Sunday, June 11, 2006
Philadelphia Trip
the day finally came when we finally decided to depart to philadelphia! we went to find my cousin, yewzhen who was studying at university of pennsylvania. she was kind enough to provide us with one night of lodging! yay! it was supposedly a 5 hour drive which passes by 2 states, maryland and delaware before finally reaching pennsylvania. our trip lasted for 2 days from 24th-25th May 2006.
armed with all our barang barangs.. on the way to enterprise to rent the car!
some photos we took along the way... we took like 6 hours to get there in the end... yicui was the one who was driving all along.. kudos man! i was the navigator and i must say long drives are really horrendous, even though we did get to stop and rest. it's hard to keep yourself awake on long and straight roads... zzz... and i mean like LONG LONG LONG roads. 100 over kilometres in one stretch is no fun.finally....! we reached philadelphia downtown! on our way to find my cousin's place.
after putting our stuff at her place.. we went to visit the famous Upenn campus!
taking a picture with one of their significant symbols... a button..? er i mean a big button.
posing with benjamin franklin's statue... he's like the founder or something.
in the campus...
sir benjamin franklin...? hi, how're you doing?
and finally... we reached the famous WHARTON SCHOOL!!! the one that we travelled all the way to see. haha. the place where some of the professors in our school came from... the school which we collaborate and model after... the school where my finance professor, this genius whiz kid choong tze graduated with a GPA of 3.97.
we've been to wharton school!
me and my cousin inside the wharton school building.
wharton wharton wharton!
this is how their GSRs (group study room) look like. similar to SMU's except that they have like 2 desktops inside lor. ours don't have and we need to self provide our laptops!
this is something like SMU's SRs (seminar rooms) where they probably hold their classes, except that they call them classrooms.anyhow, wharton is like similar to SMU so i think we kinda copied them a bit too much. oh well, what to do since we are an american university. it has like escalators and all... and we went there to see how it really is like cuz we've always heard so much about wharton but never been there personally.
after we were done fascinating with wharton, we made our way for dinner! for the famous philly cheesesteak!
yummy yummy! but damn fattening!
at first we thought it was like a steak kinda steak where you choose like well-done, medium etc. haha but apparently we were too ignorant i guess.
posing outside my cousin's apartment.
yicui and i with our red car we rented!
the next day we went back to upenn again to visit their bookstore cuz my cousin says that it's pretty interesting with lotsa stuff.
right at the entrance.
we passed by our of upenn's carpark entrance... look at how disgustingly expensive their parking rates are!!! my gosh. and USD$1 is approximately S$1.60!! next, we finally decided to go visit the famous liberty bell in pennsylvania.
along the way we saw like horse carriages on the roads.
it's free to enter!
me and the bell!
another picture with.. another bell that's right on top.
anyway, liberty bell signifies some freedom thing for america... i read the stuff and it is a very significant symbol for them.
we weren't that keen on visiting museums and thought it was really hard to find parking in the city area at philadelphia that we didn't take into consideration when deciding to drive there. so we finally decided on dropping by one of the states on our way back instead to go for more shopping at their outlet malls!
posing at the petrol station during one of our stopovers.
scenery pictures along the highway of maryland... it's a really pretty place!
finally we spent about 3 hours to reach our outlet mall at hagerstown for shopping shopping and more shopping! it was kinda like a detour back to richmond but we still went ahead cuz they had lotsa brands there!
at the carpark when we were about to leave.
we reached richmond and wanting to finally utilise the rental of our car... we decided to go to krispy kreme!
YUMMY!!
yeaps, that was the end of our trip to philly. it was overall a pretty enjoyable though a bit rush and didn't had time to do much. hehe. but it was interesting and good. :)
