Just up the Road

Just up the road is a very famous university and tourist attraction - Stanford. According to the Jiao Tong world rankings, it came in #3 in 2010 behind Harvard and Berkeley (just up the bay). We visited it yesterday Sunday) for a quick look and found it flooded with tourists rather than students. My first impression was that it was trying very hard to look like Oxford or Cambridge, with its religious feel, cloisters, sandstone buildings, quadrangles, and green environment. It also had lots of sculptures the likes of Rodin and Moore out in the open for both public view and erosion by the elements. Have a look at a few pictures and let me know what you think:

Of course, in the workaday world lying behind the facade there was some, what one might call, brutalist architecture so beloved of university administrations:

And, even more surprisingly, we came across a garden full of Papua New Guinea totem poles. I can't recall the provenance of this feature, but it was a joy to look at and wander through. Indeed, we found a geocache buried inside the garden, though I won't say exactly where so that I do not spoil you pleasure of looking for it. We looked for 4 caches at Stanford and found three of them! Do you notice something strange about several of the photos? Those from down under would recognise the stringy bark trees instantly. The whole campus is dotted with Eucalypts. We also stumbled across a rather large python or similar - we didn't hang around to ask its species.

AS