How I Spent my Summer Vacation, part 4: Morristown student Nayna Shah goes punting in Cambridge, sizes up London Bridge, and gives Harrod’s a whirl

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Summer is vacation time, and it’s fun to vacation vicariously through our contributors. Here’s the fourth entry from Morristown High School student Nayna Shah. Today, she takes us to the hallowed halls of Cambridge University in England, as she recounts her recent European tour with the bell choir of the Morris Plains Presbyterian Church. You can read Nayna’s prior entries here.

Day 10

Saturday, July 3, 2010

Cheerio from Cambridge!  I felt like a scholar today as we explored the campus of Cambridge University.  We took a punting tour along the shallow man- made river surrounding the property.

Going punting is similar to paddle boating, except the boat is flat, wide, and wooden, and instead of oars, one person stands at the back with a pointed metal pole and pushes off the ground.  About 12 people can fit in one boat, and each of us tried using the pole to push the other 11.  It was definitely much harder than it looked (especially the balancing part!)  Luckily, we had a tour guide, who was a Cambridge student, to steer the boat and teach us about the school.

Not your average college tour! Photo by Nayna Shah

The property is collectively called Cambridge University, but is actually made up of 31 different colleges, 10 of which we saw on our punting tour.

King’s College and Trinity College are the most expensive colleges to attend, however our tour guide told us annual tuition is 6,000 pounds.  This is equivalent to just under $12,000– practically a Walmart Rollback price, in comparison to the $50,000 price tag for one year of school at Princeton University.

Our tour guide also told us that Cambridge and Oxford only have serious rivalries in crew races and on the cricket pitch.

We took a two-hour walking tour around other parts of campus with a different tour guide.  Soon we realized that $12,000 is an amazing price for attending school in palace-like buildings.

The school buildings of Cambridge had manicured lawns and columns with ivory trim all around.  Our guide showed us the laboratory where Rosalind Franklin shared her photos of DNA with George Watson and Francis Crick,

And to your right, the math wing... Photo by Nayna Shah

and where the first atom was split.  Our guide made sure to stress that the first atom bomb was not created here, just the first splitting of the atom.

I picked up some English slang (many words that I am familiar with from Harry Potter) including the adverb “bloody” and the adjective “spiffing.”

My favorite is the word that makes English teenagers sound so sophisticated: Instead of “awesome” or “sick” they say “brilliant.”

Sometimes you can make a double whammy with “bloody brilliant!”  We tried our new vocabulary out on each other as we got back on the bus to drive two hours south to Hayes.

On the way down, I smiled every time we passed a red telephone booth. (We have GOT to get those in the States!)

We also passed about a dozen “TO LET” signs, which I mistakenly read as “TOILET” each time we passed.  We all laughed at the silly English who kept forgetting their “I’s” until a chaperone told us that “to let” actually means “renting.”  Oops!

Must have forgotten the I! Photo by Nayna Shah

Day 11

Sunday, July 4, 2010

Happy Independence Day, America!  Never in my life have I ever imagined I’d be in England on the 4th of July.  Oh, the irony!  We arrived last night in Hayes, a small town that actually reminds me very much of my hometown, Morris Plains.  Everything is in walking distance, most of the land is flat, there is a train station in the middle of town, and there is one main road with a grocery store and a clothes store.

I am staying with two ringers my age in the home of Gordon and Barbara, an older couple whose grandchildren live two minutes from their house.  Last night, we met their granddaughter, Freya, and went for walk with her and her dog, Oscar.

For most of the walk, we were in a forest with lots of tall grass and bushes.  My friends and I were in shorts and flip-flops and hopped around like kangaroos for fear of attracting ticks.  Gordon, Barbara, and Freya turned around and gave us some of the most confused looks I have ever seen, before explaining that ticks don’t exist in England.  The walk was so much more relaxing after that!

Welcome to London!! Photo by Nayna Shah

This morning we rang at the church service at St. Mary’s the Virgin Church in Hayes before taking the train into Trafalgar Square in London!  I was practically bouncing up and down in my seat on the train out of sheer excitement to see the world famous city.

We felt it was almost compulsory to take the extreme tourist route, so we piled on to a red double-decker bus with an open top to take an introductory tour of London.  We briefly passed Big Ben and the Parliament building, St. Paul’s Cathedral, and the Tower of London, all sights we were promised we would thoroughly tour in the days to come.

Just a slight difference from New York City... Photo by Nayna Shah

Just one look at my map and I knew London was HUGE! There was no way we would get to every incredible sight in the city, but I knew we would try to see as many as possible.

London looked like New York City: There were lots of buses (except these were red and double-decker), lots of people (except with English accents), wide roads (except with more BMWs) and lots of apartments and skyscrapers.

The interesting thing about many of the buildings was they looked like the monuments of Washington, DC, or the schools in Cambridge.  They had that old, official, government, almost- Victorian, look to them.  Of course this just makes for a more sophisticated look overall. (As if the English need to be any more sophisticated!)

We took a ferry along the Thames River and passed under the London Bridge and the Tower Bridge.

Even I was a little confused because for having such a well known name, the London Bridge isn’t much to look at.  It looks like, well, a bridge.  Tower Bridge, on the other hand, looks like there are towers on top of the bridge, with blue suspension structures connecting each of them.

Tower Bridge is falling down, falling down, falling down. Photo by Nayna Shah

Our last activity of the evening (and definitely the most exciting) was our half an hour on the London Eye.  The

Not your ordinary Ferris wheel. Photo by Nayna Shah

London Eye is essentially an over-sized Ferris wheel that moves so slowly you can’t even see it.  Instead of sitting in a little swinging cart, you sit in an enclosed glass pod that can hold up to 25 people.

The Eye overlooks all of London and when you finally get to the top, the view is stunning.  I took so many pictures I had a difficult time even deciding which ones to include in this blog!

Day 12

Monday, July 5, 2010

Today was undoubtedly our exercise day of the vacation.  If only you could get frequent flyer miles for walking!  We would have really struck it rich!

The train tickets we purchase every morning are also valid on the red double-deckers as well as the London tube (the subway).

Unfortunately, the sights we want to see are too close together to take a train or bus, but just close enough to walk.  It could have been worse though.  We have been getting so lucky with the weather; it hasn’t once rained in the week and a half that we’ve been here.  We’ve had constant sunshine and warm temperatures, and even our host families have said we are experiencing the UK’s best summer weather to date.  I guess there aren’t any hard feelings about the 4th of July after all!

The Queen's "secret service" are a little more colorful. Photo by Nayna Shah

We started our morning close to Buckingham Palace to watch the Horse Guards Parade. This is like a “changing of the guards” ceremony done by the mounted cavalry troopers that guard Buckingham Palace and St. James’s Palace.

We walked past Downing Street, where the Prime Minister resides, and then past Westminster Abbey and the English Courts of Justice.

While we searched for a place to eat lunch, I noticed that London was similar to New York in two other ways: 1) There are so many different restaurants, it’s like the world’s cultures are all contained in one city and 2) No matter how many different types of people there are in the city, one common thing unites them: Cigarettes.

We decided to spend a few hours in Harrod’s and eat lunch in its food court.  From the outside, Harrod’s looks like a flattened version of the Plaza Hotel with hundreds of world flags and green awnings reading: Harrod’s.

We visited in the daytime, but I almost wished we could have gone at night, because I have seen some really terrific pictures of Harrod’s lit up at night.  Lit up or not lit up, one step inside and I knew “food court” was an understatement.  Harrod’s was a six story department store with a half-floor dedicated to food– all kinds of food and lots of it!  Even walls and walls of teas and chocolates.  I’m pretty sure there was enough food in there to feed London!

I guess the English just don't do Macy's. Photo by Nayna Shah

After buying and eating our expensive but delicious food, we walked around the Gucci- and Gabbana- filled floors

Ah yes. There are even uniformed door-men. Photo by Erica Rossetti.

of handbags and dresses.

After two hours, we had seen it all!  From the Ralph Lauren bed spreads, to an F.A.O. Schwarz-worthy toy floor, to the Juicy Couture dog collars and guinea pig coats.  (Yes, that last one was not a joke.)

No words can even describe what was in there: Hovercrafts, crystal studded faucets, $200 dog collars, Stilettos made out of chocolate.  Everything and anything possible, you could find it at Harrod’s.

Our final stop was Buckingham Palace, a white stone version of our very own White House, but with a UK flag on top, gold-trimmed gates along the perimeter, and London bobbies (police) and yeomen (guys in the red with the big black fuzzy hats on) surrounding the outside.  We left the home of the queen and returned to Hayes in time for our 7 pm concert and dinner with our host families.

Buckingham Palace. Photo by Nayna Shah
Big Ben and the Parliament Building from the London Eye. Photo by Nayna Shah
Waving to our neighbors at the tippity top of the Eye. Photo by Nayna Shah

1 COMMENT

  1. Nayna, I loved the above and hoped you really enjoyed your vacation; sorry to have to correct a couple of points of the detail: the late Rosalind Franklin didn’t ever work at the Cavendish Laboratory, Cambridge and it is a moot point as to whether she really wanted to show her helical images of DNA to Crick and Watson (that’s James, not ‘George’ by the way), but she did give her best image to Raymond Gosling, who gave to Maurice Wilkins, who showed it to Watson.

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