“I hate university towns and university people, who are the same
everywhere, with pregnant wives, sprawling children, many books and hideous
pictures on the walls ... Oxford is very pretty, but I don't like to be dead.”
-T.S.
Eliot, 1914
Well,
this has been pretty late coming. My apologies. These past two weekends, the
internet at our flat in London has been out, meaning that at the precise moment
that I’ve actually had things to blog about, I have not had the means to post
them for you. Oh well. That just means that instead of just hearing about my
day trips to England’s two most famous university towns, you also get to hear
about this weekend’s trip to Cardiff.
So Many Books
Last
Saturday, I got up extremely early in the morning (This is a running theme of
these past two weekends) to catch the train to Cambridge. Now, most people,
when hearing the name Cambridge think only of the University, but no, in fact,
there’s a fairly large city that people live in and everything. In fact,
walking from the train station to the city center, it reminded me an awful lot
of the part of the Twin Cities that my family used to live in when I was very
young.
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| Except, you know, beautiful and amazing. |
Anyway,
the main reason I went to Cambridge, besides it being a major cultural center,
was to visit a friend of mine from Middle and High School who’s doing a year
abroad there. We had brunch in a church café and then she showed me around a
bit. This is a trend I’ve noticed is quite prominent in the less massive UK
cities: church cafés. I ate in one way back towards the beginning of term when
we were in Stratford, I ate at this one in Cambridge, and again when I was in
Cardiff. They very greatly in size, with this one in Cambridge being a full two
floors of seating that was larger than most of the commercial restaurants in
that part of town while the one in Cardiff being a tiny attic room with barely
any room to sit, but they all seem dedicated to spreading the word of God via
cheap food and tea. In either case, this particular one had an incredibly good
spinach, goat cheese, and summer squash quiche, which we both ordered.
Anyway,
from there she showed me a few of the colleges. The college system in Cambridge
and Oxford is wildly different from what we have in the states in that the
University as a whole is more of a confederation of these smaller individual
colleges. The thing is that these colleges aren’t generally devoted to a single
field as they are in the states. So rather than having, as Millikin does, a
College of Arts and Sciences, which is where a history major would take the
majority of his classes, and a School of Business, where a business major would
take the majority of his classes, Cambridge has, for example, King’s College,
where they would both study, even though Trinity College, while still part of
the same University, also offers courses in the same subjects. This leads to
sort of intra-university rivalries, which I’ll talk more about when we get to
Oxford.
Sophie
is currently studying at Girton College, which is quite far away from the city
proper, so I didn’t actually get to see it, but we did go into a few of the
courtyards of the colleges clustered around the central square. There were a
lot “c”s in that last phrase. Anyway, the funny thing I found about both
Cambridge and Oxford is that pretty much every single courtyard is some
variation on this:
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| I know, how tedious. A million buildings that all look like this. |
It’s
basically all imposing, sandstone walls around either a frighteningly green
patch of grass that you are absolutely, one hundred percent not allowed to walk
on, or else stone tiling or cobblestone that combined with the walls make you
feel kind of like you’re in a really classy, academic prison.
We
didn’t spend a whole lot of time at the colleges, though. Oxford was a whole
lot more a facts-and-history visit, while Cambridge was more about catching up
with an old friend. So she took me along the river to this bookshop off-campus.
I’ve had pretty massive problems containing my propensity for buying books
since I don’t exactly have the space in my budget or my suitcase and before
meeting Sophie had had to cut my visit to the Cambridge University Press’ shop
short for precisely that reason, but this place was absolutely the highlight of
my trip. It being a shop, I didn’t feel it was entirely kosher to take
pictures, so I’ll try to evoke the feel of the place.
It’s
the sort of place you can tell used to be a small flat way, way back in the
day. There are a couple of independent bookshops like that I’ve come across, but
most of them were content to put a book on each wall with a few best-sellers
and local interest volumes and call it a day. Not this place. You could
scarcely turn around in here without almost knocking something over. Right when
we walked in I nearly knocked over an entire shelf of P.G. Wodehouse. The big
reason she brought me, though, was the back room.
There’s
a room in the British Museum called “The Enlightenment Room” which is set up
like a posh study with loads of old-looking leather-bound books on the walls,
which are really just there to compliment all of the stuffed birds and far
eastern art that form the actual exhibition. This back room was the same idea,
except the books were the exhibition. Had I been in a position to actually make
purchases, I would have walked out either still debating my choices, or else
completely broke and trying to figure out how to possibly transport everything.
There
were volumes in almost perfect condition from as far back as the early 19th
century. A biography of a well-known Victorian stage actor seemed like it had
never been read; the spine still gave resistance is you tried to open it to the
middle. Along the back wall were hundreds of old travelogues, most of which
probably never got a second printing, talking about rafting down the Yang-Tze
River and hacking virgin paths through the Amazon rainforests. I can only
picture all of these guys as pith helmet wearing, khaki-clad, RP-spouting gents
with the most amazing handlebar mustaches ever to exist. The Shakespeare
section contained the cheapest item that I found: thumb-sized editions of
individual plays for ten pounds a-piece. I joked that I’d like to see a
thumb-sized complete works, which would have been many, many times thicker than
it would be tall. Speaking of which, there was an amazing early 20th
century three-volume edition of Shakespeare’s Complete Works with the most
beautiful wood-cut illustrations which I was incredibly tempted by before
reminding myself that the tragedies alone cost the same as groceries for the
entire rest of my time in the UK.
Shortly
after this, Sophie had to leave for a meeting, so she dropped me at one of the
Museums, which was essentially a smaller version of the British museum’s
antiquities collection. I did have a good laugh at the fact that much of their
Greek and Roman collection used to belong to a Victorian-era Cambridge faculty
member who happened to have the named Disney, meaning that you’ll run across a
statuette of Aphrodite with “Disney” stamped on the base. After this, I stopped
off at the market briefly to buy my sister a present and grab something to eat
before heading back to the train station to catch the train home to recuperate
for a day before heading out to Oxford.
And I thought Millikids
hated townies
In
Oxford, I took a walking tour. A friend suggested a company that operates on a
tips-only basis, so I built my day in Oxford around that. The tour guide was
clearly well informed, though he did have one of the most impressively pompous
and quintessentially Oxford accents I’ve ever heard. He showed us around the
larger colleges and talked about the various rivalries and traditions. It’s
probably just because my Cambridge experience didn’t have anything analogous to
the tour in terms of actual information about the college, but I got the sense
that Oxford is much bigger on identification by college and on formulating
different traditions around them. For instance, Merton College’s sole ceremony
happens in the early hours of the last Sunday of October. During this time, the
members of the college walk backwards in a circle in one of the quads wearing
academic dress and drinking port wine. This is humorously meant to maintain the
integrity of the time-space continuum as Daylight Savings Time ends.
At
the same time, though, I was struck by the intensity of the external “Town and
Gown” rivalry, referring to the tension between the students of the university
(“gown”) and the residents of the city of Oxford (“town”) which has existed virtually
since the University was founded. Our guide told us about the St. Scholastica
Day Riots, which happened in 1355 and amounted to an all out war between the
scholars of the university and the men of the city of Oxford and the
surrounding countryside with the Chancellor of Oxford University and the Mayor
of Oxford leading the two “armies.” The conflict was only brought to an end by
the intervention of King Edward III and the matter not formally settled between
the two parties until the 600th anniversary of the riots in 1955. As
much as the students at Millikin dislike the townies, I can’t picture anything
close to this ever happening, and I certainly can’t see President Jeffcoat
leading the charge. Not saying it wouldn’t be awesome, just saying I don’t see
it happening.
Anyway,
this is definitely reflected in the layout of Oxford. Unlike in Cambridge,
where the city centre is where most of the more prestigious colleges are
clustered with little shops and other “town” establishments around them, Oxford
is very clearly divided between the city and the colleges and, in most cases,
the colleges and other university buildings will be the only things on a given
city block. After the tour, I went and had lunch (a very tasty falafel,
couscous, and houmous wrap from a shop I’d passed trying to find the starting
place for the tour), bought a gift for my mom and rounded out the day with a
trip to two of the museums: The Oxford University Museum of Natural History and
The Pitt-Rivers Museum of Anthropology, which is connected to it.
The
Natural History museum was one of the best-laid out museums I’ve been in in
awhile. The specimens are organized taxonomically and it’s clear that in laying
it out the curators have taken into account what exhibits are likely to be of
interest to the average visitor. For instance, the only major break in the
taxonomic layout is a case right at the entrance that contains all of the
specimens that inspired Louis Carroll when he wrote Alice in Wonderland. Otherwise, you just pick what you want to look
at and you go.
The
same cannot be said for the Pitt-Rivers museum. It is, in a word, an absolute
mess. I don’t take pictures in museums for the sake of not doubling the time it
takes to get through them, but it is impossible to imagine how cluttered they
are. As an illustration, when I get back to the states I’m embarking on an
extended research, writing, and performance project involving Ireland’s Bronze
Age, which is not particularly well documented, however I have been checking
every museum I’ve been to for any artifacts matching this description. At, for
instance, the British Museum this is pretty easy because everything is
organized by location and era, whereas the Pitt-Rivers, for some reason, is
organized by use. So, for instance, all of the weapons are housed on the top floor
and, by extension, every single spear from Ancient Rome to 19th
Century Africa are all housed in one case, right next to another case full of
every sword in the collection. This means that you have to scan every single
item in every display case to pick out whether there’s anything in it from the
era you’re interested in.
Which
is the other problem: the collection is massive and it’s all on display. I
didn’t get the sense that there were a whole lot of “archives,” so every single
artifact is crammed into a display case with the result that trying to take it
all in is absolutely exhausting. This seemed like a museum in much need of
contemporizing, as it seemed to think that just looking at things is why people
go to a museum, so it gives you a lot of things to look at without a whole lot
of context or information about the things themselves. I gave up on trying to
find any Bronze Age Irish artifacts about halfway through, only having found a
few pieces of jewelry in a tiny display in the corner of the second floor.
So that’s where all of
the spare “w”s and “y”s went!
Which
brings us to this weekend, during which I visited Sierra, a friend from school
who is doing a term at the Royal Welsh College of Music and Drama in Cardiff.
Like Cambridge, this trip was more about visiting a friend than about
experiencing the history and culture, which is a shame, since I do really enjoy
that part of traveling, but at the same time to do both things I’ve discovered
you really need more than a day or two in a location.
Anyway,
I had the extreme bad luck of visiting at the same time as the Wales-New
Zealand Rugby Match in Cardiff’s famous Millenium Stadium, meaning that I
literally had one choice in terms of hostels, which was a bit more than I was
expecting to spend on accommodations. The place itself was fine and I have no
major complaints about the business, but since most everyone else staying there
was a Kiwi (Not offensive, for the record, though it really sounds like it
should be) explicitly there purely for the game. But we’ll get to that later,
since that’s really the story to end the post with. I was fine with not having
a repeat of my awesome Barcelona hostel experience, though, since, as I said, I
was mainly there to visit Sierra.
The
main event of my trip to Wales was a trip we took to Caerphilly Castle a few
hours north of Cardiff.
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| Which doesn't look at all like it belongs to House Greyjoy. |
The
atmosphere was definitely helped by the fact that on the day we visited the
rain literally never stopped. It felt quintessentially Northern European, which
actually was a rather cool experience. I’m not particularly bothered by cold or
rain, and so it definitely helped with the historicism of the whole experience.
That
afternoon we walked around the various shops and arcades, which are not rooms
full of pinball machines, but rather indoor marketplaces. I also found out a
bit about the Welsh language, which, like Irish in Ireland, is printed
alongside the English on every major sign. It’s probably most famous for using
all of the spare “y”s and “w”s that the other languages had left over. This is
largely because “w” and “y” are vowels in Welsh, so they get a lot more use and
in places which seem odd to speakers of other languages, which is why it may
seem to speakers of other languages that Welsh has a consonant surplus. Sierra
also said that Wales is trying to bring about a revival in the Welsh language
in much the same way Ireland has been slowly doing with Irish Gaelic, which is
a cousin tongue to Welsh. The big push right now is to get it taught in
schools.
Before
going back to her flat to drink and hangout, we paid a visit to Chippy Alley, a
side street in Cardiff that is famous for its many Fish and Chips shops. I’m a
huge fan of Fish and Chips, but since coming to the UK have been disappointed
by one thing: the tartar sauce. Not the quality, mind you, but the quantity. Every
place I’ve been in London, save one, has not let you get your own tartar sauce,
which is a problem because for a huge slab of fish, they will only give you the
tiniest tub of sauce. I literally started laughing at one place at the sheer
incongruity of it. So imagine my surprise when in Chippy Alley, they gave me
not a little tartar sauce, but none whatsoever. They had mayonnaise, one of the
component ingredients of tartar sauce, but none of the good stuff. Thankfully
the fish was good enough on its own (the key: good fish and chips is horribly
greasy) that it was still edible, but I’m starting to get majorly frustrated.
If I manage to find a place that will simply let me make my own condiment
decisions, believe me, you will hear about it. The place I mentioned before was
a stand at the Southwark festival in September, so it’s not like I can just up
and go whenever I feel like it, which is unfortunate.
Anyway,
let me leave you with the reason I was so tired yesterday when I came back.
As
I mentioned, the town was crowded because of the Rugby match, which had left me
in a room full of New Zealanders, one a group of guys who lived in England, and
the other a pair of girls who were studying in Dublin. Apparently the rush of
the game, in which New Zealand absolutely crushed Wales, was enough to get the
old hormones raging for two of them, who, laboring under a grave
misapprehension regarding both their ability to refrain from making noise and
the ability of the average person to sleep through said noise, decided to
engage in sexual activities. In a room with four other people sleeping in it.
At five o’clock in the morning. This left me with about two hours of sleep
total under my belt for my coach ride back to London the next morning, as well
as newly cognizant of my own crippling aloneness.
In
all seriousness, though, that incident and lack of tartar sauce aside, I really
have loved the last two weekends. Travel does have a way of tuckering you out,
though, so I think I’ll stay in town this weekend. Don’t worry though, I’ll
have plenty to tell you about, provided we’ve got internet. Burger King is
running a new Europe-only special…
