Webbready

The following excerpt chronicles my admittedly vague impressions of Cambridge University. Unfortunately, the following entry also contains a heightened amount of tense changes and assorted errors in writing. I present them in tact, out of shame and in penance.

January 21, 2000

…Today was a sunny day, a day that I need the umbrella I carried with me in no fashion whatsoever. This also meant that it was only slightly chilly in sun, but frigid in the shade. After the initial preparations the group was led by a tour guide by the name of Kitty, who explained many important details to us. The first of these details was the way colleges worked in the United Kingdom. One does not apply to a university in hopes of acceptance. Instead, one simply applies to a college and lists the schools where one wants to attend. If one is accepted by a college, the person will go there and will have a place to stay. Lectures are public and free, but they are not the main source of academic gain. Instead, one must write a weekly paper for a private tutor, who determines if a student will graduate or not. Also, a student will get together with other students of the same course of study in order to learn more.

As it turns out there is no central location to Cambridge University. Instead the individual colleges that make up Cambridge are scattered all throughout the town. The first of the colleges we visited was the King’s College, and we spent a large amount of time inside the chapel. The stained glass windows were a subject of great interest. Each window had two parts, an upper half and a lower half. The upper of the window portrayed a story from the Old Testament of the Bible and the lower half showed a corresponding from the New Testament. In many of these windows, which were all still made of the original glass, there were none-too-subtle hints that Henry VIII had a very large amount of input in the Chapel. His influence was seen everywhere in the chapel, including the walls which bore his emblem to the screen with his initials on it.

Another breathtakingly beautiful aspect of this chapel was the magnificent roof which had a fan-shaped pattern along the ceiling. Such detail is simply incredible. As a group, we were taken behind the screen into the inner portion of the sanctuary. In the middle was a painting which at one time was the most expensive painting in the world. On the walls, there was graffiti from an unknown source, although it was speculated that the men of Oliver Cromwell’s army did that. The most wonderful part of the chapel was none of the above, but the designs on the stained windows. Unlike the sides of the glass on the end of the church, these contained scenes of the Crucifixion of Christ.

We soon left the Chapel and while we visited several other sites, none gave the lasting impression that King’s College Chapel did. That’s not to indicate that individual pieces of information such as the story of how a statue of Henry VIII came about holding a chair leg rather than a scepter. Nor did I forget that Stephen Hawking is a fellow of Cambridge. I was merely so overwhelmed by the beauty of the chapel that to recall anything else is very difficult at this moment.