We went to Ely, England as part of my gothic architecture course yesterday to visit Ely Cathedral, the only Medieval Wonder of the World in the entire United Kingdom. It was really nice, and Oliver Cromwell's house is also in Ely. Oliver Cromwell (for the few of you that may not know him) overthrew the monarchy and had King Charles I beheaded before taking over England for himself in the 1600s. In American terms, think of him as an English "Robert E. Lee," but only if Lee had won the war, had Lincoln killed, and then ruled  over the US himself. So in short, it was neat to see Cromwell's house.

This is his house:

And many of the next pictures are of the cathedral.

The caption below goes with the picture of the faded tomb above.

I thought the tomb below was kind of funny because the statue is posed as if he is just chilling on a couch watching tv.

And the house below is just a nice little house I took a picture of.

Yesterday I saw some Russian tourists rowing on the River Cam with a stick... like from a tree. No, that isn't normal. :-)

This was a nice shot of King's College with the cattle out front.

The picture below: bee hives on the edge of King's College campus. My fiance: "oh, they just threw a bunch of old furniture over there..." 

Me: "No. No. Those are beehives."

Fiance: "oh..."

I found this graffiti below interesting, because a lot of people are the same way at Yale...they feel that by travelling the world and going to Africa and barely helping anyone they are all of a sudden educated and enlightened and a huge contributor to this world. I tend to disagree with that school of thought, but either way this is just food for thought.

And today we went to the American Cemetery from World War II in Cambridge.

And then we went to Bletchley Park, the secret location (until the 1970s) where the British broke the German Enigma code. The museum was so-so, but they had a lot of cool Enigma machines, and re-constructed "Bombe"... the code-breaking machine the Allies used to crack Enigma messages.

Pigeons played a big part in the war effort!

A propaganda poster: 

(I got some other cool pictures of german war memorabilia, but I'm not going to post those pictures, because as a general rule I don't want nazi symbols on my blog.)

I thought the clip below was cool because Bornholm is a Danish island.

The picture below shows the compound of Bletchley Park.... you can see it doesn't look super exciting on the outside.

The caption above goes with the picture below.

The machine below is the cipher machine the Allies used to crack the intercepted German messages.