PGH Walkabout with Dan

Dan finally headed west and as I had to work all weekend, we tried to pack in as much as possible today.  First stop was Oakland ... get a big bang for our buck.  After an obligatory stop for coffee and pumpkin donuts we headed over to Pitt's Campus. 

If you look closely you can see Dan poking out from behind Dippy's leg (the only proof I have that he was here for the weekend). 

The first official stop of the morning was the Cathedral of Learning. This building is not only the easiest part of Pitt's campus to notice, but is also on the National Register of Historic Places.  Built in 1926, it is the tallest educational building in the Western hemisphere and the second tallest university building in the world.

While the building is primarily used for classroom and administrative space, it also contains the 29 Nationality Rooms.  The rooms are used as classrooms on a daily basis, but are also part of a larger intercultural exchange program.  Throughout the year different lectures and seminars are held in relation to the room they represent.  Because Friday classes were in session, we probably saw about half the rooms including the Ukrainian room below. 

If you take the elevator to the top (well to the 40th floor) you are graced with some awesome views of the city.  Here we have Schenley Park and the Botanical Gardens (something we checked out later in the afternoon).

A few windows over you have a view of Oakland all the way to East Liberty.  Things are obviously much easier to point out in person, but you can you can even see my neighborhood in the distance.  

After covering most of what we could in the Cathedral, we poked out heads into the Heinz Chapel (a gift from Henry John Heinz and a nondenominational chapel on Pitt's campus) before crossing the street to have lunch at the Conflict Kitchen. 

The rest of the afternoon was a complete blur and included getting lost in the bowels of Carnegie Mellon University, seeing a Chihuly original in the Botanical Gardens and peering over the dinosaur exhibit from the Carnegie Library.  After 13,000 steps, the tired couple headed off in search of local brews and some dinner.