Cambridge Series - The City

Hello again...

Today I want to share some pictures of Cambridge.

It was a beautiful city. When I was there (July 17-27, 2011), I imagined that I had been living in a dream. Because if you see the sceneries, those look like paintings in a gallery.

You can enlarge every picture below by clicking on each of it.

Pictures above shows some buildings and houses around the city. Most of those buildings is very old. I am impressed to how they maintain their properties.

There were some buildings which built in the corner of streets. You also can see how colorful they painted their houses related to their neighbours'.

It shows some signposts of a park/garden, and a park called 'Jesus Green'. Was that beautiful?

You can also see a typical map around in Cambridge city. It shows some public facilities, some important buildings, and the way you get there.

First two pictures shows the signpost of parking lot spaces and pedestrians signals. The first shows how many parking lots were still available, and the second directs pedestrians when they can get across the street.

The latter twos were showing old and new model of parking lots' meters. People who want to park their vehicles on a particular road should put some money on it. It costs 20 pence (350 won/2,800 rupiahs) for each 15 minutes, and can only park for maximum of two hours.

This picture shows some public facilities.

Can you see interested design of a bus stop? Perhaps the designer thought that it will be more convenience for passengers to wait behind the glass. It will probably protect them from splashing water from vehicles, dusts, and other debris. Great idea!

Cambridge maintains her public phone box as well. Most of them had been working good. It costs 60 pence (1,050 won/8,400 rupiahs) for one hour to any landline (non-mobile) phones around the country, but can call mobiles for about three minutes for the same amount.

Bottom left picture shows two trash cans. One was for recyclable things, and another was for non-recyclables.

Bottom right was a picture of a letter box in Cambridge. One of my friend told me that it looked like a letter box in Mr. Bean's show. Yes, it was!

The last collection time was written on it: Mon-Fri 6.15 pm, and Sat 12.45 pm.

You can see here another signpost which shows the directions and some pictures of roads and streets. We should assume that a road tend to be bigger or wider than a street.

Because Cambridge was not a very big city, it was hard to find high rise buildings there, instead you can still find a lot of narrow streets or pathways (In bahasa, we called it a 'gang')

Two pictures above show Sir Isaac Newton's public house where became a pub since at least 1886 and a picture of an apple.

Sir Isaac Newton entered Cambridge University in 1661 and became a fellow of Trinity College in 1667.

Can you see the apple there which was not bitten yet? It just compares to an apple inc.'s logo which was bitten already.

It shows some transportation modes in Cambridge. You can still see a lot of people was cycling around the city of Cambridge. Don't be surprised if they will put their bicycles on any possible places or stands including the church' s fences (bottom right).

Cambridge has "park&ride" city busses, busses, busway, transport for schools, and "Hop-on Hop-off" tour busses (especially for tourists).

Hop-on Hop-off tour busses will go around the city for approximately 80 minutes with price guide as follows:

* Adult 13 pounds (23,000 won/182,000 rupiahs)

* Child (5-15 years) 7 pounds (12,300 won/98,000 rupiahs)

* Senior/Student 9 pounds (15,900 won/126,000 rupiahs)

* Family (2+3) 32 pounds (56,500 won/448,000 rupiahs)

I found a new dan interested thing in Cambridge which never saw it before. It was called a rising bollard. It was automatically down when there was a known vehicle want to go by, and it was automatically up when the vehicle pass through it. Why I said a known vehicle, because I was waiting long time enough to see another vehicle which cannot pass through it, because the bollard was not going down even the vehicle passed the camera line and very near to the bollard :)

It shows pictures of people from around the world who came to Cambridge for various activities which most of those are for vacation.

Up left shows a musical group performed their songs and people might donate some pence or buy their cds. I believe that they sang latin/spanish songs.

Bottom right shows a Sainsbury's supermarket auto-cashier. I tried twice, but feel awkward, because I was not used to it and didn't know how to do it.

By the way, I think we still need another people to do it for us, even nowadays all items/goods was barcoded already and we can check out by ourselves. I am afraid that in long term practices, people may not have any kind of relationships with other people in any kind of business, and people may lost their occupations because machines replace their positions. In short, I think that we as human being still need to relate to other people not just a machine. What do you think?

This is called Round Church. Nowadays, it is no longer a working church, but a museum of Christian heritage. It was built in 1130 AD by the fraternity of the Holy Sepulchre. It is one of only 4 round churches in England. They were all built after the first Crusade and the shape is probably influenced by that of the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem.

This building was called Britannia Building Society. This building society serves as a bank and related financial services, especially mortgage lending. Nowadays, the building society must compete with banks for most consumer banking services. These institutions are found in the UK and several other countries.

What do you think about the city of Cambridge?

Please wait for my report about "The River" next week. See you.

Thank you for reading.

-san-