Today starts a new chapter in my life. In fact, I am now writing from my new room, which is going to be my home for the next 4 years. I arrived in Cambridge on Friday (now is Sunday). I came here by car from Turin with my parents. It took us 3 days, as we stopped in the France to visit a winery in the Champagne region and the nostalgic shores of Dunkirk. My room is located in Leckhampton, the postgraduate site of Corpus Christi College. The site is just a 10 minute walk from the old building in the centre of town. There is a long driveway with secular trees that guide you towards the entrance of the campus. The place looks like a country house of some british aristocrat. It consists of a large area of land covered in very curated grass, willow and other trees typical of a mixed deciduous woodland. Scattered across the hectares of this forestry there are Edwardian buildings, in which there are ca. 6 rooms where students live. At the end of the driveway, almost in the middle of the grove, there is Leckhapton House (picture below).
Leckhampton This is the social hub of the campus. Inside there is a living room a dining hall, a bar, a cafeteria and a music room. My room is in one of the red-bricked buildings that surround Leckhampton. It can be reached from Leckhampton House through a short path covered by chestnut trees. The room is cosy and has everything that I need. Now it gets cold and humid in the night. I hope that when the heaters will be turned on it will get warmer. Overall I already love the place. For me, that I have always been living in big cities, it feels like being in an elvish woodland realm. There is quite a large population of squirrels here as well. They keep on running around looking for chestnuts on the ground. When a chestnut falls from a tree, several squirrels race towards it. The first to arrive at the precious nut takes it and jumps quickly to his tree. I am trying to become friend with the squirrels by feeding them with pecan nuts. These last two days I went out with shelled pecan nuts around sunset time. They are still afraid of me so they do not take the nuts from my hand but wait until I leave them on the ground. I hope that if I keep on doing this everyday, eventually I will manage to hand them the food.