Meeting some Americans

Before we left home we were lucky enough to be given the names of some people to contact in the Cambridge area. One family, the McIntosh/Pullen's, are friends of our UMD friends Pete and Rosana Keleher. Now that we are all here, we were able to meet Than and Amy and their two children, Ethan and Lydia. Even though there's no real language barrier between us and the English, I have to admit that I must put my full concentration into listening to the locals talk and understanding their pronunciation and idioms. So it was a surprising pleasure for me to be able to converse easily with fellow Yanks. It was nice to get together, and there's a sort of natural feeling of alliance as new members of this community. We've been trading information and survival tips. We hope to see more of them.

We met up at the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge City Centre. I believe it is part of the University of Cambridge. The museum houses a varied collection, including armor, paintings, Egyptian artifacts, and textiles. Colin and Timmy especially liked the armor exhibit. I enjoyed the miniature portraits of famous English royalty of old. I actually recognized a couple before seeing their names. The museum provides family activity kits to help engage children in the exhibits. Annie took charge of a little locked box filled with miniature clues to entice us to examine the galleries closely. She liked it a lot, although Timmy felt it inhibited us from looking around "just for fun."

Afterward we shuffled through the rain to find two pubs and McDonald's either closed or not serving food. Finally, a few blocks from our house, we found a reliable Turkish proprietor serving classic fish and chips. Wet and tired, Mike and I sank down on the plastic chairs and watched with amusement as the children (now deprived of tv for 2 full weeks) stared glassy-eyed at the cartoons. They didn't even seem to care that the characters were speaking Turkish!