Iceland, April 2017

Cambridge, UK, April 2017

It’s a reasonably sunny day. The museum town of Cambridge, which exhales the thirst for education and the quest for knowledge from every pore, is bustling with life. Well-dressed-and-groomed students mix with tourists of varied origins and families on a Sunday outing. Everyone has time, part of what makes for such a stark contrast with London 2 days earlier. 

I sit in front of a small café right opposite King’s College Chapel, enjoy the rays of sun and a cappuccino and wonder whether the elder gentleman at the next table might not be an incredibly famous professor, perhaps the man behind a major scientific break-through. I wouldn’t be surprised, after having learned that the pub where we went for a pint last night is the very same location where Watson and Crick celebrated the discovery of the DNA molecule, and that Stephen Hawking is still teaching right down the street at the Department of Theoretical Physics. 

It’s an impressive town, beautiful and slightly amusing, seemingly very much at ease living inside its own bubble while having the eyes of the scientific world on it at the same time.