Going to Hogwarts...

Okay, so I didn’t actually find Hogwarts, but I swear I came close! I think one of the reasons why the books seemed so magical when I first read them was because the world that Harry lived in seemed so unlike the reality that I knew—but now I see that a lot of things from the world of Harry Potter actually exist in Britain! For example I thought that whole Ministry of Defense, Ministry of Magic, Ministry of whatever thing was made up but the UK actually has those (except for the Ministry of Magic of course)—I actually work on a company site owned by the British Ministry of Defense. Children’s school uniforms look pretty similar to what Harry wears too (blazer with school coat of arms on it, sweatervest, white polo, etc). On my way to Cambridge, I left out of King’s Cross train station, which is the station Harry leaves out of to go to Hogwarts.



Look familiar from the movie…? I didn’t think they’d have any special signs or anything so I figured I’d just go take a picture somewhere between platforms 9 and 10, but look what I found…

It was pretty exciting I must say ;) They filmed the movie at Oxford University, but the buildings at Cambridge University look pretty similar to what I imagined Hogwarts to be like as well




The whomping willow!


And I pretended this was a Gryffindor house >.<;;;
Looking at these buildings made me realize just how young America is as a country. People come to Boston to see history, but most of those buildings only date back to the 1700s. These, on the other hand, are from the 1200s! It was serendipity that my housemate and I just happened to come on the day of Cambridge’s 800th anniversary! There was a light show (which was kind of lame), but it displayed most of the major benchmarks in science that Cambridge grads were responsible for (discovery of DNA, some sort of steam engine thingy, some sort of binary code thingy). The most popular tourist thing to do in Cambridge is to go “punting” which is basically riding in a gondola-type boat down the main river that passes by most of the colleges that belong to Cambridge University. The river was beautiful (much nicer than the Charles)


But unfortunately we didn’t have time to go punting. The day ended with a mad run back to the station (~1.2 mile sprint) to just barely make our train back home by 2 minutes ;)