Yale

I went to New Haven last Tuesday. I would not usually go to a place like New Haven on a vacation. I've had enough of ghetto fr West Philly to last me a long while. But I went to New Haven because my good friend, Damien, is a grad student in Yale. And since Yale grad students are very busy, I had to make the trip to New Haven to visit Damien.


Damien doesn't like his photo taken. Esp if the photographer is taking it from his 'bad side'. Damien, I think you look like Takeshi Kaneshiro in this 'bad' picture. Maybe it's the hand...
Yale is really really pretty. It's like a very very rich Cambridge. Cambridge on steroids. You wldn't think New Haven is ghetto at all if you just stuck to the Yale campus like I did. There are dorms in Yale where the food halls serve organic food. Organic food! How about dorm rooms designed by Ian Schrager?



This is the entrance to the library.

I expected to see a choir of angels singing when I walked in and looked at the ceiling. It makes my head spin just to think how privileged these college kids are. The annual funding for this library alone is probably more than what an entire city university in Indonesia uses in a year, even if you included what gets siphoned away by corruption. This is why the best American college education is the best tertiary education in the world, bar none. Everthing else is good but too poor to maximise its potential, quite rich but government-funded or worse, run by religious organisations or just plain rubbish.

The Memorial Gateway of Branford College. Seniors walk though the Gate on Commencement Day. They say if you walk through the gate before then, you will not be able to graduate. That's like the compass on Locust Walk at Penn.

When I saw this building, I said to Damien, "omigod, that's such a dumb design. Why wld anyone build a building with no windows?!" Damien didn't know what building it was so we went to check it out. Turns out it's the Beinecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library (aha! that's why they don't need windows!) and it's one of the most amazing buildings I've ever seen.


When I entered the building, the beauty of the place made me gasp. There is a glass tower right in the middle of the room. It rises to the ceiling, filled with rows and rows of books. Even the Gutenberg Bible is here. And then there's the light. It's hard to believe that the marble panels that glow with soft rose light and make the room feel luminous and otherwordly are the same formidable slabs that made the building look like a mausoleum from the outside.