Whitechapel and Cambridge

Yesterday for class we went to an art museum in a part of London called Whitechapel, and also visited the Spital Fields Market. We stopped for coffee and tea before we went to see an exhibition at the Whitechapel Art Gallery. The place we got tea was called Giraffe and it was so delicious. Sidenote: I got tea instead of coffee! I'm trying new things :-)

This is a picture of part of the market place we went to.

This is a picture of me and Sam, one of the other girls on the program! Please note the cute tea pot :-)

Then today we went on a trip to Cambridge, it was so much fun! However I didn't go to bed last night until around 3:30 so waking up at 6:30 to catch a train was not super fun. But we did take the tube to catch our train from Kings Cross Station (Where platform 9 3/4 is for all you Harry Potter fans, but i didn't have time for a picture, don't worry though, I'll make sure to get one before I leave!). The train ride was about an hour from London to Cambridge and we took a bus into the city once we were there.

This is a picture of the train station from our platform!

We toured the Fitzwilliam Museum, which is by far the most beautiful museum I have ever seen in my life. It was so cool because they had so many famous paintings, by people like Monet, Picasso, Van Gogh and drawings by Leonardo Di Vinci, it was amazing!

This is a picture of the outside of the museum

This is the lobby of the museum (You weren't supposed to take pictures so I only have this one haha)

I don't know if any of you like art or not but I have had a much greater appreciation for it since I've been in London and it was seriously so cool. I sound like a nerd. Haha anyway, trust me, it was awesome. The lady who gave us the tour was actually the assistant director of the museum, which was cool, and after the tour was over we got lunch at the cafe with her husband who is a former Dean at Cambridge (Clare College). So after we ate lunch, he took us on a tour around part of Cambridge, including Clare College and it was absolutely beautiful. It literally looked like something out of a movie.

This is a picture of one of the other colleges close to Clare.

He showed us the chapel and the dining hall which looked like the one from Harry Potter.

I accidentally got the waiter in the picture haha, but this is part of the dining hall.

He also showed us how the recently changed the previous crypt of the chapel into a bar and student lounge haha. Kind of creepy because there is still an actual tomb down there still.

This is a picture of the old crypt, now bar and student lounge haha

After that we just walked around Cambridge for a little while and went inside some of the old churches and looked at all of the other colleges. (Cambridge University is basically made up of 31 smaller "colleges") Cambridge is such a beautiful town, I loved every minute of it! It was established in 1209 if that gives you any idea of how old it is and how much history there was there.

This is just one of the streets at Cambridge near Kings College

This is a picture on the campus at Clare College

Picture off of one of the bridges around campus

We took the train back to London and apparently the train is basically like a school bus in England because there were hundreds of kids coming home from school on the train. The train went through a little bit of countryside on the way back and the sun was setting and it was really pretty.

View out of my window on the way back to London

It was definitely a really long day but it was so much fun, needless to say I am exhausted! Hopefully I'll catch up on rest this weekend, I hope ya'll had a great week! I hear that Chapel Hill (and Charlotte too I think) are supposed to be getting a lot of snow! I'm sad I'm gonna miss it so take some pictures for me! Love you all very much!

"I always thank my God as I remember you in my prayers, because I hear about your faith in the Lord Jesus and your love for all the saints. I pray that you may be active in sharing your faith, so that you will have a full understanding of every good thing we have in Christ. Your love has given me great joy and encouragement, because you, brother, have refreshed the hearts of the saints." Philemon 1: 4-7