Friday, August 7, 2009

Chapel Roof Tour and Prince Charles

These last few days have been full of different interesting experiences. We had another formal hall where I ate dinner with and olympic gold medalist. He was on the British rowing team that one gold in Sydney. He is now finishing up his PhD with one of my professors here. The next day I had my supervision that went really well. I have begun to focus on Cardinal Isidro Goma, who was the head of the Catholic Church in Spain during the Civil War. I have been doing a lot of work with all of his archived letters, that have recently been published and have not been used in previous publishing about the civil war. So I am going through and seeing if there are any discrepancies between what Goma reports (which are all in Spanish which is fun for me) to the Vatican and what has been published in previous studies of the Spanish Civil War.

This project is really taking off well, and my supervisor is very excited about it. Mainly because it is something that has not been really touched before. He is starting to talk to me about the possibilities of coming back to Spain next year to get my masters degree, an idea I am beginning to seriously consider. And if not in Spain in London with one of the top scholars on the Spanish Civil War. I also found out this week that my supervisor supervised Prince Charles when he was here studying at Cambridge. I plan on doing a post just on my supervisor later on because he really is an incredible man.

A unique opportunity that I had this week that is only available to student of King's College is to go on a tour of the roof of the Chapel. It was cool to see all of the old school graffiti from the 18th century that was in the vault area between the ceiling of the chapel and the roof. There was an incredible view from the roof of all of Cambridge as well.

Today we went to Blechley's Park, this is where all of the code breaking took place during the Second World War and where the first computer was built to help in the code breaking process. It was really interesting to learn more about how the code breaking process evolved over the course of the war, and to be there where it actually happened was very cool as well.

I never get tired of walking out my
front door and seeing this

On the chapel roof
View from the chapel roof
The University Library
American War Cemetery
Croquet with some of the TA's (I won)

Dinner at the Eagle and Child in Oxford
This is where the Inklings would come and discuss
and drink. Both C.S. Lewis and J.R.R. Tolkien were members
of the Inklings.

View of All Saints College from the St Mary's Chapel tower

In front of the hall that was used in the Harry Potter movies
Colossus, the first computer.

1 comment:

  1. Thanks so much for sharing your adventures with us. Talk about walking around where history was made!!!!! Thanks for being such an awesome example to all of us! Aunt Tamara

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