Paradise Lost

Alright, the first bad thing has happened to me while here at Cambridge.

I dropped my friend Jacqueline's camera in the river. 

Thus, the melodramatic title for this post.

To tell the truth I do feel a little disillusioned. It's like this beautiful magical place somehow tricked me into letting my guard down and then pounced. How it happened is this:

I was punting on the river with a group of people from my programme. Two of my friends, Jacqueline and Brendan were there.  We had a jolly good time punting down the river with our guide and then laughing at eachother as we each got a turn to try it out. As a side note, punting is deceptively hard. You stand on the back of the little canoe thing, stick this long pole into the water, let it touch the bottom of the river and then push yourself forward with it. The trick is to not lean it one way or the other and also not to fall out into the water (which apparently my friend Jackson did a couple days ago!)

Anyway, there we were having a merry old time of it and Jacqueline was punting and I was on the other end of the boat, sitting on the stern or whatever its called taking pictures with her camera. 1. she wanted pictures of herself punting and 2. I was taking the opportunity to take stalker pictures of all the hipster professional punting crews. Brendan and I had the idea to make a 12 month calender out of these photographs. Clearly a worthy cause.

So then we were mooring (that's right MOORING as in docking) on the side of the river at our own private  little king's collage boat dock and Jacqueline was still punting and I thought 'hey! I'll just hop out really fast and get a picture of Jacqueline punting in front of King's Collage and it will be absolutely epic and the best picture ever." Here is what such a picture might have looked like : 

Except that obviously the boat would have been right on this side of the river. But this would have been the backdrop

Sadly, this did not come to pass. I hopped out of the boat no problem but Brendan who was holding the camera (and no doubt not quite keeping up with my unbridled enthusiasm--I will admit I was a little hyper) reached to hand it to me and somehow our hands didn't connect and the camera fell in the water. It wasn't his fault or mine I don't think, it was more just this epic fumble. Brendan reached in and grabbed the camera before it sunk.

Jacqueline was really nice about it and we ran to the groccery store to get some rice to put it in and are hoping that the water will be absorbed and maybe it will still work but my hopes aren't high. I just feel really stupid and really horrible that I did that to her camera. If only it had been my own that I dropped!

So yeah. My first melancholy blog and now I know that bad things really do happen in England as well. 

But that was yesterday right? Today I had a great seminar on how the developed western world by maintaining policies of NGO funded 'self-reliance' campaigns in the global south is actually perpetuating the circle of unending war that exists all over the world. 

A typical tourist-y day punting on the Cam
(and yes, I already know the irony of the fact that I dropped a CAMera in the CAM river thank you)