. It's all very medievally set up still. And there are churches up the wazoo! Every corner, there they are!
We started off in this square where a big market took place. From fish to tea, from CDs and used guitars to knitwear. Then these cute hometown tour guides split up our group into groups of 15, and we went on our merry way. It was a University tour, essentially, but hey! isn't that what Cambridge is all about?
Cambridge University, mind you, is made up of all of the Cambridge colleges. The university does all of the teaching and administrative stuff, and the colleges are the reputable names that you apply to. Kinda like NYU, Stern College....get it?
My guide started us off with Trinity College (the richest and largest college there). Henry the 8th founded it, and they have a sculpture of him holding a "holy hand-grenade" and....a chair leg. Long story...

I have to stop now to make a note at how impressed I was with the grass here. Sounds stupid, I know. But seriously, this grass here is amazing! It's iridescent-green! And it's incredibly well maintained! I felt like I was looking at a velvet carpet, or something out of the Wizard of Oz!
Now, mind you that it is forbidden to trod on any ounce of grass.

Then off to King's College, made by Henry the 6th. Very quadrilateral, I say.
But the King's College Chapel (you know, where the King's College Chamber Choir sings every Christmas Eve?), now that was something!!!! Massive. Half modest and half overembellished. It was stunning. The outside is very gothic, but the inside...wow.
We weren't allowed to photograph the inside, but it's amazing. The walls in the antichapel are very gawdy, but still beautiful. The stained-glass windows are massive and luminous, and they're the 85% of the original windows, too (because they took out all of them during WW2 for safe keeping)! There's a very large oak organ in the middle of the huge church (by Henry the 8th) that's all carved out. And the chapel part is so pure...I can't explain it.
But the ceiling was my favorite. The columns of the building went up and fanned out on the ceilings...they truly looked like fans! All stone, but they looked weightless!

At the end of the tour, the lady brought us to a small restaurant-pub. Eliana and I ate some fish & chips there, and along came the rest of the NYU brigade into this little pub. It was awkward.
Then our supervisor, Paul (25, british, cute, Master student at Birbeck...), sat and ate with us. We just talked to him in the pub for the rest of the 2 hours there, and it was wonderful.
I will end this post by simply stating that though I've never been to Cambridge before, and though Paul was with Eliana and me for the rest of the time, I was the one who had to walk us back to our check-in point. Right.