January 15: Cambridge

The ducks were ducking themselves into the water then splashing all around. I thought the kids would enjoy this picture.

Vanessa’s Dining Room, Histon: Monday 7:45 pm GMT

Vanessa dropped us off by the William Fitzgerald Museum today. Unfortunately, it turns out that they’re open from Tuesday to Saturday. :-P So we ended up wandering around parts of Cambridge that we hadn’t seen yet (and some parts that we had).

We came across Little St. Mary’s Church and though we didn’t go in, we did walk around to the garden in the back and enjoy listening to the birds and looking at the back of Peterhouse College. (Peterhouse is the oldest college at Cambridge. It was started in 1284.)

As I sat looking at the greenery and the paving stones that were used to shore up the areas of the garden that where higher than other areas, it suddenly dawned on me that the rocks had writing on them. Then I realized that they were gravestones. Someone had rearranged the gravestones to make them into borders that held back the dirt behind them!!! I became convinced of this when I found a stone that had been set in place with the text sideways.

We then wandered over to St. Botolph’s Church, which was built in 1320. Believe it or not, the city of Boston (first the one on this side of the pond, then the one over in Massachusetts) got it’s name from St. Botolph.

After Botolph’s we found ourselves in an area that we’d seen already. But we knew where the internet cafe was from there, so we buzzed over there and uploaded pictures. On the way Rob grabbed a cornish pasty. I believe that’s his new favorite (or shoudl I say favouritie?) food. (See Mary. It’s not all complaining. Rob keeps throwing his hands in the air every time we pass a pasty shop. (He was pronouncing it as “paste-ey” then he changed it to “pahsty”))

From the cafe we tried to find St. Tibbs Row to take a picture of the sign, but it turns out they’re doing construction there. So the street sign (if there ever was one. Have I mentioned that the English don’t seem to like street signs?) was gone or hidden behind construction supplies. That was a pretty severe dissapointment because I knew the kids would have loved to see that. (Speaking of the kids. Nathan was diagnosed with strep. yesterday and now my mom tells me that she thinks Anna has it as well. :-P )

While we were wandering looking for St. Tibbs Row, though, we managed to find a funky rocky church. Again, it’s only about 100 years old, but it was still cool.

We passed by the Museum of Archeology and Anthropology and hoped to go in, but they’re not open on Mondays either. We did find a sign for another school of Economics, though. That’s always important. So we took a picture.

We made our way to the touristy part of town to find a place to exchange the rest of our dough. Then we hit the pub. This time I got cider. It was nothing to write home about.

We walked back to Histon and made it in record time. We tried to find the place that Rob’s brother Ryan had stayed when he was here (we only just today found out that he had lived in Histon when he attended Cambridge) but we couldn’t find it. (He later sent a map in an email so we’ll go hunt it down later.)

We grabbed some groceries at the mini-Tesco and headed home. For dinner we had leftovers over baked potatoes. Yum! And Rob, Nathaniel and Rebecca are now making brownies.