land of the pine! (i)

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lots of traveling lately, and as of the chicago trip i've kinda caught the shutterbug... bug. anyway, these pics are from my trip to the durham/raleigh area. specifically: my trip to duke univ and its medical center.

it's kinda weird for me to find a world-class university like Duke in the middle of ABSOLUTELY NOWHERE. but well, there you have it!

anyway, i flew in on the red eye, leaving SFO at 12:30am wednesday night. well, technically thursday morning. after about 3 hours, we landed in houston to change planes. houston's actually a pretty big airport:



It's kind of amusing to me that the pics I took from Houston were all weirdly unfocused and hazy, which is totally appropriate because I was feeling completely unfocused and hazy after getting woken up at what was essentially 3-4am for me and made to march down a pretty vast distance to my next flight.

That pic above is, btw, just like... the tail end of terminal E. The terminals are pretty weird -- all lined up and kinda oddly shaped -- but terminal C, I believe, is the largest. All the terminals are really swanky and modern.

And yet!

As you're walking through terminal C, there's almost no way to miss this statue, which sits RIGHT after the security gates. The only way you can be in Houston and not see this, in fact, is if your transfer gates are right next to each other and nowhere close to the main center of the airport. However, I swear to god they actually plan your transfers so you have to walk by, because I've seen this every time I've been at Houston:



Yessir, that is George the First. I didn't get a good look, but I wouldn't be surprised if he's holding a bible. He's about 8ft tall -- add in the base and he towers about 9 feet over us wee minions scurrying past. I love how he's got a David posture going, but the REALLY hilarious thing is when you walk around the side and realize this is what he actually looks like:



It's SUPERBUSH! Braving the winds of liberalism! Standing up for god, guns and gold!

The name of the statue, btw, is "Winds of Change".

After saying hi to George, I went on to my next flight. Weirdly enough, the 2.5 hour trip from Houston to Raleigh was made in a tiny little commuter jet like these:



-- but the little shits apparently fly very fast, because I was a good half-hour early into Raleigh. Right after we took off, it was about 730 houston time, so I caught these gorgeous pictures of the morning clouds afire with sunrise:





When I got into Raleigh, it was about 10am and I'd slept about 2-3 hours total across the whole night, interrupted, so I was dazed as fuck-all. It was really pretty country -- very green, even more green than california despite the winter. I don't think I've ever actually seen countryside like this before. There's a lot of brown-gold wildgrass, and lots and lots of trees. Upon closer inspection, I realized all the trees were wild pines -- but not the tall, straight alpine pines I'm used to from various camping trips. This is what the freeway from Raleigh-Durham airport to Duke looked like:



Kinda looked a bit like I-5 really close to the canadian border, actually.

When I got into Duke proper, I was too busy looking for the place I needed to be to take pictures. This is unfortunately the only pic I got of the architecture there, which was pretty awesome -- very east coast ivy-league-style, which in turn was modeled after Cambridge and Oxford. All grey stone and gothic towers, along with a good dose of fortress architecture -- crenellations and arrowslits and all. The main quad was quite beautiful, and I regret not getting a pic.

Anyway, here you go: Duke Chapel (it looked like a bloody cathedral, tbh) from the medical center area:



After that, I slapped some alertness back into myself and went off to a quick meeting. When I got out of that, I decided to drive around campus a bit before heading to my hotel. Duke was founded by some very wealthy tobacco barons. Their daughter Doris Duke was your quintessential southern debutante, and she apparently commissioned a gorgeous garden to run along the east side of the campus. I stopped off in there and took quite a few pictures. I'm sure it's even more lovely in the spring and summer, but these are the Duke Gardens in the dead of winter. This is the entrance area:



I think in the summer that central area would be filled with flowers. Right now it was filled with mud *LOL*

Continuing past the rotunda, the path opens out into a little forest park-type setting. There's a lot crammed in there -- it starts with an almost french-garden-type look, then rapidly moves into a more english, pastoral garden. This garden is literally in the middle of campus -- you can see the school's buildings from the path:



Here's a nice little stream-and-bridge:



And on the other side, that stream leads to a pond with a pretty big variety of ducks peacefully coexisting. You can't really make them out, but there are ducks on the left side of the pond -- mallards and wood ducks and the like.



I liked the red bridge :]

Coming back up, you could circle behind the forest-y area and find a japanese-ish garden there. There's a small clearing with a cherry tree in front of a pavilion, which must be really beautiful in the spring. It looked like hell in the picture, though, which I think wasn't at all the intent of the gardeners, so I left that snapshot out.

There was also a bamboo forest. In front of the bamboo forest were plum trees. Plums are always the first flowers to bloom in the bay, which is something I've always loved them for -- you see the plum blossoms in late january, early february, and you know spring is coming. The same thing seemed to be true in North Carolina. This is probably my favorite picture from the whole trip -- the very first plum blossom on the whole tree juxtaposed against the green bamboos in the background. I'm not sure why the image is tilted. That was an accident, not some ... artsy maneuver. Despite it, I like the way it came out.



Wandering into the little bamboo stand, I got this snap, which reminded me a bit of the panda preserve in Sichuan:



On my way out, I stopped by the visitor center, which was staffed by a single elderly, perfectly coiffed lady. She looked like she stepped off the set of Golden Girls -- snow white hair and perfect, vivid makeup, plus a soft southern drawl. It was awesome.

I gotta say, I liked the North Carolina accent. It wasn't as jarring and twangy as the southern accents farther south and west -- it was this very soft, classy drawl.

Anyway, outside of the visitor center, I took a pic of their fountain:



On my way off-campus, I snapped this pic of a tree-lined road pretty representative of the whole campus, except the central quad area --



Next up: "downtown" Durham, rural areas, and Raleigh airport!

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