Wednesday, September 17, 2008

Nate's Many Adventures at BYU

This week, me and my roommate Stephen R. went to explore the Joseph F. Smith Building. It was pretty amazing. The building is made around a courtyard with a sweet fountain surrounded by stone arches. Offices for various colleges are in the first through fourth levels, and every office has a window because of its sweet setup. The Basement of the building was sweet- it contains tons of classrooms, some of which are beneath the courtyard. I hope I get to have a class down there sometime.
There's a big underground parking garage with its entrance on the road east of the building. Apparently it is really big. It covers all the space between the Tanner Building and the JFSB and it has 3 levels. The JFSB is connected to it on the north side and has 6 or so connections to it in the basement. I restrained myself from exploring the parking garage because I assumed it wasn't for students.
The front (east side) of the JFSB is pretty sweet. It's made of tons of windows in levels 2 and 3. Behind those windows is an amazing spiral staircase that runs from the basement to the second floor. The second level of the east side has a sweet museum about the history of BYU and church education. It's not a wimpy museum- its full- fledged and pretty big. You could easily spend hours in there if you were interested in church education. And even if you're not a huge church history buff (aka me) you can spend an hour in there learning cool stuff before getting bored. That's where me and Stephen spent the majority of our time.
On the third floor over the museum is a cool exhibition area and some good places to study. There's also a huge model of the BYU campus made out of wood on that level. On the fourth level, above the museum(actually on its roof) is a huge balcony overlooking lots of campus. It provides some really cool views of the mountains and has tons of tables so you can study there (it would be a cool place to study or just hang out.) We met some people from our ward up there.
Overall, the JFSB is probably the coolest building that i've ever been in. It's actually a lot taller than it looks; there's like 3 levels underground so it all adds up to 7 total levels. There are 158 steps from top to bottom, at least on the north staircases. Me and Stephen had a good time touring, though we did get a bit lost in the basement.

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