Wednesday, 19th May

The morning and the classes

After the usual process of getting up and having breakfast I started in another sunny and interesting day like everyone else. In school Mr Morf briefed us on the events of the day. Available were a trip to Ely in the afternoon and the musical “Alice in Wonderland” in the evening. I chose the trip to Ely, because I don’t really like musicals and I didn’t want to just hang around in the afternoon.
After the informative briefing the everyday school lessons began. Tendayi (say 10-Die) wanted us to do some question improvement exercises which nobody really cared to do. However, in the end it was a fun and instructive exercise. The rules of the exercises were really easy. Everyone got one sheet of paper, one student the sheet A, and the other student the sheet B. In order to complete the own sheet it was necessary to ask one’s partner certain things. Afterwards we had to invent our own, in our opinion perfect, country. Everyone liked doing this hilarious and active exercise. The first 100 minutes passed unbelievably fast, however everyone already knew that the next 100 minutes were going to be brimming over with boredom and tiredness (sorry, Helen, but it’s just the truth). In this mood the 30 minutes break unfortunately also passed very fast. Perhaps the boredom was/is caused by the specific time from 11am to 1pm because we are always tired then and if you are tired, it is harder to concentrate; you feel bored ;). Additionally, Helen wanted to do exactly the same as Tendayi had done before, which made everything even worse. However, in addition, we had to do some research for Glastonbury Festival, which caused an increase of our happiness because we’d thought it was going to be just a normal, boring “Helen-lesson”; fortunately she destroyed this bad opinion.
The results of the research were: Glastonbury Festival is the world’s largest festival for music and other art, like comedy or theatre. It has existed since 1970, after the death of Jimi Hendrix. Since then it has been taking place every year on the last weekend of June for 3 days at Worthy Farm in Pilton.
Towards the end of the lesson our job was to create an own festival, which was very funny as well. There were many different ideas like a festival on different islands or a festival especially for elderly people. Exactly when everyone had finished, the lesson was interrupted by the school bell.
Lunchtime was much too short today with less than one hour if you went to Ely. Silvan and me first tried our luck at Pizza Hut, which unfortunately was nearly brimming over with people. Another restaurant, called “Pizza Express”, was too expensive for such a small budget a student has, so we decided to go to Marks & Spencer to buy our lunch. In about 20 minutes we devoured our food and then took the train to Ely with some other students and Mr Morf.

Trip to Ely

The trip to Ely was very interesting and amazing. Mr Morf told us lot about its history. “Ely” derives from “eel” because they sell eels in many restaurants and fish shops. The city of Ely began to grow about 1300 years ago, in the 7th century, around the abbey of the future cathedral. From the middle of the 9th to the 10th century, the Vikings overran England many times. This rude people also burnt down the monastery, which, however, was rebuilt later on. In 1083 William the Conqueror started building a cathedral because of the already existing monastery. It took 200 years to complete it. In the 16th century King Henry VIII closed down the monastery because he wanted to have money, he didn’t like the Catholics and he wanted to found his own church in order to be able to divorce from his woman.

The wonderful cathedral of Ely with its Gothic and Roman style mix perhaps is only still there because Ely wasn’t a target for the bombers in the World War. Thanks to this the bishop of England still resides in Ely.
After collecting some impressions of the inside of the cathedral we were free and could do what we wanted to. We walked along some shops and enjoyed the good weather before we took the train home to Cambridge.
With this, just another great “Cambridge-Day” ended…

® Thierry Trafelet