Summer in Cambridge

Three more places around Cambridge worth visiting
Whenever I visit some lesser-known places in the UK I tend to mention them in one of my articles. And this one won’t be an exception! The first place I will talk about is the Imperial War Museum Duxford. It is a museum devoted mainly to aviation as Duxford was RAF’s air base during the World War I and II. But even those not so interested in planes as I am can find a bit that is interesting for them. Beginning with modern aeronautics, going through Royal Air Force aircraft, history of the Wars and finishing with American aircraft and army vehicles, all of those can be found in the hangars of Duxford aerodrome.

Second place I visited was the Anglesey Abbey, a mansion located to the northeast of Cambridge. It is owned by the Fairhaven family and while the family are living in a part of the house, most of the house is available for tourists to see. The whole property is maintained by the National Trust and besides the country house it includes vast gardens and a mill.

When you type “sights around Cambridge” into a web browser, one of the top twenty places is often the Cambridge American Cemetery. It is a cemetery commemorating American soldiers who fought in the World War II and it is built in the style of the cemeteries known from the American movies.

Summer Cambridge
Cambridge outside of term definitely has a different vibe. Fewer people, calmer roads, more free bike racks, all of these hard to imagine for someone staying in Cambridge only during term time. But during summer there was something extra (at least from my perspective) and it was festivals. I went to only three of them, The Big Weekend, the Cambridge Thai Festival and Oktoberfest, but I wouldn’t be surprised if more took place. All of them give opportunity to local people to enjoy themselves with fewer students around.

Summer London
With Cambridge being just an hour away from London, I couldn’t resist to visit one of my most favourite capitals. First of all, I got the chance to meet up with a few of my friends, some of whom had an internship in London and some of whom had started working there. In addition to that, I visited a few new places such as the inside of the Buckingham Palace, gardens of the Kensington Palace, British Museum and I saw where the Czech embassy in London is. Finally, I went to see the Notting Hill carnival. It is a Caribbean-themed carnival on the streets of Notting Hill, so it was full of marching bands and people dressed up in Jamaican-styled clothes. The unfortunate thing though was the weather as it was raining for most of the day. So my friend and I stayed for a while and then we went to one more museum, Victoria and Albert Museum, and then finished the day off in a board-game café.

Why did I stay?
Finally, why did I stay in Cambridge over the summer? I found myself an internship there. It was in one of the groups in the Department of Chemistry and the point of the internship was screening monomeric amyloid-β binders as a part of more general research into the Alzheimer’s disease. How successful the research there is? First, a whole new building was built next to the Chemistry Department specifically for the groups studying misfolding diseases, such as Alzheimer’s. Second, quite recently there has been an article in a lot of different news, including the Czech ones, about the effects of cholesterol on Alzheimer’s disease and the group I worked in was featured in the article. So I was really lucky to have become a part of such a cutting-edge research and gain experience in the fields of biological chemistry and biophysics. And I took one more thing out of the internship: I fully realised that synthetic chemistry and doing reactions is what I particularly enjoy and what I would like to focus on next.

This brings me to the end of this article. The summer was full of very interesting and impactful research, but it wasn’t only about it. I got to see Cambridge in a different light, with a lot of festivals, and I took advantage of being in the UK during the only 10 weeks in the year when the Buckingham palace is open to public. And so having got to know Cambridge a bit more again, it will make it even harder to say goodbye to it at the end of this year.