Cambridge was calm and cozy. It's like a small village only that it has the oldest bookshop in Europe and a world-class university. I wasn't sold at first. Tourism is not encouraged, not even the good type. Newton is an afterthought, Hawking has no dedicated place, Sylvia Plath's home is lived in and private and the best science museum is inside a privately funded research campus, built by the estate of one famous alumnus of Pembroke college. Private initiative is the driving factor here. West Hub or Cavendish Laboratory, the Cambridge University Press, Trinity College. A combination of landownership, investment and donations from alumni, many of which are among the most important people of their time. I don't know if this is directly replicable, but this place has a decidedly conservative atmosphere which certainly correlates with the spirit of preservation and growth and there was room for people with vision to build their large scale experiments which would eventually translate to the foundation of modern science. None of this is touted from the rooftops, you have to dig a little bit. For such a famous place, the info is presented in a quite lo-fi way. That being said, I would like to spend time here. Three days in I know all the other regulars in the coffee shop next to Round Church. My gf spent an afternoon in the immense bookshop near Trinity Street, while I had a bad tummy ache. The amount of flyers about some old-music concert in this or that college reminds me of my old collection of Harmonia mundi CDs, if I were to start over again I would love to be a pale 20 something in those steampunk Pembroke gardens or a quirky engineer in West Hub. Every time you cross a street you get a sample of the future of fashion and finance, scientists and socialites. I wasn't able to find food I like and survived on almond croissants in the morning and tuna at sunset. But there are so many nooks and crannies where you could just fall in love for the first time and dream about greatness that I find these young people lucky. At the store of the University Press I'm a bit nostalgic. I used to devour these unwieldy tomes throughout disciplines. It was like mentally fusing with legendary grimoires. Everything was interesting, the thrill of information the most potent form of the desire to live. Then it stopped, I did it wrong, probably to hide my anxiety more than to apply myself to the world. I'm not alone though. Both my gf and me sway on multiple rounds through the shop. It's the first time I feel old. I write with friends, especially J, who I have never met but is the only other person whose first destination in a new city is the local bookstore. I vow myself to always be curious. Maybe I won't be taking in thousands of pages of deeply technical fields without any rhyme or reason, but I will always know where to find them if necessary. This is how I see our times by the way. Many people are actually not in a position where they can apply their passion to the greater good. And I bet the average level of maintained knowledge and memory is much higher than before, if only by osmosis or whatever. It's far easier to gain and maintain. On one hand we are a generation of quiet quitters but on the other guardians of knowledge, full of potential. This is what places like Cambridge tell me. Give people a reason to contribute and they will. Put a young person in the company of smart people, past and present and they will try to become one of them. Put a rich person in charge of meaningful change, scientific breakthroughs or cultural shifts and they will contribute. Never mind the reason, the effect alone is worth it! I have not met one single bad tempered person. Smiles and charming greetings, jokes and friendly exchange. These schools are certainly not accessible to the average person. And something tells me that a large portion of their current fame rely on Asian students. There are many. In a prominent place in the bookshop you can find a collection of poems by Xi Zhi Mo. I know because my other friend J told me about him. As far as I know, Xi has written one poem of farewell about Cambridge. Now they put a memorial stone for him next to the Cam in Trinity College. Some Chinese visitors actually only go there and then turn back without looking at the chapel with the famous palm-leaf ceiling. You have to pay 17 pounds to get past the gate and that's a bit steep just to take a picture of a hastily placed boulder. There are Korean fashion and Taiwanese bubble tea shops, bad quality. Restaurants downtown are of the pay-and-get-out kind of hospitality of Prague or Paris. And at night fall there are a fair number of homeless, that you don't see during the day. Seasonal workers maybe? I spend my last day at the Dolby center in West Hub. It looks like a building from Surviving Mars and I'm tempted to put that music on. A research lab and university firmly placed among reminders of breakthroughs past. Back when I was their age, I would have ducked my way through my studies and be carried along by maybe one extroverted person who happened to like me. Today I would just chat with all these people non-stop and revel in their biographies and aspirations. I smile thinking about all those young people who get the timing right and get the opportunity to delve right into the exciting part of life during their stay. Go change the world!