I was originally planning to visit either Monticello or Montpelier while I was visiting Charlottesville, but I the plane/train delays threw a big wrench into that idea. I don't know if I would have made it there anyways, since Michael was so busy when I was visiting. He had a brief due on Thursday that he stayed up all night to work on. I guess I just have really bad timing in visiting people... =)

Since I had seen pretty much the whole campus (the grounds) the day before, I decided to tag along with him to see what law school was like...


Michael's locker. It's junior high all over again...


Michael's friend Nicole (sp?). Busy working on applications?


Michael's mailbox. An invitation to the prom is inside...hahaha.


Hey....I was there! It's the colliseum!
I stopped by a very small exhibit in the Law Library, and listened to the "dagger in the back" speech by FDR after Italy entered WWII. It was a very thought-provoking speech. The thing that I was wondering afterwards, though, was that FDR was giving the speech to new college grads. I wonder how many of them truly understood the matters of importance. I mean, my impression is that if you give a similar speech to students today, most of them would shrug it off and forget about it the next day. What does that say about us?


Just strolling around the law library, I pulled out a book and saw that it was an index. So for fun, I decided to take a picture of the first few entries...


Zoom out. A picture of the first page.


Zoom out. A picture of the first book.


Zoom out. A picture of the first shelf.


Zoom out. A picture of the first bookcase.


Zoom out. A picture of the first wall.


Zoom out. Sorry, the story ends here. They've started filling up the second wall, and they've left more space for it to expand...and remember, this is just a lookup index -- the actual books are elsewhere in the library. O.o


One thing I will say though, is that the inside of the law school was really nice. This is the main study area in the library, but the rest of the school had the same kind of feeling.


The outside. As I was taking pictures, another tourist came up and asked me to take a picture for him. He was Japanese and could hardly speak any English. I wonder what he was doing at the UVA School of Law....

The train ride back to DC was pretty uneventful. Much better than the train ride down. On the way to Charlottesville, I was talking to a nice lady who was originally from the Bay Area. I don't know what was going on, but I was so uncomfortable on the ride down. I was so hot (I later found out that I was pressing myself up against the heater....d'oh!).

Charlottesville is nice, but it definitely has a college town feeling. And there were a lot more asians walking around than I was expecting. Michael led me to believe that it was like 99.9% rich white people and he was the odd man out....haha....

Michael and I went out for some dinner in downtown Charlottesville. Downtown as in quaint little cobblestone road.


It's about 20 degrees, but people still wanna play indoor hockey...this is for you, Lawrence.


lol...Michael is such a rebel.


One of those nouveau art exhibits at one end of Main St. People can write whatever they want on it with the provided chalk. "British take us back Congress is ruining our country"


Some interesting tidbits....


"I hate Valentine's Day", "Get Over IT!" This was taken on the day after Valentine's, so there was a bunch of that kind of stuff going on. Also check out the leaf...


Time for some audience participation...What do YOU think this is a picture of?

The next morning I bundled myself up and Michael dropped me off on campus to do some exploring. It was another sunny day and I kept myself warm by criss-crossing the grounds several times. I had picked out a few landmarks to go see, but apparently you can get to a lot of places quickly even on foot, so I got to see everything I wanted to and more...


Inside of The Rotunda, which is the main thing to see on the campus. Designed by Thomas Jefferson...he designed the bookshelves to be behind the pillars so that they would be more inconspicuous. The timestamp on the camera means that I took the pictures for the day with my Sony camera. That's because I left my new (dinged-up) Canon at Michael's place...whoops...=p


A picture of The Lawn. Outstanding senior students get the opportunity to live in one of these rooms. It was a little incongruous to see random college paraphenelia (lawn chair, door mats) outside of these rooms. Also, apparently, the rooms don't have bathrooms, and you have to go out in the cold to one of the communal bathrooms... (!)


A building across the street from The Rotunda (on the opposite side of The Lawn). I saw the big "Z" on the steps and was like...that must be one of the fraternities...


The front of The Rotunda. There was some ice at the base of the statue that I had fun sliding around on a little.


The on-campus (or on-grounds, I should say) church. It was deserted when I went inside (Thursday morning) but there was a woman talking on a cell. I wonder what she thought of me...


I wandered into an exhibit on Russian children's literature. Is it just me or is this an Axis & Allies map? The caption says: How the Capitalists are Armed. I think our generation doesn't understand any more what it was like to live during the Cold War. Just like the generation that follows us doesn't understand what it was like to live before the internet...


This is an actual letter written by John Adams, the 2nd president of the United States. My goodness, it looks like it was written by a 10-year old. (It's not because of quill pens, either. For comparison, see John Binns' handwriting below).


The other side of The Rotunda from across The Lawn. The students are trekking to and from class. Ahhhh, college life.


The opposite end of The Lawn from The Rotunda.


The same building as before. I think it's called the Old Cabell Hall. What was nice about the campus (the grounds) was that it really had a great sense of architecture throughout the whole school. All the buildings had the same feel and felt like they all "fit" together. Stanford, in comparison, has the Gates building across the street from Packard.


So as I was walking around campus (the grounds), I saw another building with a big Z on the steps. Apparently, this was all over the place. It was even on the steps leading up to The Rotunda, but I didn't notice because I didn't walk down the steps. I still have no idea why they put Zs everywhere.


A small, medieval gladiator ring! Or, where Cloud and Aeris watch the play in the Golden Saucer. =)


All the buildings looked great, except for this one. This is Felicity's Psych building (shared with the Biology department). Yeah, it's pretty ugly, especially in comparison to all the other buildings. Pearline's got it made....



OK guys, I dare you to play basketball on this court......


I was walking around next to the side of a building (getting lost, I might add...), when I noticed all this water dripping off the roof.


I was like....where is all this water coming from? Doesn't this building have a gutter system? So I look up and lo and behold, the water is coming from sheets of melting ice. Then I realized...that could be dangerous if a sheet of ice decides to come down...


Near as I can tell, the main entrance to campus (the grounds). This is next to The Corner, where a lot of the students go to eat/shop, etc... I went to check out a bagel place Michael recommended. I think the only reason why the bagel seemed better was that it was all toasty...yum...



If you thought basketball was bad, I wanna see Amy play soccer on this field!!


So I ran out of stuff to do and Michael wasn't done with classes yet. So I tried to find my way back to his place. Here is the road I came up, with the sidewalk moderately cleared...


Here is the road as it continued. It got worse...you can still see some sidewalk in this picture. When people cleared the driveways, they just piled up the snow without caring about the sidewalks at all. The big roll of snow in the foreground (and the one about next to the Marlboro sign) are almost waist high, and I had to basically climb over them. It had to have been some city dividing line or something, the difference was ridiculous.

I don't have any pictures, but in trying to get to Michael's apartment, there was this narrow road that went through a small tunnel underneath these railroad tracks. The road was not even wide enough to really fit two cars side by side in the tunnel, so I was really apprehensive about walking that route. But the only other way would be for me to take a looooong way around. I climbed up a small hill and briefly contemplated crossing the train tracks, but the way the land was, I'd have to walk on the train tracks for a bit, and then I had no idea how I'd get down the steep slope on the other side.

I eventually went for the narrow road and thankfully no cars went up or down the road while I was on it.....whew!

Gyaaaah! OK, I'm sitting down and forcing myself to write about my trip...

So, I stayed at the Red Roof Inn when I was stuck in Baltimore, and when I got there after the long, exhausting day I had (see my previous posts), I asked them if there was someplace to eat nearby. Being the genius I am, I of course did not really have anything to eat all day. So they told me that there was a restaurant/sports bar at the Marriott across the street. I go over there, and a guy who was also staying at the Red Roof Inn who saw me walking over there sat down with me. He's an attorney from the Chicago area (apparently, according to Michael, this is not uncommon behavior for lawyerly-types). Then he proceeds to order some beers. Of course, I stupidly succumb to the peer pressure (even though he's not my peer...hahaa). So there I am, drinking a beer, nothing in my stomach, and since the place is so crowded, the service is slow and the food takes FOREVER to get out.

When I finally get back to the inn, I had a moderate hangover and I had another whole day of travel to look forward to. I couldn't go to sleep, so I explored the inn (outside, see the pictures of my foggy breath), and found a bottle of water to down. Basically, I turned a crappy end of the day into an even crappier day, all because I was too afraid to stick up to my principles. That's something I really need to work on.

Thankfully, I woke up the next day not feeling all that bad (I think I fell asleep at 3 and ended up waking up at 6 or something) and got ready to experience the joys of Amtrak.

This is a nice picture, but it doesn't show how freakin' cold it was. I guess the temperature wasn't that bad, but there was a really brisk wind blowing from the north, so as soon as you stepped away from the south side of any building, you just got blasted. This poor guy had to shovel all the snow off the platform (although I guess he might be fairly warm due to all the exertion). One of the conductors even mentioned that this was the nicest platform he came across that day because all the other platforms were all filled with snow and slush.

Apart from him there was also this lady standing out in the freezing wind with only an umbrella to protect her. Simply crazy.... There was a section of the platform which was covered and which everybody huddled inside while they waited for the train. I don't know why she decided to wait at the far end of the platform (where the shovelling guy hadn't even reached yet).


Train tracks are weird. I don't remember there being very many turns when I take Caltrain to the city. But there are certain stretches of track where the train is definitely tilted in one direction. It's kinda hard to see in this picture, but it almost looks like the train is going to fall over. And it's not like the train is going very fast since it just pulled out of the station, so the tracks don't really need to be banked or anything. When I was on the train to D.C., there were definitely portions of straight track where the train was leaning to the left...weird...

Visual evidence of the wind. Southwards, you can get a good view of the tracks. To the north, all you can see is the ice and slush the wind has covered the window with.

This is of the upper level of Union Station, where some of the fancier restaurants are. It was nice to be able to walk around a look at a lot of the stuff (although toting the luggage around too was not that nice. This was about the time that I decided that walking around D.C. with my luggage after coming up from Charlottesville was not going to work). Learning my lesson from the previous day, I made sure to eat plenty of yummies since it lunch time and the train was not due for a couple hours. I think I had a cinnamon bun and a banana/walnut muffin. Yum.

So I finally get to Charlottesville, and of course since the train is delayed then I've thrown everybody's schedule out of whack and Michael can't come to pick me up anymore. And I call Felicity to see if she can pick me up, but she can't because she just got a call from the airline that her flight has been cancelled and she's scrambling to reschedule. Once she got everything sorted out, she called me and said she was on her way. Of course, out there, it means that she has to shovel the driveway and wait for her car to warm up...I think she ended up showing up about 40 minutes after she said she was out the door...hahaha.

It was all good...it was a sunny day (but still cold) and I took a lot of pictures. And knocked over my camera and broke my tripod...boooo...

Felicity gave me a whirlwind tour of the grounds and then we met up with Michael & Co for some dinner. It was nice to finally put my luggage down and enjoy having arrived!! =)