Back to Cambridge

I decided to stay in Europe an extra week and a half to do some traveling.  So after finishing up with school in Holland, I flew across the English Channel to Cambridge to stay with my sister, Diana, for a few days.  Since I had started my semester abroad in Cambridge, it seemed a good place to bring it to an end.  It was the middle of winter when I was in England before, and now the college campuses had green lawns and beautiful gardens.  This is the Great Court at Trinity.

She had made me a "Mormon tiramisù."  Our Mom invented the recipe--you soak the lady fingers in orange juice rather than coffee.  It is a marvelous dessert, and it was a complete surprise.  I was so happy to have a piece!

 On my first day there we went to see the gardens at Clare College.  They are typically English with painstakingly mowed lawns and hedges of flowers.

It seemed to me like they had color-coded the flower beds so that there were sections of yellow, red, and blue.  I saw a gardener carefully edging the lawn with shears to make sure that there wasn't a blade of grass out of place!

They must mow the grass in different directions to create these stripes.  Other lawns were in a checkerboard pattern.

Here are some more pictures of the flowers.

Deep blue delphiniums.

One of the gardens had a pond with lily pads.  I'm pretty proud of this picture.  It looks like it could be the cover for a CD of Impressionist music or something, doesn't it?!

Cambridge is such an incredible place.  There are students who actually live in this house--either that or maybe professors have their offices here.

I went to King's College to hear the choir sing evensong.  I loved going to evensong when I was in Cambridge before, but the days were much shorter in the winter, and so I never got to see sunlight shining through the stained glass in the chapel.  This time, I got to listen to the choir while looking at sixteenth-century windows depicting the final days in the Lord's life.  It was very moving.  Afterwards, Diana and I went to dinner at a Chinese noodle restaurant.