Cambridge-MIT Exchange

American Breakfast Sundays

Since the first American Brunch Sunday with CMEs who craved old fashioned American-style sweet breakfast food, we've started a brunch revolution.

I mean ... gotta make good use of this huge set/room I've got for this year and this year only :)

Therefore, brunch parties every weekend. Solid.
It's always potluck-style with ingredients - Alexa's getting bread, Jade's bringing juice, Chris has got eggs, etc.
and works amazingly well. Each time we end up having a bit of variation, although you can't really go wrong as long as you have bread, eggs, and some sort of fruit. Oh, powdered sugar and syrup is a must - until Alex and Anna introduced nutella and whipped cream into the equation. Now I've got an accumulating stock of King's cafeteria silverware/glasses, plus two jars of maple syrup, a box of powdered sugar, and three containers of nutella in my cupboard. Looks like brunch will be happening every weekend from now on ...

Sunday, 11/8

Sunday, 11/15

Saturday, 11/21

Sunday, 11/22

Saturday, 11/28

aw, we finally all fit around one table!

Holiday SPIRIT

Alexa, Michaela, and I, being Americans, have been raised in the overly-commercialized, Hallmark-monopolized, decorations-ridden, color-explosion world of HOLIDAY SPIRIT ... and WE LOVE IT.

So, when we come to Europe, we DO NOT let the lackluster "yay .. er .. Christmas .." (spoken in ~5dB) stop us from our (somewhat premature) festivities.

We could not WAIT to celebrate Thanksgiving and Christmas, so we got a little headstart mid-November.
(oh, and Halloween too.)

PIES. Pies are essential. We have ovens. Why not make pies? They're easier than cooking an entire turkey. Plus, we'd been severely craving pumpkin pies since Halloween. So ... we embarked on our cooking adventure, the entirety of which ended up being a 4-hour endeavor. YESS.

[all the tasty spices ... smell the HOLIDAY SPIRIT!]

[making pumpkin pies ... from scratch]

[pumpkin pies, fresh out of the oven]

[pies, milk, whipped cream, roasted pumpkin seeds ... check]

[DELICIOUSNESS]

[festive pies with the Americans]

[PIE TIME]

[Market Square Cambridge city Christmas lights "Big Turn On"]

[11/15 lighting of Christmas lights in Market Square :D]

[Market Square with a ... sheet? of lights]

See, even people in overly-holiday-eager America would say 11/15 was a bit too early to light up the town with Christmas lights ... I say it's never too early.

In my book, the existence of each year is simply 10 months of waiting for October to roll around so we can start GETTING IN THE CHRISTMAS SPIRIT AGAIN!!!

King's Toga Party

The weekend following the Communist Party, King's bar had a Toga party to celebrate the imminent opening of a Kingsman's play "When In Rome" ...

An unsurprisingly large number of people own white bedsheets and went to the effort of haphazardly (in some cases, quite intricately and impressively) wrapping themselves in them before coming down to the bar.

Good times.

[King's Toga Party - bar, cleared area for dancefloor]

[Louisa, Juan]

[Nadia inherited a sheet and I found one abandoned on the ground = Greek for the rest of the night.]

[Greeks at heart]

[hahahahahha]

[King's Bar = dancefloor with live DJ]

[aftermath, or what it must have seemed like to any townspeople still awake: people running around Cambridge streets in the middle of the night, chasing each other while wrapped in large white sheets. wtf?]

Formals & Swaps

formal n.
Dinner event at Cambridge University. Entails semiformal attire: suit-jacket/tie, dresses. Usually a 3-course meal is served with wine and post-dessert coffee/chocolates. Uber posh.

(see Halloween formal post)

Depending on which college it is, formal halls happen from daily to weekly to bi-weekly, even. King's has formal hall every Wednesday night - I've gone to 2 of them. They're pretty costly, but good fun, what with candles, formal dress, a 3-course meal, wine, delectable dessert, and endless pennying, all served inside a medieval castle of a dining hall.

pennying v.
1. Maneuvering a 1pence coin into your friend's (preferably full or empty) wine glass. Consequence: they have to down their glass; if it's empty, it has to be filled to the rim and downed.
2. A unique Cambridge tradition.
3. Endless entertainment.

The Guide to Pennying
- penny in wine glass = down the glass
- penny in empty wine glass = fill the glass, down it
- 2nd penny in glass = pennier downs their glass
- 3rd penny in glass = whole table downs their glasses
- penny in wine bottle = get ready for a forgotten night
(note this can only be accomplished with an "engineer's penny" - a bent 1p coin to fit into the bottle opening)
- 5 pence in dessert = no hands allowed!
* pennying is invalid if the glass is in hand or the dessert's already been started

Ways to Penny Your Friend (or Stranger sitting next to you)
- drop in a p when they're not looking
- free-throw across the table
- sneak it in by pretending to reach for the water pitcher
- wrestle them down and dunk it in their glass
- fight them
- ask them to pass the sugar bowl with both hands and plunk it in
- fast as a lightning bolt when they've just finished the glass and are picking up the bottle to refill

---------------------------

Got a couple of ins with other MIT students also doing CME (Cambridge-MIT Exchange) ... basically since all the CME kids are at different colleges, this means we get to go to each others' formals pretty easily :)

Couple of the last formals:

11/02 Pembroke iCUSU formal
11/11 King's formal hall
11/14 Trinity formal hall
11/17 Selwyn formal hall

---------------King's College formal

[King's formal]

funny story about this formal: so I'm sitting in the bar, having just finished dinner and about to take a nap while others dine, so I can be fully energized and ready to go once everybody gets out of formal. Naiara comes around asking if anybody wants a free ticket.
"Why?" ...
"cause we know we can't sell it now." (It's like ... 15 minutes before formal starts, haha.)
"eh ... well, we all just ate ..."
"yeah, I gotta do work"
"I'm writing a paper"
....
"Ok how about this: you try to find someone who really wants the ticket. If you can't find someone within the next 5 mins, I'll take it."
So at this point I sit back, relax, and expect the chances I'll have to rush back to my room and change for formal are pretty slim.
7:21pm - I get the ticket. Oh snap.
[fast walk back to room, change into formal wear, get back to hall]
7:28pm - standing outside hall.