| Ally has decided to attend Bowdoin College in the Fall, and she, Laurie and I made a visit to see the campus, take the tour and get acquainted with the College. |
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| We started out very early on Friday, April 17th to visit Bowdoin College. Laurie and Ally were treated to a rare (for them) sunrise. It was a beautful day for the visit, warming to near 70 degrees, sunny and clear. |
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| However, we were in Maine and did manage to find one snow pile doggedly hanging on behind Hubbard Hall. |
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| Finding snow on the warmest day of Spring should have come as no surprise on the campus of a school whose mascot is the Polar Bear! The stuffed one was brought back from the expedition of Robert Peary, a Bowdoin graduate, on his quest to be the first to reach the North Pole. |
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| The quad is the center of student life outdoors, and is surrounded by the library, classroom buildings, dorms, student union buildings and the Walker Art Building. |
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| Hubbard Hall was the original library at Bowdoin, and part of it still houses the majority of the school's collection, another part serving as offices and classrooms for the government, legal studies, economics and history departments. |
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| The Hawthorne-Longellow library, named after two illustrious Bowdoin graduates, houses the colleges humanities, periodicals and government documents collections, as well as providing study rooms and carrels. There are music, art, science and foreign language libraries on campus as well. |
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| Memorial Hall houses the theatre department, and was built as a memorial for the college's Civil War dead. Bowdoin sent more men to the Northern Armies, and suffered more casualties, than any other college in the nation. |
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| The chapel is a beautiful structure inside and out, which also houses the American Musicological Society and the Center for the Common Good. There are murals depicting biblical scenes around the walls over the monastic-like stalls, including the one above of the lame man being healed by Ss. Peter and John in the Jerusalem Temple. |
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| The Walker Art Building houses the Bowdoin Art Museum, which has many impressive items; we couldn't take any photos inside, but it does include Assyrian bas reliefs, Greco-Roman artifacts and paintings from the colonial through contemporary periods from American artists such as Winslow Homer, Ansel Adams and Andy Warhol. |
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| By mid-afternoon, it seemed that half the student body was relaxing on the quad, as temperatures climbed into the high 60s and typical outdoor college activities (sunbathing, frisbee, and ball playing) came to dominate. |
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| At the end we visited both the new and old ice arenas; Ally, of course, hopes to spend plenty of time in the new arena, which opened in January of this year. |
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| The arena was not being used for skating when we went inside however; students were gearing up for Robocup, whose goal is "By the year 2050, develop a team of fully autonomous humanoid robots that can play and win against the human world champion soccer team." Bowdoin is hosting the U.S. Open this year. |