Yes I Am Alive!

Not a very faithful blogger, am I? So much has happened since February - suffice to say that the UK, Ireland and Croatia are very beautiful, but seriously there's no place like home. For whomever may be interested you are about to be subjected to installment one of my travel diary from our trip...

Hong Kong to Cambridge
20 May 2007
Well we've just had the last few days in Cambridge with Natty. The flight over was completely painless - flying in the day I think is the answer - arrive in the night or afternoon and just sleep, then tomorrow is another day! Probably the good seats had something to do with it as well.

Hong Kong was brilliant - we were very relaxed compared with the first time we visited and walked from Mong Kok down to the harbour and back about 4 times in the day and a half we were there. The smell of HK is unmistakable: cured seafood, liniment, spices and curdled milk all rolled into one. Walking in crowds of thousands of people is like being in a ballet, or swimming as part of a huge school of fish, and is strangely not unpleasant.

Cambridge on the other hand is an out of sync tangle of bikes, people, car, buses and the odd truck (lorry). The architecture is a stark contrast with that in HK as well - and it has completely blown us away. The college buildings in Cambridge range in age from 1000 to 1979 - almost a millennium, which is quite difficult for me to wrap my mind around. The buildings throughout the town are all very ornate and impressive as one would expect for this town with prestige to burn! Most of the colleges have been closed to visitors as it is exam time, and we peeked through the stone arch of one but were chased out by a very cranky porter (the man who sits in the office at the front).
We've been on day trips across the fen (a huge ancient wetland that was drained in the 1700's with help from Dutch engineers) to Ely whose massive cathedral is known as the 'ship of the fen' and ate lunch at a lovely pub aside a canal. Ric tells me it won pub of the year! Then we went to Newmarket and Natt and I shopped while Ric sat in another pub and wrote his diary. Yesterday we went off across the fen again to Bury Saint Edmonds - which was once an important religious centre with a huge Abbey with lots of Monks. The place got renamed Bury St Edmunds after poor old St Edmund got killed in 870 and his body was moved there in 903. The Abbey was destroyed by the townspeople in 1539 because they rebelled against the mean Abbot that lorded over the place. We went to the brilliant markets and then walked through the expansive grounds of the giant ruined Abbey, Ric was in his element. This is truly a pathetic history of the place. I just looked it up on the internet and a lot happens over a course of a few thousand years! That's all for now.