Top of the World, St. John’s Tower.

17 July 2013

The famous “garbage” singer at Cambridge. He is actually really, really good ???

A view from up-top Saint John’s Tower. You can see Pembroke, Kings, Saint Catherine’s, and Trinity colleges in the distance.

Sunsets are one of my favorite things of all time…

Art is exposed in each our lives in one way or another. It has been interesting to discover how art plays such an immense role in my life, with out my knowledge that it ever did. Studying both drawing and creativity in conjunction with my business studies here at Cambridge has really opened my eyes as to how people perceive things. How we interact is vital in our perspective. I have learned the importance of understanding where people come from. Culture is a form of art-I would categorize it as “social” art… if there were or is such a category. Being abroad for a little over 2 months has already widened by perspective one hundred fold as to how small the world is. I have realized that the people in Idaho and the people in Utah are not a realistic sample as to what the rest of the world is like. If I hadn’t decided to travel and study abroad, I never would of encountered so many people who live in all the other areas of the world. Excluding maybe Antarctica and Greenland, I bet I have come across someone from every country in the world…that is a bold statement, but I am willing to bet that it is near true. I have found that culture differences are no boundary in creating friendships, but language barriers can be. Luckily, here at Cambridge everyone speaks English as either their first or second (or maybe third and fourth) tongue so it is easy to connect with people. When I was backpacking Europe, and equally when I study in Portugal, there are people who do not speak English…and that is where I feel the boundaries pushing in. This is a challenge I want to overcome, I want to enjoy the feat of mastering another language. Portuguese will be that language, and with this knowledge I should be able to understand many of the other latin based languages…a start to connecting to a large majority of the outside world.

The Tower we are about to scale…

I made it!

I love the feeling of being on “top of the world”!

Myself, Omar (Iraq/London), Aclem (Lebanon/California), and Amira (Cairo) standing on top of Saint John’s tower.

Saint John’s Cathedral. The very top of Saint John’s cathedral. Gorgeous. GORgeous. GORGEOUS. Once again I was able to experience the exhilaration of climbing to the highest peak in Cambridge. I could of stayed up on top of the tower for ages. We climbed up with teeny-tiny spiraling stone staircase for 163 feet to get to the top. I don’t think people had been up before us for quite some time because the spiderwebs were thick and nasty. They felt like a fishing rubbing against every corner of my body…grungy! The spider webs and burning thighs were well worth it. When I got too the top and was able to look out over the city of Cambridge and see all the beautiful buildings and colleges in relation to one another I was struck with awe. So many great things happened in this place. So many people walked in and out of the doors of these colleges having discovered things that forever changed our world. Watson and Crick, John Maynard Keynes, Charles Darwin, etc… It really makes one feel like an insignificant human being when they walk through corridors where years before students just like them discovered the structure of DNA. How can I ever measure up to that? Confidently I just keep telling myself that my breakthrough will come, I just need to be prepared if it does not end up being something earth shattering such as that. Here at Cambridge, everybody’s input counts and everybody is treated as if they were the smartest person on the planet. There is the psychological factor behind being thought of as such. If others perceive you as something, most likely you will begin to perceive yourself as that, and eventually your thoughts will turn into actions… We all have the power to change the world. Why not start now?

Woohoo, I love Cambridge!

Touching the blazing sun…

A view of the Cambridge Union Society, where many of my classes take place.