Yale and Pizza

We're travelling well together and beginning to master the art of compromise. In New Haven, Connecticut, I got another Ivy League university, and Daniel got ... pizza. Nice juxtaposition, no? In fact, these are about the only things that New Haven is renowned for - we got the feeling the rest of it was a bit of a dump.

As most Yale students and alumni will tell you, Yale University is far superior to Harvard. As a somewhat objective outsider, I agree. If I was to go to any university in America this would be it, and not just because it has a superb medieval studies center. Most of the campus feels medieval, even though the bulk of it was built at the beginning of the twentieth-century. The architect and I would have got along like a house on fire. His neo-gothic buildings have fake cracks in the windows. Some of the glass panes are coloured, so as to look as if they have been replaced. The roof tiles were buried under Long Island Sound for two years before being laid, and he poured acid down the stone walls to make them look weathered. Cool guy.

Yale University

Colour at Yale

Back in the day you weren't considered much of a neo-gothic architect until you'd built a cathedral. Yale didn't need one, so he built them a library. Except it's a cathedral. But, cathedrals weren't worth their chop unless they'd been though hell (think the dissolution of the monasteries, world wars etc). So, Mr. Architect finished the building, then took to the top of it with a blowtorch. Seriously - it's covered in black scorch marks. There are also a number of statue-less statue nooks, suggesting that the statues have been plundered when in fact there were never any there to begin with. It honestly has to be the coolest library on the planet, but we didn't get any photos of it. Idiots.

If New Haven does a good university, it does an even better pizza. Locals will tell you that Connecticut pizza is better than NYC pizza - we'll give you our judgement on that towards the end of our trip. There's a few specific pizza institutions in New Haven, and on the recommendation of a local we went to Sally's Apizza. Luckily we got there early and only had to wait about twenty minutes for a table - by the time we finished up, there was a line around the corner. The walls inside were covered in photos of and letters from famous people (i.e. Frank Sinatra) that have eaten there since Sally's opened in the 1930s. Daniel and I shared a pepperoni, though I use the term shared loosely since I only had two slices of the behemoth below.

Before

After

Needless to say there was nearly half a pizza left, which Daniel enjoyed for breakfast the next day. Our waiter at Sally's, Lorenzo, was also our entertainment for the evening. The guy had an encyclopaedic knowledge of Australian rock music and intermittently gave us clues as to his favourite band of all time. At the end of our pizza we were still stumped - when he named the band as "The Church" and we proclaimed we'd never heard of them, he told us he was going to revoke our passports and kicked us out of the restaurant. Almost. He and another waiter were asking us about our trip and seemed immensely jealous, telling us it was the trip of a lifetime and something that all Americans should do, but never would. We're getting that reaction a lot. Lucky bastards.