21%sicilian.: deep-fried nostalgia and other fun stuff: trip to Pittsburgh.

Buongiorno i miei amici! É buona a parlare a voi nuovamente! Last time I promised a nice long entry because I was going to Pittsburgh. This is actually great because I have never been to Pittsburgh before, so I took more pictures than I have done on any other trip! 121, to be exact.

Why Pittsburgh? Well, not only have I never been there before, but my mom actually went to Pitt for college (3 years until she went to Old Dominion). She wanted to show us around campus and where she used to hang out with her friends, and where she worked.

If you aren't familiar with the University of Pittsburgh, it's just outside of the city in a suburb called Oakland, and shown below in the next picture is the only university building in America that is a skyscraper, called the Cathedral of Learning. The Cathedral of Learning is home to a lot of upperclassmen classes and offices, and there are different rooms that are dedicated to different countries. Of course, the classrooms were dedicated back before the 1950's so Yugoslavia has a room and all of that jazz, but I was able to find some really neat things.

The Cathedral of Learning from a few blocks away.

Looking back through the gate to the entryway, the gathering room was huge!

Hm. Wonder why I took a picture of this.

How Harry Potter-esque can this place get?!

The only room with a peephole big enough to stick a camera lense through: The Irish Room

This room was actually open, but with no furniture. It was the Scottish room, and I have no idea who the picture is of...

The doorway that I caught sight of heading out of the Scottish room: A freedom is a noble thing.

I was tempted to go see if Sirius Black's face would pop up in the fireplace.

Oh and by the way, it was a BEAUTIFUL day.

Next stop was my mom's college hangout, what she called "The O". It's supposed to be called The Original Hot Dog Shop, but who can say that whole phrase when it's full of drunk college kids. This place was open all hours of the day, and served everything it had to offer at all hours at decent prices. Plus, all of the signs and furniture haven't changed since my mom went there in the late 1980's. Not to mention, the pictures below are a SMALL order of fries. Let that blow through your mind a little while you scroll on down.

These are the college dorms that freshmen have to live in their first year. My mom (thinks) she lived in the middle tower.

Now that we all got our serving of nostalgia (even though only one of the three of us actually went to Pitt), we headed back to the city to our hotel to drop the small bag of shirts we bought. I changed into mine because I felt lame not wearing any Pitt garb and going to a Pirates game.

WAIT I forgot to throw that in. Good thing we are segwaying right into that.

As soon as we were done in the hotel, we were on our way to the other side of the river to the stadium. In Pittsburgh, they call what others know as the subway/metro/tube (if you're in the UK, if so thanks for actually reading this far) as the T. The T was not far at all, so we walked to it. I was expecting it to be packed on a game day in downtown Pittsburgh, but this is what we got when we walked down there.

This was only one side, but in total there were 6 people in the underground, including my mom, brother, and I.

I'm going to try and condense this as much as I can for the sake of sanity and energy, so here's how it went. We got there super early and took a stroll through some parking lots, to get a shot of Heinz Field (where the Steelers [American Football team]) play and that ended up like this.

Ate some mini pierogis and deep fried pretzels at Jerome Bettis's Grille (Bettis was a linebacker for the Steelers at some point in time, and now has a restaurant right across the street from both stadiums.)