Cambridge revisited

The first time I was in Cambridge was sometime in the 1980s, when I was on a language course. I learned a lot that long-ago summer, both in the course and in my host family. I was not alone there, there was also a French girl my age, and we went around together. That was when I learned about bus stops where you had to wave to the bus driver to stop, after we were almost in tears trying to get back home and no bus would pick us up. I learned about left-hand driving when I was almost run over in London. I learned about my stomach's problem with whipped cream when, the day after a rich dinner our host mother served us which finished with pineapple piled high with the stuff, I was sick on a corner of a University building in Cambridge.

I don't remember much else of my first visit to Cambridge, at least consciously. Nevertheless, I must have been very impressed by it, since my subconscious kept revisiting it in my dreams, without me realising it. Not knowing it was Cambridge I was dreaming about, I thought it was Prague - but then, yesterday, I turned a corner and had an amazing feeling of dejá vu - there it was, the slightly sunken building of King's College.

I walked around Cambridge for hours, window-shopping and stopping in bookstores, when I saw another piece of architecture that I didn't remember seeing before, but which nevertheless was familiar - the Round Church. A beautiful building, one of the oldest churches in England (1130!), the inside just slightly marred by the "exhibition" they put up.

Then I stumbled onto the University Museum of Zoology, which was fascinating - a collection of skeletons, stuffed animals, and dead things in jars. As much a museum of fauna as a museum of how fauna was collected and classified. There were jars of fish collected by Darwin himself, for example. There even was a stuffed Kakapo, poor thing.
( I took a few pictures there. )

On the whole, an exhausting but wonderful day.