Another thing that I also always recommend to the visitors is if you are in town whether it's for a day or a week is to make time for one of the free walking tours at Yale University. It just gives you a great overview of that institution, which is so much a part of New Haven culture and they are free, they are offered twice a day during the week and once a day on the weekend. The thing that's so fun about the tour is really the guide. They are student led and with an institution that is over 300 years old, there are some wonderful stories to be told and if you were to just wander around campus on your own, you wouldn't know about them. You wouldn't know that Nathan Hale, who said his only regret was that he had "but one life to give [his] country," was a student there. There is a statue there that depicts him and no one really knew what Nathan Hale looked like. So for that statue, they actually picked a student at random to be the model for that statue. When the CIA was doing busts for their building at Langley, Virginia, they didn't know what Hale looked like, so they had someone sneak on campus and basically do a tracing of the face of that statue thinking that they had captured what Nathan Hale looked like. They did not realize that they just had a random student who was used as the model of the statue. So not only was that the student the model for the statue here, but he was the model for the statue that continues to be at Langley Field in Virginia. There is Beinecke Library at Yale that has one of the largest collections of rare manuscripts and books in the world. They have one of only five copies of the original Gutenberg Bible that was printed on the first removable type printing press. The money for the building itself was donated by the Beinecke brothers who started S&H Green Stamps. And the architecture itself is basically an enlarged green stamp booklet that's made of a type of marble that allows light to penetrate it. They wanted it green initially, but they couldn't find green marble. It's a very ultramodern looking building. It's translucent marble. So that's the only light you get in there. It's all just natural light that penetrates the marble. So you know there are just tons of interesting stories like that when you do a tour of Yale.
