.
We were joined soon enough by others and soon were busy talking with a young Chinese couple (she: studying for an MBA at Cambridge; he: a foreign service officer visiting from Beijing), a very young grandmother recently returned to live in Cambridge after several years in London, and another local resident who joined us after waiting inside the walled complex (as mystified as we had been in his isolation on the other side of the gateway).
Our collective position at the head of the line assured us entry to the choir area for the late morning Christmas Day Sung Eucharist service, featuring choir, organ and a small string ensemble and performed with all the “high church” pageantry imaginable. We sat close to the altar at the far eastern end of the nave, the perfect location from which to hear and observe all the various goings-on.
The service itself was beautiful, built around a Mozart mass played and sung masterfully. Although not as crowded as the Christmas Eve service of Lessons and Carols, many participants, including us, really liked this service better, encompassing as it did a totally involving and complete worship experience. For us, it essentially striped our celebration of Christmas down to its bare essence, a very nice place to be, indeed!
We had Christmas Dinner at Browns, one of the few local establishments even open on this important religious holiday.
Later we strolled around town, seeking out holiday decorations (of which there were precious few in reality), finally returning to our Guest House in the early evening.
With little else to help pass the time, we ended up, in our cramped but comfortable quarters, just watching Christmas specials on the BBC before, once again, succumbing to an early “witching hour” and drifting off to sleep much sooner than has usually been the case.
Boxing Day dawned bright, sunny and quite chill. Since the local buses were, as they had been the day before on Christmas, not running at all, we once again hiked into town.
The next couple of hours passed quickly in the company of an excellent local guide who took us on a very informative and interesting historic walking tour.
That evening we went to experience “Jack and the Beanstalk” done up as an all-singing-all-dancing Pantomime, an impossible to describe but extremely popular cross-generational entertainment especially associated with the end-of-the-year holidays. We had a blast – and yet another early-to-bedtime to follow!
And so ended our lengthy bifurcated sojourn in
Look for some concluding observations sometime soon!
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