Our beautiful campus and university

If you don´t know yet, I´m studying at Queen´s university in Belfast, Northern Ireland. It occupies quite a big area. Campus is near the city center. That means most of faculties and students accommodations are in the same area, including botanic garden and 2 cultural halls - Elmwood Hall and Whitla Hall. Elmwood Hall used to be a church but university bought it and made a nice hall for lot´s of different events. Whitla hall for some reason reminds me of buildings from so called first republic of Czechoslovakia.

Whitla Hall Belfast

Janáček´s theatre Brno, try to compare

Elmwood Hall Belfast

The university itself is surprisingly young. It was founded in first half of 19th century. Despite that the main building looks like from some fairytale and is ridiculously beautiful.

Main building of Queen´s university

Behind the main building is court from which you can enter the best study place ever - the Great Hall! You can feel like in Hogwarts. I swear I could see an owl behind the window. It´s one of these big halls you can know from other older universities like Cambridge or Oxford. It is a place for students to study or you can book it for some special events. On the walls around you there are paintings of important and famous former students of university. It is interesting how the painting style is changing through time. Some of them are very modern.

The Great Hall

Another supercool place is library. In comparison with Masaryk University in Brno where all of the faculties have it´s own library, Queen´s has one giant library and one smaller in Medical and Biology center. It got an architectural reward, because it´s very eco-friendly. The place is huge and for nerds they have special reading room - CS Lewis reading room inspired by Narnia. There´s a table with map of Narnia, Lewis´s quotes all around and door is in form of the wardrobe through which you could enter the other world. Nice lady taught us that if you struggle to open them, you should help yourself by pulling a tree on right side of the door. In front of it is a carpet with Aslan :-P.

CS Lewis Reading Room

The library is huge. You can study and watch trees in Botanic Garden, which is part of campus too and good place to hang out or run. But i have to admit, I wasn´t there much yet. So I guess it´s opportunity for another post :).
Except Botanic Garden, there´s lots of places for students to sit and study or rest. In the library there is nice café, another one is in front of the main building in Student´s Union. In Student´s Guidence Center there is even coffee for free and another fine place to sit is in International and Postgraduate Student´s Center. As you can see at Queen´s there are many student centers :-P. And of course all around campus you can use benches to sit or just sit on grass, if it´s not raining again. I think I can get use to this environment.

Motto of the day: Only being in different university than yours is a great experience. You can see lots of cool stuff you couldn´t see at your university. I´m thinking even university can make you love studying just by creating you lovely and nerdy environment.