Life and the Triangle
by Josh Staiger
Last Sunday afternoon, I decided to pay a visit to the Sarah P. Duke Gardens in Durham. That place is awesome - plenty of nice places to walk or to sit and read and ponder about Darwin's theory of evolution. It's also free.
Lately I've been finding quite a few gems like that in the Triangle. You just have to know where to look.
While I was in the area, I decided to scope out Duke's campus, as that was something that I wanted to do before I left town. The verdict: The chapel and the area immediately around the chapel are fucking *amazing*. The architecture there is absolutely beautiful. However, other than that I wasn't all that impressed with the campus as a whole. Outside of the chapel area, it seemed more like a series of isolated buildings with parking lots than an actual campus. I think that it would be a good place to go for grad school, but probably not for undergrad.
After my tour of the three major universities in the Triangle, I still think that I like UNC's the best overall.
In other news, I finished reading Solaris. I really liked it a lot. Initially, at parts I thought that it dragged a bit with long fictional scientific explainations of made-up formations in the Ocean, however after finishing the enire book, I see why those parts were necessary to the theme of Science contrasted with love and the human emotion. I especially liked the last chapter a lot. I think that it framed the whole book very well. Highly recommended.
I have started reading the second Harry Potter book: The Chamber of Secrets, and it has really pulled me in so far.
Ahh... less than two weeks remain of my stay down here.