Highest place in Cambridge
The other day I’ve been in the highest (land) place in Cambridge: the Castle Hill. It took me a while to climb there… as long as… ehem, 1 min? C’mon, this is not serious. Probably you’ll think I’m joking, but nope. The Castle Mound is what remains of that epoch around XI century, when the Cam river had to be carefully controlled by the Normand. The castle on top of the Mound was lost, as many of it’s stones were used to assemble some of the local houses, Magdalene College, Great St Mary’s and Sawston Hall. More information on the Castle here.
Finally, as a proof of the dizziness of the height of this place, a panorama of Cambridge City. Some of the features that can be observed are St. Gile’s Church roof, the King’s Chapel behind, the Trinity Tower, the Cambridge University Library, a piece of the Cambridgeshire County Council… and the curry restaurant Cocoon!
English humor…?
It seems that in Cambridge both doctors and disabled people have same privileges regarding parking places… I wonder if this is a kind of English humor regarding the mental state of someone who succeeded in getting a doctorate…
Cotsworlds. The purest English loveliness.
Description of Cotsworlds?
Uncountable tea rooms and tiny toy-like-size houses. Flowers. Small rivers furrowed by ducks. Green meadows being eaten by adorable sheeps, cows and horses. Pubs and inns offering “real ale”. Shops that sell all kind of UK flags and Queen related merchandise. The most bizarre thing I’ve seen is this Waving Solar Queen. Kinda start regretting not having bought it. Lol.
In summary: pure loveliness.
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Grantchester, a nice surprise
Cambridge is lovely dear. Of course it is. However, recently I discovered another source of loveliness really close. As close as 2.5 km on a footpath, which takes around 30 min walking. Is the nearby town of Grantchester. The footpath by the riverside is spread with brown cows, people suffering punting on their boats (specially during the improbable combination of weekend + good weather), sheep, dogs, children and other kind of living creatures.
At the end of the path, there is an open air cafe, which allows you to take a rest and recover the burnt calories by grabbing a nice piece of cake. Another options (+18) are some of the pubs, which also look great specially if the weather is good… Well, I must admit that all England must be nice and lovely if the weather is good. The issue is that this is a real stroke of luck.
One of the pubs that specially took my breath out is… the Unicorn! I wonder if the owner’s name is Charlie.
Finally some pictures. I’ll add some more in the future, as I plan to get back several times 
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Neal Stephenson’s Royal Society
Today I’m extremely happy. And so was yesterday, and the day before and so on. Eventually, every day I woke up I still can’t believe my good luck… Anyway, this post is not aimed to speak about happiness, maybe any other day that I feel specially twee. The thing is that I started to be kinda excited since last Friday afternoon: I registered for an event related to my topic of research (Transient Sky with Gaia) with lots of relevant people presenting their work in there. Amazing! But getting back to my topic, this event were going to be held in… The Royal Society of London!!!
Maybe for those of you who are not really into science or simply those who’ve never read the Neal Stephenson’s “Baroque Cycle” it may sound like WTF/WTH. Well, may be. Then this post is going to be quite meaningless for you, unless you decide to sort yourself out and get these thick 3 books right now. It’s about History Fiction. Similar to SciFi, but in the past. Real historical events mixed with imaginary and amusing situations. It may sound like cheap marketing campaign, but I may admit that some years after having read them, I can appreciate what Neal did for us.
So then, what’s the point? These books describe the status and evolution of European society in 17th and 18th centuries. Among that events, the Royal Society plays an important role, as well it’s very initial members, such as John Wilkins, Robert Hooke, Sir Christopher Wren or Isaac Newton. It explains the type of experiments that they held at that epoch, the instrumentation they used / invented and comments on the relevance of their work.
What is still in place after that epoch? Well, the actual location of The Royal Society is not the original one, so it has been reallocated several times, but it still keeps some portraits and original work done by the society’s members… and maybe any other little treasure. Here I present a list of things that I could identify from the books:
- Member’s portraits, such as Newton’s one.
- John Wilkins book on philosophical language: An Essay towards a Real Character and a Philosophical Language
- Natural and Political Observations Made upon the Bills of Mortality book written by John Graunt, which is the first mortality statistics in the city of London.
- AND a strange box with an extremly complex locking system… which was used at that epoch to keep extremely valuable items! The one who’ve read the books probably already know what I’m talking about
I’m sure that there are may other things that I missed, but at least I’m happy to have identified some of them ^^
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- Royal Society Entrance
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- John Wilkins portrait
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- Newton & me
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- John Graunt book
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- John Wilkins book
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- Locked box
Britishification
I’m starting to get worried. I think that after 4 months I start to feel the symptoms:
- Baking cakes nearly every week.
- Cook curry chicken.
- Drink tea all day long and stop complaining about the quality of the British coffee.
- Do shopping when I go to Spain, because the prices are… so cheap!!!
- Compulsively say “That’s lovely dear!”. In any context.
A trip to London
Finally I managed to find a combination of nice weather and spare time to go to London. Free museums, alternative people, the Tube… a nice chance to change the atmosphere from time to time.
Here some pictures.
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Fourth Studio Session
Well, finally I managed to rewind some time back and add another post about the photography lessons I took during the last studio course. This fourth one is the continuation on the “Glamour” illumination, having the following configuration:
- White background + two symmetric backlights with 2f difference regarding the main light to create a completely white background.
- OR
- Black background + 1 background light to create a circular halo.
- Two symmetrically located umbrellas in front – side of the model. One of them is the main light and the other, which is usually 1 or 2f fainter, is the filling light. Diffuse light is used to create some interesting soft shadows: in the face, the collarbone, the arms, etc.
- A Rayman Rabbit and other accessories to create funny situations
Finally some pictures from this amusing session.
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Chilean adventure
After spending more than 30h traveling to get to Punta Arenas, you find yourself in a totally different environment. At the beginning, in the bus to Puerto Natales the landscape was just infinite land under deep blue sky. Sometimes a guanacos, cows and horses appeared along the road.
The next step was the Natural Parc of Torres del Paine. Impressive. What can I say. Wild weather, wild mountain and completely human-dominated and expensive refugees. However, The physical (5 days hiking through the W circuit) and economical pain had a reward each time I looked around me. The landscape was simply amazing. The fanciful shapes of Torres kinda remind me our catalan mountain Montserrat. Same steep shapes, but higher, colder and covered by an eternal white blanket.
Last pictures belong to the city of Valparaíso, which seems an ant’s nest of small colorful houses, tiny cafes and graffiti walls.
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Almost Spring in Cambridge
After a couple of really cold weeks, it seems that finally Spring has (almost) arrived to Cambridge. Sunny weekends, punt boats going up and down, the first flowers… It seems that it’s time to take a deep breath and start enjoying what is about to come…
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