Better Late Than Never {Vol.1}.

So...

a while back i took a whirlwind trip of the UK.

Well, Cambridge, Dublin, and London.

(note, Dublin? Not part of the UK.)

(which I knew, but it still confuses me.)

And I promised for eons that I would write a post about it.

And since I have a few minutes

(and I finished a ROUGH rough draft of my thesis

and decided to reward myself)

I'm gonna tell you a little about it!

Up today: Cambridge

If you don't follow me on Twitter,

I'll catch you up a little on the backstory

I went to Cambridge to present a paper

at a conference I was invited to

(on my exact thesis topic, nonetheless!).

Needless to say,

I was SO nervous the whole time I was preparing for the trip.

THE people who wrote THE books in my field,

they were going to be there.

My external advisor/reader?

Yeah, he was there too

(and is also one of THE people).

It's the first conference I've attended,

let alone presented at!

What a way to start, no?

At Cambridge?

Anyway,

when I arrived at Heathrow

(via Munich from Budapest)

I made my way to the Underground

to King's Cross to get a ticket for the train to Cambridge.

For all you Harry Potter nerds out there like me,

my train left from Platform 9.

SO! CLOSE!

I still had hopes the train would get mixed up

and take me to Hogwarts instead.

But, to Cambridge I went.

The train trip was lovely,

The English countryside is beautiful.

When I got to Cambridge I hopped in a Taxi to take me to King's College.

And my taxi driver?

Most AWESOME dude ever.

He talked to me the whole way,

told me where to eat,

what to see,

and where to get the best pictures of King's

(though, I've decided it's impossible to get a bad picture of the place!)

He was hilarious, and I was laughing the whole trip!

The conference went well,

the people were lovely and SO helpful.

I didn't faint when I gave my paper,

and I didn't say anything stupid!

Go me!

They fed us constantly

tea, coffee, sandwiches,

dinners, desserts,

breakfast in the King's Dining Hall

(which really could have been in Hogwarts!)

It was amazing.

My room was in King's College Gardens,

which are incredibly beautiful,

and you can only get into them if you're a fellow or a guest

of the college, so it was a pretty awesome privilege.

I learned a lot about Cambridge University too.

As in there isn't really a "Cambridge University"

The University is essentially a collection of colleges

which act and function independently of the University system.

Cool, no? Oxford is exactly the same too.

So, Enough talk,

here's some pictures: