Art, history come to life at Cambridge

  Photo courtesy of Jennifer Reichert Cambridge University
students sit by the River Cam while watching the punters. The river
is a popular evening hangout spot for students.

By Jennifer Reichert
Daily Bruin Contributor

Our bus began to jiggle as the street below us became a
cobblestone road. I looked out the window at the brick row houses
with white picket fences, smooth stone buildings and small
brass-plated signs that said things like “Department of Art
and Architecture, Cambridge University.”

My excitement built up so much I thought I would jump out, but I
was still disoriented because we were driving on the left side of
the road.

The bus dropped us off in front of a huge, arched wooden door
surrounded by large, fortress-like stone walls. I was still looking
for the campus because I did not know yet that Cambridge University
is composed of roughly 32 colleges throughout the town, each one
closed off by an entrance with a Porter’s Lodge.

I walked through the doorway and entered into history. A sign
greeted me which read, “Pembroke College, built in
1347.” A grassy courtyard, enclosed by tall brick walls with
long, arched, curtained windows, spread out before me.

The Old Library, with its dark, wood-paneled walls and ornate
white ceiling carved with images of fruit baskets and books, became
the room where I studied Shakespeare from a Cambridge tutor (tutors
are known as fellows until they earn the title of professor). It
was also the old college chapel at one time and smelled old and
musty with history.

Typically at Cambridge University, students are assigned a
private tutor whom they work with one-on-one or two-on-one. Then
they go to their actual departments of study, scattered throughout
the town, to receive their lectures. Each college contains
fellows’ rooms for tutoring sessions, a library, a chapel,
dorms, dining facilities and a campus pub.

My art and architecture professor, an elderly, eccentric man
with a goofy smile and animated personality, would get very excited
and run out the door while we quickly followed him to the museum
across the street. He would run up the stairs until we reached
the painting of the day to study, perhaps a Van Dyck
painting. The duration of class was spent analyzing the
original work.

  Photo courtesy of Jennifer Reichert Pembroke College is
one of 32 that Cambridge University is composed of. These colleges
are spread throughout the town. He applauded every guess we made as
to the meaning of the painting and bowed or cheered when we were
correct.

At night, town residents gather on the bovine- and
alcohol-scented river bank after getting a pint of beer at a pub
called the Mill, a quaint two-story white and green building with
pink flowers lining the windows.

On one of the first nights in the UK, our professors invited us
to a pub and bought us all beers.

Usually, several hundred students sit out on the grass among the
cows with open glasses of alcohol, which is legal in England.

Students buy a glass of beer from the “junior
parlour,” the college pub, because it is cheap, and drink it
while walking to the clubs at night. Students drink alcohol and eat
berries on the grass at their college in the middle of the day.

Students talk and drink while sitting under weeping willow
trees, watching the night punters.

Punting, which resembles a gondola ride, is a popular activity
in Cambridge which involves a type of flatboat with a long stick
that one uses to push it down the river Cam.

Punters travel under the picturesque vine-covered stone bridges,
past the majestic neoclassical and Gothic-designed colleges which
come up to the edge of the river. The buildings have small river
doors where supplies used to be received into the colleges by
water.

The weeks I spent in Cambridge were ones filled with awe over
the architecture, history and beauty of the place. But in the end,
I was happy to return home to Westwood.