A great weekend

Last night we had our first "dinner" party. It started harmlessly enough. A pancake breakfast, a walk downtown, and a last look at the Darwin exhibit. Susanne went to a lecture entitled "Lunch with Mrs. Darwin" which was a look at Darwin's life and the personality of his spouse and her cookbook. She was given the last ticket, so I wandered around the museum once again and then headed over for punting at 2pm at the College. It was too crowded, so a bunch of us chose to watch at the Mill Pond Island whilst quafing an ale. Met a fellow student from Owen Sound, who smoked rollies with filters, and a couple of other interesting blokes. We wandered back to the college, and joined in the scavenger hunt. We were suppose to answer a bunch of questions about Darwin College, and it was amazing watching 100 people keenly running around trying to find the answers. We got stuck on: "What was watched on Darwin's birthday?" We thought that there might have been an eclipse or something on Feruary 12, 1809, but alas - nothing of note happened that day. While we groped for that answer, which turned out to be "Zoolander", which was the movie that the film club watched that day this year, other groups figured out the secret clue and won the hunt without even getting all the answers.! Oh well, we should have thought about a trick.

While standing around drinking Pims (a drink popular in England), a bunch of of us decided to go punting. We set off, and then doubled back to grab a bottle of wine from the party. It turned out that it was a privately owned bottle, and the owner chased after us in a kayak. He arrived on a collision course, and we calmly offerred him a glass, which he accepted with a good laugh. This was the first of two acts of piracy that we engaged in this day.

Apparantly, learning to punt has 4 stages:

1. Getting the punt moving, but not likely the direction that you want to go.
   
2. Learning to turn using the pole as a rudder.
   
3. Using the river bottom to turn the boat the way that you want to go.


4. Doing 3. with one hand.
   

I quickly got to 1., mastered 2.., and struggled through 3. Tried 4., quickly went back to 3.

After a beautiful trip past the colleges of Cambridge U., we all decided that we were all thirsty, my friends. We moored off King's College, and ran to King's "private pub" and bought 6 bottles, as we learned to do in the BVIs. Alas, according to our upper year skipper Nikon (a person not a camera!), each college's pubs are for their members and invited guests only, so we had to run and not get caught. A person appeared, who Nikon told us was a guard, and he suggested to Esther, an M. Eng. student that she had to tell the guard that she had to use the ladies to get past. Turns out he was just a bystander, and not a guard, and Nikon laughed at his good folly, and we all joined in. Arriving pirate style with our pirated beers in hand at the moored punt, we jumped in and completed our journey.

We arrived at the college, starved. We were directed by Nikon to the best pizza in town, where we ordered 3. When they were ready, we dashed to our flat with our hot pizzas in hand, and served dinner with limited plates, cutlery and my computer for music. We laughed, drank my last bottle of wine, and concluded the evening at the Darwin pub for a nightcap.

Oh, as you may have guessed, the pictures here are not pictures of our first dinner party. They are pictures of our first formal dinner at Darwin, and the scavenger hunt quiz. Enjoy.