Clubbing in Cambridge

So, this past week wasn’t as exciting as the week before when we went to Edinburgh, but there are still lots of fun things to do in Cambridge.

Last Monday was nice because we didn’t have any classes since the Tour de France was coming through Cambridge. However, this also meant that there were massive crowds and tons of blocked roads, so we basically couldn’t leave the college. The general excitement was rather fun, but the race itself was kind of anticlimactic. You couldn’t really see what was happening, and the whole thing only lasted about ten minutes. The bikers all came through in one massive group, so they weren’t exactly trying to outdo each other yet. But either way, it was nice to have a day off to recover from the Edinburgh trip. : )

Here is a picture of Will and Kate made entirely out of jelly beans! I don't know if the sweet shop set this up specifically for the Tour de France, but it wasn't there before Monday, so I'm going to go with yes.

You can see the jelly beans better in this one. Isn't it way cool?

On Tuesday we started classes again. I think I mentioned last time that my awesome class about music and the mind was cancelled (I’m pretty sure my teacher got deported because she had some sort of visa problem. Lovely, eh?), so I spent a couple days working with the program directors while trying to get into a different class. I finally got into another class called “Good Life or Moral Life?” As you can probably tell, this is a philosophy of ethics class. I’ve only been to lecture once, but it is pretty fascinating. Philosophy isn’t exactly my favorite subject, but my professor is very interesting and is also exactly how I would picture the quintessential Cambridge professor. He had on a brown suit and vest over a purple button-up shirt that had a white collar, and he also had a bright teal bowtie with a blue and white polka dotted pocket handkerchief. Oh, and he has curly hair and a beard. And he carries a bag with different fruits on it. But his lectures are pretty interesting, and it was fun to talk to him during seminars. Oh, this is another thing about Cambridge: during lectures, you shut up and sit there while the professor lectures, and you never ask questions; during seminars, you can talk as much as you like, and it is much more informal and personal. Some of the students don’t seem to get this, so the professors are sometimes a bit irritated when they raise their hands and try to ask questions during lectures.

I've also realized that there is quite the rivalry between Oxford and Cambridge. All the teachers and students here joke about it, and on the activities list that shows places we can go visit, Oxford is listed as "The Other Place." We had a guest lecturer come and talk about the history of Cambridge, and he told us that "Oxford talks, but Cambridge publishes." : ) I always figured that the two schools were pretty much the same, but according to our guest lecturer, they are very different in their history, tradition, and management. I also learned that here in Cambridge, a theoretical mathematician was (at least back in the day) the best thing you could be. The theoretical mathematicians looked down on the applied mathematicians, who looked down on the theoretical physicists, who looked down on the lab chemists, who looked down on the biologists (because, in the words of our guest lecturer, "Let's face it, biology is a fuzzy subject"), and everyone looked down on the engineers. Sorry, Dad. : P

On Saturday I went out to Newmarket, the birthplace and world center of horse racing. Saturday was the Darley July Cup, and I don't really know what that means other than a really big horse race. I was definitely a bit underdressed for the occasion (the family tickets said you could wear jeans!), but it was lots of fun to see all the ladies dressed up with their huge hats. I totally would have gotten one if they weren't so expensive! We got to walk around and see some of the horses before the races started, and once the races began, they had one race every 40 minutes or so. I'm pretty sure they only spaced them out like this so people could have time to bet on the horses, which is evidently a huge thing (sorry, the movie Secretariat comprised the extent of my horse racing knowledge until Saturday). We were able to go right up to the fence to watch the races, which was amazing!

A jockey on a horse before the races.

So there actually is a race going on here, and you can kind of see the horses on the track, but this was back before we decided to go up to the fence to watch the races. You can clearly see the massive crowds of people though.

Yay! Now we're up by the fence!

This is during an actual race!

The big jumbo screen thing with the horse names and numbers along with their chances of winning. We would try to guess who would win just by going off of their names, which were pretty awesome. I really liked the horse named When Will It End : )

Oh look, I'm in this picture.

During another race. This was the coolest picture I got from the whole event.

I've been rather surprised by how much people smoke here and how you can practically smoke anywhere. There were tons of people smoking at the horse races, so the whole place reeked. Here in England though, the cigarette boxes say "SMOKING KILLS" in big letters across the front, but everyone does it anyway. In Cambridge there are lots of people that smoke too, but luckily you can't smoke in the colleges themselves.

On Sunday we went to church at the local family ward. We rode in taxis to the church since it was pretty far away, so it was pretty funny to see the long line of BYU students trying to cram into taxis. The ward/branch was actually bigger than I thought it would be, but they only have a few youth and primary kids. Lots of the people in the ward seem to be from the U.S. as well. Everyone was really nice though, and they are all pretty keen on getting us involved in the ward activities while we are here.

On Monday I met with the professor that is going to be meeting with me for my supervision. Supervisions are popular options here at Cambridge. In a supervision, you work one-on-one with a professor in your chosen field of study, so for me, mine is neuroscience. I was assigned to Dr. Mark Kotter, and he has a lab out by the hospital where he studies central nervous system stem cells. He researches the regulation of differentiation of oligodendrocyte precursor cells when neurons experience demyelination so that they can be remyelinated. This is of massive importance to diseases like MS where the main problem is myelin sheath deterioration. I had to wander around Cambridge a bit in order to find the building I was supposed to meet him in, but that let me see some way cool stuff. I walked by the old Cavendish Laboratory site, which is where Watson and Crick discovered the structure of DNA! I couldn't believe I was standing yards away from where it happened. It was so amazing! The Cavendish Laboratories are still part of Cambridge, but they have been moved to a newer site, and I'm not exactly sure what is in the old Cavendish building now.

Entrance to the old Cavendish Laboratories

Some plaque showing that this is the site of the Cavendish Laboratory. It's super hard to read, but it says something about the guy whom the lab is named after and the duke that established the lab.

Apparently the electron was discovered here too. I actually didn't know that. Very cool.

Yay for chemistry labs!!!

I am hopefully going to be helping the grad students that work in Dr. Kotter's lab, so I was able to go out to his laboratories by the hospital and have a look around. Dr. Kotter is super nice for letting me into his labs, and I am very excited to get to work! I can't believe I'm going to be able to study in Cambridge labs!

This week we had two more guest lecturers come, and both gave very interesting talks. We had Sir Alan Ward, a judge, come and talk to us about several rulings he has made that overrode parents' decisions about their children's medical care. The main case he talked about was one where he ordered the separation of a pair of conjoined twins. The twins were connected at the waist, but one had a working heart and set of lungs while the other did not. If they remained attached together, both would die within several months because the one twin's heart would not be able to pump blood through both bodies and would eventually give out. If they were separated, the one twin would die immediately, but the other would be able to live a perfectly normal life and have virtually no long-lasting harmful effects. The parents did not want their twins to be separated, but Sir Alan Ward made the decision to separate them in order to save the one twin. It was very interesting to listen to how he made his decision, and at the end of the lecture I was just glad that I've never had to make such a hard choice. I was also very interested in the lecture because medical ethics will be a big part of my career when I continue on to Physician Assistant school, so it was fascinating to learn more about it. Our second guest lecturer was Dr. Valerie Curran, who is a leading expert on cannabis. This lecture was great as well, and we learned a lot about how cannabis acts on the brain (yay for neurobiology!). Following the lectures, we always head over to the Union Society bar for drinks. Drinks are a huge part of the culture here. Kind of like how every LDS church gathering has dessert, every meeting here at Cambridge has wine. Like, we're going to talk about the various effects of drugs on the brain and how alcohol is consistently ranked the most harmful drug (followed by heroin and then cocaine), but let's celebrate the occasion with drinks! Of course, there were plenty of glasses of orange juice for those who didn't want the wine, so that was nice of them.

Yay for our orange juice in wine glasses!

Something else I've learned here is that if you want Sprite, you need to ask for lemonade, and if you want actual lemonade, you need to ask for cloudy lemonade. I get the whole fries are chips and chips are crisps thing, but I didn't know about the lemonade thing before I got here. Even though Sprite is offered as a soft drink at most places, you still need to as for lemonade if you don't want them to be confused.

Speaking of drinks, I actually went "clubbing" here at Cambridge for the first time. Everyone goes to clubs and pubs in the evening, and last Wednesday our program assistants (they're Cambridge students that help organize this whole summer program and are kind of like RAs) reserved part of a club for our summer program. The place had a pretty cool Moroccan theme, but other than that I imagine it was basically pretty similar to any other club. It was really dark and filled with lots of smoke and fog machines, and I would really love to know why those flashing strobe lights don't induce more seizures or blind more people. Also, I'm not a fan of loud music to begin with, and this club had really loud music, of course. It was the kind of music that was so loud, you could feel it reverberating everywhere. It actually was starting to hurt my stomach and give me a headache, proving that I am just a major wimp. So I basically showed up, hung around awkwardly and attempted to talk to people over the horribly loud music for a little bit, all while dressed in my jeans, jacket, and converse shoes (totally club attire, right?), and then I left after about half an hour. Clubbing is definitely not my cup of tea (British pun!), so I'm just proud that I went, seeing as though I can't even stand dances back home. But yes, I am "broadening my cultural horizons" here in Cambridge, as you can clearly see. : )