Joshua’s December in Cambridge

Hello, hello!

My semester abroad is over! It’s bittersweet – I enjoyed the time abroad so much and am sad to leave Cambridge and be done with my travels around England, but I’m so glad to be home with my family, my car, and my violin and dulcimer!

My spellcheck is back to American English, so if you winced every time I wrote something like organise or offence last time, have no fear!

On 25 November, my roommate Kurt and I made a trip to Oxford. Everyone in England knows that Oxford and Cambridge are supposed to hate each other, but I’m afraid to say that (while Cambridge is, of course, better, because I have to say so) Oxford was a very nice town.

While in Oxford, we saw the castle and prison (the latter of which was in use for around a thousand years, until 1996), wandered around to see the colleges, and went to the choral advent service at Keble College, which I think is the most beautiful college I’ve seen in either Oxford or Cambridge.

The next weekend was my last trip of the semester – Edinburgh, Scotland. This was another group trip, with nearly every member of the college. Everyone else went up by bus on Friday morning, but I had a class that day, so I had to go solo by train. And what a train ride it was! Thanks to a series of delays (crossed electrical lines causing 2.5 hours of delay, and a staff shortage and union overtime restrictions and strikes causing my train to stop early and never continue to my destination), I ended up getting to Edinburgh at around three in the morning (instead of around 8:30 that night) and had to go by taxi for the last couple hours of the trip. Thankfully, I found three people who also needed to get to Edinburgh, so we all got a taxi together and one of them volunteered to pay for the whole thing to simplify the refund process from the train company – fantastic for me!

The time in Edinburgh was amazing. We started the next morning with a hike up to Arthur’s Seat (a random mountain in the middle of the city), had an excellent walking tour of the old city (mainly the Royal Mile, which is the straight road from the castle to the palace and contains nearly all of the most important sites in the old part of the city), toured the Palace of Holyroodhouse (a still-active palace where the British monarch still occasionally resides), and had proper fish & chips with a special fish-and-chips sauce that we heard one can only find in Scotland. Finally, we visited the Edinburgh winter market and saw the Scott Memorial, a massive Gothic memorial which wasn’t open to go inside when we were there, but which was very impressive from the outside, nonetheless. The days were even shorter in Scotland than down in Cambridge, so it got dark around 3:30pm and I haven’t many photos from most of the evenings.

 

The next day, we started the day by going to the Sunday morning service at the Edinburgh Cathedral, which was also attended by the Scottish parliament and some royalty, which is kind of cool. We also visited the castle, but didn’t go in because it was sold out and we didn’t have tickets in advance. It was very neat from the outside, nonetheless! After that, I went to the National Museum of Scotland, which was a huge museum with centuries (or millennia, really) of history. Unfortunately, I only had 1.5 hours there before I had to leave. Thankfully, I was with everyone else for the return trip, on the bus.

It was strange knowing this was the last time I’d be getting back to Cambridge from elsewhere in the UK – the voyage home was only two weekends away, and I would be very busy until then with final papers!

The next couple of weeks still managed to keep me busy. Being so close to Christmas, there were more church services and meals I helped with; the college had a final Christmas dinner and little celebration of the semester completed, and, of course, I couldn’t possibly end a semester without at least a couple sleepless nights while working on final papers I should have started on much earlier.

On Friday night, several of us went on a walk around Cambridge for the last time. One of my friends ended up dropping her phone in the River Cam, so I dug around in the silt for some amount of time before everyone agreed we wouldn’t ever find it. I guess that means I can check off “spent twenty minutes freezing my arm in the Cam” from the list! (The Cam is also really polluted, so I made sure to go back and shower right away so I wouldn’t contract some weird disease.)

At 2:30 on Saturday morning, I bid Westfield House farewell for the last time and made the journey downtown to the bus stop, where Simeon Klepac, Kurt, and I departed from to Heathrow. About a 2-hour bus ride, 9-hour flight, and 3-hour drive later, I was home!

Just like that, it’s over! The entire experience was absolutely incredible, from the first few days in Paris through the final hours in England; from the weekend excursions to the weekdays spent researching and writing papers; from the walks to classes across Cambridge to the train rides through the rest of the country (even the ones that made my hair a bit more grey). I wouldn’t hesitate to recommend a semester abroad to any college student – whether in England, where I had such a brilliant time, or any other country.

Thank you all for reading these! Hopefully it’s been a good depiction of my time abroad, and hopefully I’ll help inspire some other past, current, or future students to travel as well!

~Joshua A. Klabunde.