Time moves differently when you live abroad: you have more time to luxuriate in immersing yourself in the local culture than you do on vacation, but you also keep reminding yourself that you're still on borrowed time and there's only so much of it left. By July I had a one-way flight out of Heathrow on the books. The end crept up on me faster than I anticipated, so I booked train tickets for day trips to Cambridge and Oxford back-to-back as soon as I got home from a long weekend in Cornwall.
I didn't really have a plan for things to see besides wandering the respective cities and universities. We were spoiled by the perfect summer weather that week which made the experience feel even more like a daydream than it already was. I visited Cambridge in 2014, back when I had more or less just started college. It's kind of funny to look back on that time now and see how preoccupied I was with trying to find a place where me and things belonged together and how much I wanted that place to be a specific kind of college experience with quiet quads and old architecture—as if aesthetic could serve as a stand-in for substance. It was hard not to get caught up in romanticizing Oxbridge when almost all of my classics professors studied there and these campuses and college towns felt so different from Berkeley. California never felt like home to me, but being at university did.
Revisiting Cambridge—and visiting Oxford for the first time—at the end of my academic career brought back a wave of nostalgia for the absolute privilege of being a student and how much I loved sitting in classrooms to discuss book chapters and theoretical concepts. I'll always have a soft spot for pursuing a life of the mind, and I'm grateful I got the chance to spend the past year doing it again with a subject I didn't have enough time to explore in undergrad. Even though most of my grad program ended up being online this year after the winter lockdown was announced, it seems like plans for a real graduation ceremony in December are underway; here's to hoping.
As far as travel recommendations go, the punting tours led by locals at Cambridge are a great way to see more of the colleges and bridges from the river that were otherwise closed to the public. Sit back and relax with a Pimm's from the bar boat: it's a much more relaxing (and informative) experience than doing it yourself if you've never punted before. My friends and I rented our own boat last time and got into a few traffic jams because it required skills we didn't have to properly maneuver the boats. We also didn't know what we were looking at, so it was nice to learn various tidbits from our guided tour.
At Oxford, one of my coworkers at a remote job graciously showed us around the town and campus; we even got to see Magdalen College for free. Some of the colleges that are normally open to tourists were closed while we were there, but you can see many of the main attractions, like the Radcliffe Camera or Hertford Bridge, from wandering around the city center.
For good, affordable street food go to Market Square in Cambridge or Gloucester Green in Oxford for lunch. For cream tea in the afternoon, visit Fitzbillies in Cambridge or Vaults & Garden in Oxford. Both cities are about an hour by train from London or about two hours by coach, making them perfect for a quick getaway to indulge in all your uni fantasies.
xoxo, vivian
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