Cambridge diary 1

Seriously, I've not been to many places yet in Cambridge. Mainly, because the weather is friggin cold and I was busy with a lot of registrations. In Cambridge, you have one registration with your college and another one with your dept. They work independently. You have two different e-mails and you have three different libaries (dept., college and central). It just makes the whole thing very bureaucratic.

My room, as some of you back at home already know, is very small. It's my main complain here. It's the size of the maid's room back in my old house in Malaysia. It's exactly that size. And worse, coz at least the maid room has a en-suite bathroom. I had to share.

My room is next to the kitchen and the dining hall. So you can imagine the amount of privacy I have.



They gave me 1 bed, 1 table, 1 wardrobe, 2 cabinets and 2 chairs. When I put all of it inside my room, there's virtually no space left for my to walk. I have to literally climb to reach my bed. So I had to throw one chair out to the dining hall and stack the cabinets on top of each other. Also, the cabinets have to lie against my bed, rendering all the drawers useless except for the top drawer.



Nothing looks good in this room...except me in the morning.



And me again in the night.


Engineering dept. is not far from where I stay. But my research center, called C.A.P.E. is about 3 miles away. Along the way there, I took some pictures of Cambridge using my new SonyEricsson C905 .



This phone from SonyEricsson comes with a camera so powerful that it outperforms my Sony cybershot camera I bought 4 years ago.

Here are some of the pictures I took along the way to my research center using this camera phone.

(bridge over River Cam)

(the field just right outside my Residential College)

The research center is at West Cambridge. A lot of other research centers are at this site along with C.A.P.E. Among them is the famous Cavendish Laboratory, which produces virtually all the famous people we read on our secondary school Physics textbook. (In the early 20th century, this is where electrons were discovered.) It's really quite a nice looking place and it looks more like a office building and commercial center than a university really.


(the entrance to C.A.P.E.)

but just right opposite this building, there are 2 horses.


They belong to the veterinary dept. which is across the field. Talk about weird combos.

And they are right, when they say there are more bicycles than cars. Because I can't see much of a car park at the research center near West Cambridge, but I saw this 'bicycle' park (and it's not the only one).
Everyone rides.

Seeing so many bicycles, I can't help but to recall a dirty joke from the movie Austin Powers, "She's like the village bicyle. Everyone's had a ride." I hope I get to ride sometime.

p/s: my parents sometime read my blog and I think they always believe that I'm 'clean'. So I hope they won't understand the joke in the last paragrah. =P