Welcome to Cambridge!

Hello! This summer I'm participating in the Pembroke-King's Programme (PKP) at Cambridge. I've only been here for two days, but it has been a blast and I am already in love with the city of Cambridge!

I flew in to Heathrow airport in London Sunday morning, and when we landed the sun was out and shining, and it was a gorgeous day. However, by the time I got a bus and arrived in Cambridge in the afternoon, it was pouring rain. I guess England wouldn't be the same without the rain. I shared a taxi with another girl who was coming to PKP, and we went from the bus stop to King's College. Unfortunately, graduation was apparently just ending, so the streets were packed and it took us forever to get there!

The University of Cambridge consists of 31 colleges, and each different college houses its own students, has a dining hall for them, and has its own library. The two colleges participating in this program are King's College and Pembroke College (obviously, since it's the Pembroke-King's Programme), and the college I'm staying at is King's College. The University of Cambridge was founded in 1209 by scholars who left the University of Oxford. Apparently there was some sort of disagreement and they ended up fleeing Oxford, but I'm not sure of the details. Anyway, King's College itself wasn't created until 1441, when it was founded by Henry VI. However, construction of the iconic King's College chapel didn't begin until 1446, and construction continued on and off until 1515.

This is King's College Chapel

The building on the left is the end of King's College chapel, and the white building in the middle is the Gibbs building. The River Cam runs alongside the college, and people are always punting there!

This is Pembroke College. As you can see, it is gorgeous.

 I live in a place called Webb's Court, and it is much newer--it was built in 1909. But it still looks pretty awesome! My room is up on the fourth floor, but this means that I have a great view, and my windows open up onto the roof (someone announced this at FHE, and apparently lots of people are excited about possible roof-climbing adventures, so now I'm the girl with access to the roof). The windows are so cool because they have little handles and open like doors, and they don't have screens. Why can't we have windows like this in America?

My room! It is huge! And it has an armchair! There are four of these rooms on my floor in my staircase, and we all just share a bathroom.

This is the view out of my window. As you can see, it leads onto the roof : )

This is the view into the courtyard out of my other window. The brownish building directly across from the window is actually the library, so I have a great view of the library at night when everything else is dark and the lights are on inside.

Another view out my window. You can kind of see the King's College chapel.

This is the outside of where I live. I'm the white window furthest on the right of the taller building.

So basically, this room beats anything I've ever had at BYU and probably beats any view I'll ever have again.

The college is open during the day to visitors, and the huge gates are open then. However, in the evenings and at night, the college is closed to outsiders, so we have keys that let us in through the little door in the gate. The porters stay right by the gate and check you as you go in to make sure you're actually a student. It was crazy being able to walk right past all the tourists and go straight into the college while the porters were trying to keep everyone else out!

Climbing through the little door in the gate!

Anyway, once we got to King's and got our room keys and stuff, there was an opening dinner. Students have come to this program from all over the world, so there are lots of interesting people to talk to. There are about 100 kids from the UC schools in California, there are lots from Yale and Harvard, and there are even people from schools in Beijing, Cairo, and Australia. BYU brought about 40 people to the program, and the program only has 394 people (I was laughing at the inadvertent Harry Potter reference for ages : ) ), so we actually make up a good chunk of the people here. The dining hall is super nice and the food is delicious! I had salmon and quiche and little cheesecake bites the first night here.

This is the dining hall! It is gorgeous! And it is basically Hogwarts.

Yeah, like I said. Hogwarts. And the stained glass is pretty.

After dinner everyone walked around for a bit to explore. There was mist over the lawn, and it looked gorgeous and spooky and reminded me of The Hound of the Baskervilles for some reason.

Awesome gorgeousness.

So, thus ended day one. I hadn't slept in over 24 hours, but I was so excited to be here that I didn't feel tired at all! Day two was a bit rougher though. I was exhausted!

We started out on Monday with breakfast, and once again, the food was delicious. We then walked over to the Union Society where we will have classes for a quick orientation meeting (where we learned that there were 394 people in the program). Cambridge is simply amazing with all of the old buildings and little shops, and the Tour de France is apparently coming through in a week, so there are little flags strung all over the place. It reminded me of the town in the movie Tangled.

Walking through the streets of Cambridge. I think this street is called King's Parade.

We had some tours of the colleges followed by a library orientation tour, and then we basically had the afternoon to ourselves. We walked around to lots of the different shops, found the grocery store Sainsbury's (where they have stuff like bagged milk--why would you ever put milk in a bag?), went into some bookstores, and basically just explored the city. In the evening, all the BYU students went to Family Home Evening at the home of the senior missionary couple that serves here, and that was a lot of fun. It is still odd to me that Cambridge is a town and that people actually live here that don't go to school here. The houses are super tiny, but they are cute and very British! It was also fun to meet members of the local ward here.

This is a picture of the front entrance where the gates are as well as King's College chapel on the left.

the front side of the Gibbs building

just pretty stuff

As you can see, there is grass EVERYWHERE, but you are not allowed to walk on it. Only fellows of the college or Senior Members of the college or professors are allowed to walk on the grass. There are signs everywhere that tell you in six different languages to keep of the grass. I don't really know all the rules about the grass, I just know that we're not allowed to walk on it except for one place in Bodley's Court.

This grass! We are allowed to walk on this grass! This is Bodley's Court, and behind me is the river Cam.

People punting on the River Cam with Bodley's Court in the background.

on the bridge over the river

After FHE we walked around some more and went to a pub to watch the World Cup. Pubs are a huge thing here; there is seriously a pub on every corner! It is lots of fun to talk to the locals as well. They're actually pretty used to having all the American students come over for the summers.

So those were my first two days at Cambridge. Classes start tomorrow, so I better go to bed so I can be ready for those. On one final note, here is the entrance to Cambridge during sunset. It is so pretty! And so old!