My second day in Cambridge

Cambridge — By Ryan on February 6, 2010 8:02 pm

As you guessed I was up like a light come 2:30 or so and ready to hit the laptop for another 10 hours of work before I went out to explore cambridge some more. Fabian was lucky enough to have that saturday off so we worked at home until 2pm or so and then set out on our adventure into Cambridge. An adventure who’s purpose was really to get to know this swiss animator who I’ve been working closely with for the better part of a year. After assuring him that we’d be fine making it into town without the map our conversation focused on each other and learning about what makes the other tick. I am oh so curious about the cultures and ways of other countries and so I began to explore what about his personality was Fabian and what about it was the Swiss. Over the course of the day I learned to appreciate much about the very reserved, polite and sensitive swiss. Fabian hasn’t been out exploring the city all that much so it was an adventure for the two of us and we were in luck as it just so happened to be the 800′s anniversary celebration for the great University. We stayed around town and on the suggestion of the oh so diligent Fabian we found a cafe to go and dedicated a good part of our afternoon to working on an investor move for SARF until we were ousted from our table by a party that had previously reserved it. The light show for the anniversary party was set to start in 30 minutes or so which gave us just enough time to hit up ‘The old English sweet shop’ on one of the main corners in town to buy some traditional english sweets to munch on during the show.

The shop itself was just as picturesque as you would imagine it would be with two levels full of overpriced but but unbelievably delicious sweets. We settled on some fudge in the basement, I myself choosing the black licorice fudge which nearly made me cream my pants on first sight and immediately overlook that £3.50 price tag on the small bag. But man oh man this was worth it, easily one of the most delicious treats I have ever eaten in my life, if not the most delicious. This stuff should require a license with how good it is. It would seem that both Fabian and I have similar tastes when it comes to these sorts of things as we both bought a small bag of the stuff and both of our bags were gone by the end of the night as it was clearly not humanly possible to stop eating this sugar coated cocaine once you started. We exited the sweet shop, sweets in hand and proceeding to get in the long queue for the entrance to the light show. What the city had done was setup a multitude of super high resolution projectors along the main campus pointed at the 800 year old buildings, making a canvas of sorts out of these ancient and inspiring pieces of architecture. Upon these canvasses they projected all sorts of psychedelic imagery, ranging from simple slides of celluar biology to walking skeletons marching from one building to another. It was like a giant acid trip happening before your eyes and we just stared up in awe of what we were witnessing. All to an equally tripped soundtrack. Around the back of the buildings was another lightshow with more projectors on more buildings and laser pulsing through a little river and projecting a hologram of a spinning earth onto a clear sheet suspended in the air. They had programmed some of the projectors to avoid some of the major stained glass windows so you’d have this amazing image being displayed with a big black center where this gorgeous window sat. The imagery was obviously customized to accomodate this so you ended up having these psychedelic slideshows and movies framing and snaking their way around the windows. Truly breathtaking. The old white trees lining the banks of this small river were all lit up with with this eerie white light making for the illusion of a forest of ghost trees rising from the grave. You have to hand it to the english they know how to put on a show, especially one that merges such modern technology with the beauty and class of these ancient establishment – no easy task at that.

After snapping tons of photos and recording as much video as my patience would allow we headed off home where I promptly fell asleep before 11pm while Fabian and Jon sat up drinking beers and watching movies. Which of course led to me once again waking the next morning at 3am to start another work day off early and ensure plenty of productivity before the imfamous Nick Dixon arrived

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Tags: 800 years, Cambridge, celebration, england, laser, lightshow, sweets, uk, university