Mood:
chillin'Now Playing: Nomeansno - The day everything became isolated & destroyed
Topic: Stephen Says
Things have been hectic over the last few days. My sleep in at work was generally disturbed, not in the least by the fluorescent light in the kitchen coming down at 3 o’clock in the morning and having to tidy the mess up.
I suppose that I thought Cambridge was going to be similar to Oxford but instead it turned out to be Royal Holloway’s bigger and more pretentious brother. I suppose the fact that it came into existence as a place for graduates of Eton to go for further education says something about the closed nature of the town and the general pomposity and feelings of self aggrandizement that goes along with being in the town and a part of the ‘scene’.
(On a side note, Elisabeth wondered out loud the other day how our experience with Royal Holloway & Englefield Green has shaped our feelings about living in Britain. Whether or not we would have this anti-elitist attitude if we had spent our first year in Birmingham, Cardiff or south London and not been exposed to the asinine belief of upper-class academic elitists…)
Like Egham, Cambridge is a university town and exists to cater to the thousands of students that live there for nine months of every year (Unlike Egham, it’s also a horrendous tourist trap the other 3 months of the year) so, unlike Oxford, which has the feeling of being lived in by real people (As opposed to students & tourists), Cambridge caters to the whims of people with more money than sense – no nice pubs, no sense of the town other than ‘look at me, I’m HISTORIC!’
(On another side note, Elisabeth and I were also musing on whether or not establishments with reputations as Bastions of High Education [note the capitals] are really all they’re cut out to be. Or whether the fact that they’re able to actually impart some knowledge upon the student body of spoilt rich kids who are only there because their parents could afford to send them makes them such Bastions.)
So that’s it for Cambridge. The 3 things that will stand out in my mind from the day are:
1)Feeling generally aggravated & annoyed almost as soon as we arrived when I realized that instead of it being a fun day out, we were going to be surrounded by tourists doing annoying touristy things as well as tourist trade people trying to rip everyone off.
2)Getting one of the angriest punters on the river as our escort. He was a theatre student who deliberately rammed other boats and capped his tour off by saying “lets knock people into the water” and then rammed more boats harder.
3)Stopping to take a picture of the front of the Scott of the Antarctic museum and having some nice man tell us how to sneak around to the front of the museum to see the statue of a naked boy whose body was based on that of Scott’s son. And then noticing his wife had a beard.
So that’s it for blog entry 501. Elisabeth got the honour of posting our 500th entry yesterday.