Episode IV: The Towers

And now... the moment you have all been waiting for... (0r at least the moment Mom has been waiting for...) Pictures of THE JAYHAWKER TOWERS! That is, pictures of the place where I'm living.

There are four towers, with six or seven stories each, and maybe ten units per floor. Each unit consists of four rooms, including two bedrooms. Floorplans can be found here.

A guy I know who comes from Costa Rica calls them the “yay-hawk towers,” and my roommate once had a letter sent to him with the address “Jay Hock tower”. The official name is The Jayhawker Towers, although people in the know just call them The Towers.

I don’t really consider them to be dorms, since they have two bedrooms, a bathroom, a living room and a kitchen; but I don’t consider them to be apartments either, since they are owned by the university and rent out by the school year. A friend insists that they are “townhouses.” I should note that while I requested the all-graduate tower, I was given the everybody-except-freshmen-allowed tower, with a graduate student as a roommate. Thus far things have worked just fine.

Here are a couple pictures of the bedroom, which I share with a guy from Ireland. The one thing you don't really see in the pictures is my bed.



The kitchen, which is a good thing to have, is at least in one way a step up from the Norris family kitchen: the broiler actually works.



Below is a picture of my tower (Tower D) with Tower C in the background. If you enlarge the picure by clicking on it you will see that I have circled the windows that belong to our rooms. Likewise on the picture at the top of this page, my room is the one on the top left (with the light on.) An interesting sidenote: my wireless headphones work all the way out to where I took these pictures, which means I can continue listening to the radio or TV or whatnot all the way across the street.
















One interesting thing about living in the everyone-allowed dorms is that a number of athletes live in them. Particularly, it seems that football players like our tower. Here are side to side pictures of an athlete's living room (posted in the athletic museum) and our living room for you to compare and contrast. Note that the only everything in our living room (except the sound system) was brought by my suitemates and was already here before I even arrived.

My favorite interior design element of the place can be seen below. For some strange reason, every time you walk in the door you get this uncanny feeling that John Travolta and Samuel L. Jackson are pointing guns right at your mid-section.

Well that's all for now. I will update this after I get a couple more pictures, but for now, I leave you with a nice little view from our living room window.

Episode III: The Game

Episode III, Part I: The Game

The first KU football game of the season! (I just had to buy season football/basketball tickets). I witnessed more school spirit in four minutes at Memorial Stadium than I had in four years at Cal State Fullerton (and we were 2004 baseball champs, mind you). Of course school spirit is nice, but after the second or third school chant and/or song of the night, I couldn't help comparing the scene to something one would observe at a Nazi party rally or such.

Below you will see a balding gentleman in the foreground of the picture. This guy wanted to kick Emery and me out of our "seats" (in quotation because the student section all stands on their seats). He went as far as to challenge me to a fight, although I respectfully declined. Also included is a picture of Emery and me at the game, and clearly, the guy would have been in trouble if we took him up on his offer.

Incdentally, there were two items of further interest related to this scenario: first, we wound up finding some unoccupied seats in the non-student section which meant (a) we got to sit, and (b) we got to sit by the basketball team (below is a picture of Emery chilling with KU's starting point guard). Second, the very same balding guy wound up sitting right in front of us during the last few minutes of the game, at which time I snapped his picture. Once he realized I had taken a picture of him, he promptly challenged me to a fight.

And oh yeah, KU won 49-18.




Episode III, Part II: Iowa

After the game we drove straight to Iowa. Besides a few gas stations (which were generally closed) the thing that really struck me about Iowa was absolutely nothing.

I figure I should show some pictures of wildlife from Iowa, so below you will find Stephanie Moody riding a horse, and then Thomas Kuhn riding a horse (note the look in his eyes).







Extra Credit: Lecompton

On the ride back I happened upon this historic monument to Lecompton, former capital of Kansas Territory, current population: 600. Had Kansas become a slave state, Lecompton would have become the state capital; but as it was, the free-state folks gained power and chose Topeka as the new capital. And so it is today.