Yale

 

Yale University Notes: A brief recap

Yale is kind of like Oxford picked up and placed in New England, with new versions of the buildings. It is truly a new version of England (hence, New England). Where Oxford's buildings go back to the 1200s, the Yale buildings are from the late 1800s and into the 1900s. But they look old, and were designed to look old. You know how Disney designs their buildings to look old or from other countries? Yale did it first. A long time ago....

The stone buildings are full of architectural details and carvings reminiscent of England's similar buildings. The colleges are set-up like Oxford, with the gates and privacy for those students who live there. Behind the gates are beautiful, serene, open-air quads and places to walk.

It is said that Yale is the place of the first quadrangle in America. The campus is such an enjoyable place to walk around, and in the three days I was there, Ina and I walked all over the campus several times in a day. I like that. It is pretty compact, at least in the downtown section. Which means I got to be around all this beauty all day.

The downtown is part of campus, and very close by is the Sterling Memorial Library and the Beinecke Rare Book Library, which are literary havens for someone like me. They are completely different in architecture, with Sterling being modeled as a cathedral and the Beinecke a modern cube with thin panels to allow light (but not UV rays) into the library. They are both beautiful in different ways. But also the Commons Dining Hall, the bell tower (which only rings twice a day, but I heard the bells as I passed by it at least three times), and the classroom buildings where Ina and I snuck into a Philosophy class. 
More to come. I have to separate topics in different posts or this one would be a mile long. Seriously.