Weekend wrap-up

I was left in charge of today's blog entry, and when I complained that he'd left me with a rather uneventful day to report on, Philip encouraged me to fill in details on Saturday's trip to Cambridge. He left out some of our excursion, having gotten caught up on the price of petrol here...

Besides taking a walking tour of Cambridge, we also spent time in Kings College chapel. Because flash photography is not allowed inside, not many of my photos turned out very well, except for this one -- one of 26 sets of stained glass windows.


At the far end of the chapel is a spectacular painting by Peter Paul Rubens (one my personal favorites) entitled "Adoration of the Magi".

The remainder of our afternoon was spent at the Fitzwilliam Museum, which has a quite nice collection of Old Masters and Impressionists, sculpture, armor, and ceramics. We lingered over the illuminated manuscripts-- they are quite something.

As for yesterday (Sunday), we returned once again to Magdalen Road Church for their worship service. Later in the afternoon we met up with our Austrian friend, Alexander Lorenz for cream tea at the Grand Cafe on "the High" (what the locals call High Street). Alex was a graduate student in Vienna in 2003, where Philip did his last sabbatical-- they shared the same lab bench. Alexander finished his PhD in 2005 and is now doing his post-doc in the Microbiology Dept here at Oxford. He chose the Grand Cafe because it reminds him of the cafes in Vienna and we quite agreed. But it was a wonderfully English way to spend a Sunday afternoon catching up with an old friend-- sipping tea and eating scones.

--Deb