September 29, 2011 - St. John's College and Punting

My feet hurt so much from walking all over today. I actually managed to wake up early and leave my room by 10 am (which would be when I normally wake up). Jetlag is clearly a good thing for me. Anyways, today I wandered around a lot by myself to get the hang of this area. I also went to one of the international students orientation events and got a tour of the important locations of the city (including King's College, the oldest building in Cambridge, the lab where Watson and Crick discovered the double helix structure of DNA, and some of the other Colleges). The best part of my day was when the group went punting on the River Cam (which was briefly pictured in the earlier post). Cambridge is absolutely gorgeous when viewed from the river. I even made some friends today! It's pretty cool meeting people from all over the world, which is definitely something you don't get at Caltech.

There's a mirror on my way down the stairs, and the only full length mirror I have access to. Its pretty terrible when I realize I want to change my outfit and then have to run up two flights of stairs to do that. You can see one of the buildings from yesterday's post through the window:

 The architecture within St. John's is absolutely gorgeous. This is one of the walkways that you'll see a picture of when I'm punting later in the post:

This is called the Bridge of Sighs, also within St. John's. It connects the two parts of St. John's that are separated by the River Cam.:

 These are some of the other living accommodations within St. John's:

Here we have St. John's Chapel. Its beautiful (as is everything else, but I don't know how else to describe it). It reminds me of the Notre Dame Cathedral in Paris:

 Look my name is there on the resident list for my building (Cripps)!!:

This is on the punting tour we went on today. I didn't actually try punting (using the pole to the propel the boat), but I'll probably do that with some people from St. John's since we can rent out these boats there and possibly also tomorrow with the Caltech students at another college (Corpus Christi). Its also super easy to fall into the water... The girl next to me (Connie) is from Hong Kong:

 And remember the Bridge of Sighs? Here's what it looks like from the outside:

This is what one side of St. John's looks like from the outside. You can see the outside of the alley ways that I took a picture of earlier in this post. It feels like Hogwarts to me :) I'll take a picture of it from land at some point as well so I can get a better angle.

And these are the Cripps, which is the building I actually live in. Those giant windows are similar to the ones in my living room. Its not as pretty as the rest of the buildings in St. John's, but the rooms are spacious so its fine:

The rest of my day was pretty nice. Yifei (a Caltech student) invited me to go out to dinner with Conan (another Caltech student) and some of the international students from her college (Corpus Christi). Corpus has a lot more international students so they have a lot of orientation events planned whereas I haven't seen anyone in St. John's yet. And so I've been crashing their events. I got a tour of Corpus today and its absolutely gorgeous. I can't wait to upload pictures of the other colleges. I'd like to think that St. John's is the best, but I think King's College probably beats it. Cambridge is definitely known for that one. We went to a South African restaurant which had really good food and was surprisingly spicy. It was rather nice seeing some familiar faces even though I didn't really know either of them that well at Caltech. We also made plans to go travel around the United Kingdom and possibly Scotland as well, and so I look forward to those weekend trips :) But waking up at 7 am tomorrow for orientation will NOT be fun...