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Published: August 18th 2023
No Entry to Cambridge
-Piprey on wheels
Aug 2023
We, 3 friends decided to drive down to
Cambridge to enjoy a Saturday summer holiday. Getting up at 5.30 am, I prepared some sandwiches and had a nice cup of tea. My friends came around and drove through M25 to reach in less than
2 hours (90 kms north of London) and found free parking!
The Cambridge houses were a
paradise of flowers. We clicked photos as we went along. We probably visited all the charity shops in the town.
Being a
university town, it has a very well-educated population which probably shows in the enormous number of
bookstores everywhere. I bought a second handbook on London in 1700. In the
intellectual city of Cambridge, you discover London 😊
A diverse range of cuisines including
organic and vegan options catering to Asians, Africans and others must make foreign students feel at home.
Cambridge cluster has many offices of pharmaceuticals, biosciences, software and high technology companies.
Bicycles used by people as eco-friendly, cheap mode of transport and the general tidiness of the city were impressive.
We had expensive and hence, lovely coffee and almond croissant at an Artisan coffee shop. Croissant cost 3.80 Euro. The customer service was
polite, helpful and friendly - very British untouched by 'cannot be bothered attitude'' of many of the London coffee shops which match
the city's gloomy weather 😉
For lunch, I ate an aubergine burger and fritters with a lemonade from a Spanish food store in the
Saturday market. My friends tried Paella and African chicken rice dish. Visited the
Museum of Anthropology which had interesting information on
bronze age settlements of Cambridgeshire. There was a
craft’s bazaar in the town center.
We wanted to do
punting which is a simple Gondola like boat with a thin rod to steer it. The going rate is 12 passenger boat cost 240 GBP for 45 mins or 25 GBP per head steered by a clumsy student in most cases. Many of the
boats bumped into each other and
got stuck among the low lying willows. We walked up to the gates to the colleges but all were guarded or locked and closed to public. From the main road, you could probably enter with an entrance ticket. As good as closed.
Still, I overheard a lovely old English guide speak about the room of present King Charles and his bodyguard in Trinity college. It seems the bodyguard scored academically better than the king which was apparently because he was only hard working 😉
The river was full of punts- narrow, wooden boats which in early days used to be pulled by horses. Yes, the horses used to run on raised ground in the middle of the river to pull the boats! Cambridge was a major trading center.
We sat on the grass and waved at the passengers in the boats, likely to be on all their photos with the Trinity college in the background 😊.
We ate some
ice-cream and my friends had some beer in an almost empty pub because everyone was outside. After a gorgeous day, when we were half-way to the car,
we experienced typical English weather (it started to rain)
Out came my Made in China umbrella and saved us three British women from the onslaught of disastrous English weather.
We had a delightful picnic in the car. British egg and Polish ham sandwiches, salami, cheese, olives, tomatoes, tangerines and watermelons. Herbal tea with honey. There was no room for dinner. It was a couple of hours of driving before we reached home.
The college buildings look grand. Cambridge is a lovely place for a day trip but the punting is just exorbitantly expensive. Isn’t anyone regulating the fares when they rip off tourists in broad daylight? Closing the universities to the public almost seemed wrong when thousands of visitors come to admire it.
With
no entry to Cambridge colleges, it was a nice summer picnic in the car for all of us 😊
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