Cambridge University and Greenwich, England

Cambridge has many more high-end shops and many fewer hip and youth oriented businesses than I'd have guessed. The resident eggheads must really be serious about their work. The town doesn't give any sens of being dominated by college students, though you see them everywhere on foot and bicycle. King's College Cathedral, where we attended a Evensong service, is a massive stone marvel of medieval engineering. Endless stained glass panels fill the 30 meters or more of open wall space on either side. They were all removed, buried, and then replaced during WWII to prevent destruction by Axis bombers. At dinner we enjoyed traditional pub grub in The Eagle, across from King's College. Collectively we had all the classics: bangers and mash, fish and chips, and steak and ale pie. It was here, just a table from where we sat according to a plaque on the wall, that Watson and Crick first told their peers about their discovery of DNA over a pint of ale and dinner. The scientists had apparently been dining and drinking in The Eagle for months before they came to their revelation. Sadly, nothing inspired came to my mind, but the food was good and it was pleasant to hear and see some of Cambridge undergraduates having a fine and noisy time at the famous table.

Back in London, we had a drink in Notting Hill and visited the bookstore from the Hugh Grant film. It's actually a very good travel bookstore. The neighborhood was more eclectic and racially mixed than I expected. Lots of Caribbean influence.The weather here in May is very similar to southern California in January. It's cool, without being cold, blustery, and it threatens to rain often. I find it pleasant, but then I don't have to live here, do I?

On my last full day in England we headed to the Royal Observatory. Strangely, I almost forgot to make this trip. Thank goodness my father remembered my intention to visit. It's a requisite stop for any geographer visiting London. Not only is this the most famous marker of the Prime Meridian, the line that artificially divides our world into Western and Eastern hemispheres, but it also houses the famous clocks that John Harrison invented to solve "the longitude problem." In fact the observatory was established way back in 1675 in order to serve as the official arbiter of measurements of all sorts in England. The Observatory was built where Greenwich Castle used to stand. This castle is where Henry VIII housed many of his mistresses since it was close enough for a quick visit. The grounds today are gorgeous parkland of grassy hills and tree-lined pathways. The Royal Maritime Museum shares the park with the Royal Observatory.

We managed to get a look at all four of John Harrison's remarkable timepieces. Harrison, for those who are unfamiliar with the story, was a self-taught watchmaker who over a period of 43 years built five incredibly accurate watches to aid ships in the determination of longitude (east-west location). The method is simple, if you have a watch that is accurate. You simply set the accurate watch to Greenwich Mean Time (London time). While at sea, you note the moment that the sun reaches it's apex (true noon). Since the earth rotates at a fixed and predictable rate, it is then simple division to figure out how many hours (and hence miles) you are from Greenwich (360 degrees around the earth; 24 hours in a rotation; hence, each hour of time equals 15 degrees of longitude).

Captain James Cook used Harrison's chronometers on his second and third voyages in the Pacific and found them to be incredibly accurate and useful. They certainly fell within the standards set out in the Longitude Prize offered by Parliament in 1714. Sadly, though, Harrison was never awarded the ₤20,000 prize. Over the years he was awarded a total of ₤18,750, the last payment of which was ₤8,750 given to him at the age of 80, three years before his death. Notably, he was never officially given the prize. It was never awarded to anyone. The main reason for this was the bias of the Board of Longitude against a self-taught workingman who solved the problem in a simple way, without the use of astronomy nor Newton's beloved calculus. It was only through the intervention of King George that Harrison managed to get any recognition at all. If you're still interested in this fascinating historical episode get ahold of Dava Sobel's erudite and entertaining history of the events, Longitude.

The maze-like London Underground is justifiably famous. Trains whisk you off to your destination every two or three minutes at most stops in central London. I was surprised by the extreme depth of many of the tunnels. I suspect that the Thames and all of that water is part of the reason for this, but New York has the Hudson and the East River and still I found the escalators descending to surprising depths in London.

The map of the "Tube" is also quite famous. It's iconic cartography allows us to make sense of what is in reality a very complicated geography. Stations become colored dots. Lines are brightly colored and remarkably geometric. Scale is distorted to encourage comprehension, not to represent physical distances.

Visiting the British Museum was a highlight, just as expected. The Egyptian exhibits and the Elgin Marbles (which Greece rightfully wants back) are fantastic and left me awestruck but the real surprise was the reaction I felt to seeing the sculptures from the Assyrians at Nineveh and Nimrud, both of which were located in what is today northern Iraq and flourished in the Neo-Assyrian period from 911 B.C. until the sack of Nineveh and the fall of the Assyrian empire at the hands of the Chaldean Babylonians in 612 B.C.

The sculptures and reliefs, like those I saw from prehistoric periods in India, are graceful and powerfully beautiful. Like the Parthenon scultures, which they pre-date, they mostly depict military, ritual, and royal events. The scale of the sculptures again baffles a viewer today. Massive winged lions and bulls standing over ten feet tall and weighing 30 tons guarded huge entrance gates made of cedar and held together by sculpted bronze bands. Relief sculptures depict battles involving huge numbers of warriors, chariots, horses, and camels. Soldiers wield spears from the ground while carrying massive shields. Riders on horseback draw bows. Men stricken by blows fall from their horses or collapse to the ground beneath the weight of their attackers. Camels in particular, which are rare in Hellenistic art, are lovingly depicted.

What's so amazing to me about these sculptures is how much they look like the cartoonish images in my childhood mind of such times, replete as they are with wine jugs, chariots, agricultural scenes, lavish costumes, and strong young bodies. The images in my mind were shaped by films and comic books that were obviously drawing upon collective impressions from the excavated ruins of ancient Mesopotamia. Many of these ruins were found in the 19th century and must have created quite a popular stir.

Still, seeing the real sculptures, even dislocated as they are from their geographical context, aids in the imagining of the ancient past. Like many children raised watching black and white films, I came to think of the past as drained of color, as a pale and sad precursor to the rich, colorful, and pleasurable life people live today. Years of study and imagination have made the past more real to me, but sculptures like thes and those at Khajuraho in India require me to see the past as tangible, filled with sensual pleasures and terrible agony.