Punting and Resolutions

So, this weekend we had probably the nicest day we've had since I got here almost two weeks ago.  Saturday was sunny and beautiful and I jumped at the chance to explore some of the older colleges a bit more.  I'm still not sure what the rules are for university students to visit other colleges, so I am taking it as my rule that if no one stops me, I'll go wherever I want and it was fun to just wander through the gothic halls of Kings, Trinity, Clare, St. Johns, and other gorgeous old colleges.

In the afternoon on Saturday, the Churchill college MCR (basically the grad student society) organized a trip to go punting on the Cam.  As I'm sure you all read my link from the last post, you already know that punting is where you go on the river with a really shallow boat and one person uses a huge pole to both propel you forward and steer.  There are guys who give professional punting tours, complete with historical facts about all of the colleges (many of them totally bogus).  However, we did not have that, so we had to punt ourselves.  This turned out to be really great fun, and yield many pictures (some slightly embarrassing).  Here are some of them:

      

      

So these pictures are of me punting, the "Mathematical Bridge" (apparently designed so that it doesn't need to be held together by nails, even though it is...), and two other buildings which I don't remember what they are.  I think the one on the left belongs to Trinity and the bridges on the right are from St. John's.

On the punting outing, listening to the punters pedal their made-up history, I realized that I actually wanted to know stuff about these colleges, my own but also all of the other ones.  When I was in Italy, I really liked that I had all of this information to put on here, about all of the museums and the art.  So I'm going to try and do a post on each of the colleges here.  Hopefully these posts will be accompanied by me actually having done something at each of the colleges, but there are 31 of them, so that might not happen. It is so nice to have friends at a bunch of different colleges through the Gates, so hopefully I'll be able to impose on them to show me the fun things to do at each college.  I bought a little book that has short histories of each college yesterday, so I think that I'm well on my way to making this resolution a reality.  Although, we'll see what happens when work starts up again...