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The next few days were a bit scattered. Becky made a quick one day trip up to Birmingham to give Mark and Abigail a little break as they both were not feeling well, and Jamie was doing great. She ran up on Sunday and came back on Monday. I just spent time walking around Kensington and working in our room. I also went out Sunday night with some of the students and we had fun participating in a trivia night at a local pub. We did really well coming in second place. Of course, it is not important that there were only three teams.
On Tuesday I have my class and had my students in the parlor early so we could head out to visit the Churchill War Rooms. Everyone was very excited. For some reason I just felt that I should pull up the tickets before we headed out and it was a good thing I did because it was then that I noticed that the tickets that I had bought were for the following Tuesday. Oh well. I knew that we could not have class in the boring Daniel House, so we all headed off to one of the many coffee shops nearby. The six of us crowded around a table and had some great discussions around what London would have been like for 20-year-olds in 1940 when the bombs started dropping. It was a little sobering for the students to really think about all that. It was a great time, and I have to say that a napkin can make an amazing whiteboard. I was also able to explain truth tables of an “and”, “or”, and “not” gate in the middle of a coffee shop.
The next day the two students taking a Biblical Foundations class were traveling to Cambridge to meet their professor and tour the city. Becky and I were able to join with Rylan and Izzy on their adventure. Both Becky and I had been to Cambridge but thought it would be good to have some folks guide us around. We took off in the morning and left from the Kings Cross station. This station is well known by some and if you look at the pictures you can see why people are lining up near the wall at this station.
Once we traveled out to Cambridge, we met up Rylan and Izzy’s professor, Jonny Grant. He is from New Zeeland and is going to be working on his PHD at Cambridge. He has already been a lawyer and practiced in London about 10 years ago but has just moved his family back to the UK to study. The day was only in the 30’s and very windy. He met us at the station and since we were hungry, we headed off to a pub to get some lunch. We went to the famous Eagle Pub and had a nice warm lunch and great conversation. If anyone has been reading all these blog posts, you may have picked up that pubs are just a way of life here in the UK. They are nothing like a bar, but really just a place to go and have something to eat and drink and to socialize. All the students and Becky and I have really come to enjoy pubs and the relaxed atmosphere they provide.
After lunch Jonny took us over to the Great St. Mary’s church which has a very narrow stone staircase of 123 steps to the top of the church tower. There are great views from up top, but the stairwell is very tiny and the door into it very short. We enjoyed the view and even if the day was a bit cloudy, it was not too wet or too overcast. The church also houses one of the first editions of the King James Bible printed in 1611. So amazing to see this history up close. Zoom in and read the plaque for the story of the bible and where it was found.
Jonny also took us by the university library, but unfortunately, we missed the open public times to go in by about 5 minutes. Still the building grounds and the cam river flowing by were so very nice.
Then we went to The Church of the Holy Sepulcher, generally known as The Round Church and met up with our guide. The church was built around 1130. We are always amazed at how old so many of the buildings, streets, and cities are that we are visiting. You just cannot go far without running into some place that is around 1,000 years old and is heaped in history. This particular church is not actually used as a place of worship due to its size but is a museum and a Christian study center for Cambridge students. We even met some students who had taken previous Samford groups on tours.
Our guide for the afternoon was an older gentleman that was so very nice, but he was a character. We were not the only people in the tour, but he took us around different locations around the center of Cambridge. Our guide was a Christian gentleman of the church and one of the goals of the tour was connecting how Christianity and Cambridge University worked together and have had so many impacts on so many things in the world of today. So many great people of history passed through Cambridge. One place our guide took us to was, the church where CS Lewis worshipped, and lived, and working towards at the end of his life after his time in Oxford. The chapel was very small but was a very nice church in at Magdalene College. He also pointed out the room that Lewis lived while working in Cambridge till he finished his career.
We finished the tour by stopping by some other sites and ending at Emmanuel College Chapel. Here is a quote from Wikipedia about this college and the people who passed through it, and all the influence on life in the US. “Emmanuel graduates were prominently involved in the settling of British colonies in North America. Of the first 100 university graduates in New England, one third were graduates of Emmanuel. Harvard University, the first college in the United States, was organized on the model of Emmanuel as it was then run. Harvard is named for John Harvard (BA, 1632), an Emmanuel graduate.”
After the tour and some hot drinks, the four of us boarded our train back to London. It was a good day, though very cold. The warm train ride home was very, very crowded and we all got separated, but we all made it back to the Daniel House. Just another day romping through amazing world history.
