Cambridge

Made a day trip to Cambridge on Saturday!  Went with a group of 4 other expats - 3 Americans and 1 Scottish.  Should Scottish be classified as expat in London?  I don't know, but I just did!  Cambridge is only about an hour from London by train.  We started at Kings Cross station and I saw the (in)famous Platform 9 3/4 of Harry Potter fame!  I wanted to get a picture, but there was a LINE of probably 20-30 people waiting for pictures and I wasn't willing to wait for it.  Next time!

 

So Cambridge University is actually made up of 31 individual colleges.  Students live and study within their college.  Cambridge is the second oldest university in the UK (after Oxford) and the third oldest surviving in the world,  The oldest is the University of Bologna in Italy, which was surprising to me - I don't know why.  I guess it doesnt get the press that Oxford and Cambridge do?  Anyway. 

 

The most famous college for its architecture is Kings College.  We visited the Chapel and grounds.

 

Ceiling and organ inside the Chapel...

The grounds were really beautiful!!  But they have an extreme concern about people walking on the grass.  These signs were EVERYWHERE - probably every 10-15 yards all along the edges of sidewalks.  We thought it was kinda funny.  Also I now have a life mission to make friends with a Senior Member of the College so I can come back and walk on the grass.  :) 

 

 

 

This is the River Cam that runs through Cambridge.  Apparently the name of the town came from the River and the fact that this was the location of the one of the earliest bridges in the area.  "Cam-bridge" - that felt silly spelling it out, obviously you got it!

 

One of the famous activities is to go "punting" on the River, which is a fancy word for boating in this long, wooden, flat-bottom boats.  They are steered and driven using a long pole, similar to gondolas in Venice. 

Of course we had to take a ride!  We had a nice driver in our boat and he gave us some of the history of the city and University.  Some of the especially picturesque spots on the River...

Wimbledon

So I'm going to go out of chronological order and skip ahead to my day at Wimbledon - Finland weekend will come later.  :)  I went to Wimbledon with my friend Lizzie.  First time for both of us and many people here had said it was an event not to be missed.  There are so many unique things about going to Wimbledon!

First, THE QUEUE.  All important - fancy word for "line."  Unlike most major sporting events, they don't sell all the tickets to Wimbledon in advance.  There are a set number of tickets every day that are reserved for the Queue. They are some of the best seats in the three largest courts (aka "show courts") and are available every day, all the way up to the finals.  They have a large field set up where you can camp out, vendors selling food and drinks.  The entire thing is so organized and so...British.

Lizzie and I didn't want to camp out, so we took the train out early and joined the Queue around 7:30am.  Here is the camping area.

You should know that most of the people in the tents in this picture were actually queuing for tickets for the FOLLOWING day to see Andy Murray play.  So they were there more than 24 hours in advance to get a spot in line!

They only have about 500 tickets for each of the three big courts and when you get in line, you get a card with a number on it.  Our number was in the 1800s, so we thought we would only get grounds passes.  We were surprised when the agent came through passing out wrist bands for seats in Court 1!  (That's the second best court at Wimbledon.)  So we got them!!  This is us showing off our wristbands that we got Court 1!

Inside of Court 1, early in the day before any play began.

 This is later in the day.  It rained off and on through the afternoon.  Because the courts are grass, they cover them up when it rains so they don't get slippery and waterlogged.  This cover was on alot that day!

While it was raining, we wandered around the grounds.  This is the formal entrance to the All England Lawn & Tennis Club. The guys at the door smiled nicely for pictures. :)

We had the required Strawberries & Cream!  Special note - mine was FREE!!!  HSBC Bank was one of the event sponsors and any HSBC customer could show their bank card and get theirs free.  This never happens to me - I've never been at an event and banked with the right place before!

This is the view from our seats!  Early in the day we saw two women's quarter-finals matches.  Incidentally, we got to see Marion Bartoli, who went on to win the entire Championship!  That was pretty cool for us.  Also a fun moment was after the official matches, they had some exhibition matches scheduled on the large courts.  Ours was a senior doubles match...can the tennis fans see who that is on the court?

Here is a closer shot and the scoreboard with the names on it too - that's John McEnroe!!  Super funny little match they played and everyone seemed to love it.  

The grounds were really beautiful - this is some of the seating between courts and flower baskets everywhere!

And here is Henman Hill!  This was taken later in the evening as we were leaving.  But during the day the hill was full of people having picnics and watching on the big screen.

Really fun day altogether and so glad we were able to go!!

Some funny stuff

I'm trying really hard to get some posts up, but my Internet Explorer keeps crashing every time I try to pull a picture in from my saved stuff.  More coming soon...

 

But these pictures were on my phone. 

 

This is my dish soap - it is basically the equivalent of Dawn in the US.  If you can't quite read the top part, it says that the Queen endorses this Fairy dish soap.  I wonder how many dishes Her Majesty has washed and what other brands she compared it to? 

This was on the wall in the Tube.  It's an advertisement for milk.  Only in a city like London - FULL of finance people could this make it.  And only because I am an accountant did I take a picture. 

I could write many posts of the funny things people wear, but it is often hard to get pictures without being obvious.  My iphone helps with that.  These are the shoes (and hairy legs - sorry about that!) of two completely normal looking guys on the Tube.  Yes, those are the toe shoes on the left.  And the guy on the right is wearing boots.  With shorts.  And funny socks with American flag stars on them.  Just two regular guys wearing this nonsense with absolutely no irony at all.  Hilarious!

When Anne and Dan were visiting, we stopped into the Tate Modern art museum for a few minutes.  I was frankly a little disappointed that the stuff we saw wasn't strange enough.  But then I went to the Saatchi Gallery.  Look at this freaky business!!  I think it was made out of butcher paper. 

And finally, a cute moment.  This little guy was just taking a nap on the Tube next to his owner.  The owner was equally cute older chap with a hat and newspaper.  London is full of the weirdest and cutest stuff!