New Haven, CT - Yale University

One of the main reasons why we chose to visit New Haven of all the places in Connecticut was because we had wanted to see Yale University. Yeah...we've got this thing about universities and university towns =P

The very first thing we did when we arrived was to sign ourselves up for the campus tour. The tour is conducted 352 days a year! Twice a day on weekdays - at 10.30am and 2pm and at 1.30pm on Saturdays and Sundays. The tours are conducted by student volunteers.

This is where all the campus tours start - the Yale Visitor Center on Elm Street.

The entire walking tour took approx 1hr 20min.

This was where we entered the university compound.
Our tour guide (in purple tank top)- a petite young lady who's a freshman and very very eloquent. She had many interesting stories to share which made the tour even more interesting. The statue is of Nathan Hale who was a patriotic American spy and Yale graduate.
The campus is very pretty - lots of greenery and interesting buildings.



And the below statue is of Theodore Dwight Woolsey who was the president of Yale from 1846 to 1871. There's a belief that you'll have good luck if you were to rub his protruding feet. Generations of students and visitors have been rubbing his feet until that part of the statue is so much shinier!
Innovative way to advertise - drawing/writing with chalk on a heavy-traffic pathway.
A very busy bulletin board....

One of the structures that I really like is the Harkness Tower. It's very gothic looking.









We bumped into Batman who offered to help us cross the road.....cute!
The below is the Sterling Memorial Library that looks like a chapel from the outside. It's known as the "cathedral of learning".

The library looks like a cathedral on the inside too!
And where the "altar" is, that's where students check-out the books.
It has to be one of the most interesting libraries I've ever seen!


This is another library - Beinecke Rare Books & Manuscripts library. It's a modernist design and the walls are actually translucent marble.

The library houses the oldest and most precious books in the Yale library system. The books are all kept in a special temperature and humidity-controlled room. The most prized book in the library is the original Gutenberg 2-volume Bible.












The university is huge and kinda sprawls across the whole of New Haven. It'd take at least a good half of a day to properly see the whole campus. Again, good shoes are essential and dress casually if you wanna blend in with the students. A very lovely campus indeed!