Tuesday was the first day of classes, and I have to admit it was rather anticlimactic.
It was such a lovely morning--clear blue skies that I'm beginning to realize are a rarity here--that I decided to go for a walk before class with the local waterfowl.
Honestly, though, it's still strange to me that places like these even exist.
My philosophy professor showed up to lecture in a three-piece suit with a massive handkerchief exploding from his breast pocket. We talked some out in the hall about my research, and he surprised me by mentioning that he, too, had dabbled in musical relations, but with philosophy and not psychology. This, in turn, led to a discussion of Elgar's Cello Concerto, during which I, predictably, asked if he'd studied differences between individual performances and he replied that no, he'd focused less on the performance aspect and more on the composer's use of the score as a means of communication.
Interesting.
My psycholinguistics professor, on the other hand, was disappointingly American and fairly conventional. I can't complain about conventional, but I was looking through my scheduled readings, and as this is a four-week course, I get the feeling that I'll be unwillingly burning the midnight oil for weeks to come.
After class, the sun had belatedly decided to go on holiday (as they say here), and, of course, one can't simply have cloudy days in Cambridge. With clouds come rain.
I recalled my earlier conversation with the housekeeper:
"It looks like it'll be a scorcher today," she said.
"Is it?" I replied, wondering if I'd ever before worn jeans and a down jacket during the month of June, "That'll be nice."
In my dreams.
By Californian standards, this rain rated as a six or seven on a ten-point scale of raininess, but by Cambridge standards, I'm pretty sure it was a fairly standard two or three.
Anyhow, I'd decided to trek to Maplin (the closest American equivalent I can think of is a Radio Shack or a very small Best Buy) to pick up an ethernet cable because the wi-fi in centuries-old Bodley's Court (which was once inhabited by Alan freaking Turing) is absolute crap. After scrounging around and eavesdropping on the employees alternately cursing Nigel Farage and Boris Johnson (Cambridge, in contrast to much of England, had steadfastly voted Remain), I popped next door to Sainsbury's to pick up some more food.
The news stands told all.
Pile on a humiliating loss to Cinderella-Iceland in the Euros (with Wales still in it), and I think it's safe to say that the UK hasn't had the best of weeks.
It's a little difficult to get a handle on the political climate here specifically in Cambridge, what with all the tourists and the foreign everything-ness and the fact that I, like a newborn babe, have yet to sleep through the night, but there is an air of what I can only describe as uncertainty hovering over this university town. There haven't been any demonstrations that I've heard of (I can imagine if this were a campus like Berkeley, the story would be quite different), and hordes of people still showed up for evensong at 5:30 in the centuries-old chapel (which was not once inhabited by Alan freaking Turing) so the world still, however precariously, wobbles round.
I'm heading to London on Friday, though, and that will be a different matter entirely.
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