Visiting the University of Leeds campus and the Royal Armories/Carlos Pueblo

Visiting the University of Leeds campus and the Royal Armories/Carlos Pueblo

During my Oxford stay, a Chinese visitor heard my scheduling of Leeds visit and

recommended the Royal Armories Museum. I desired to visit Leeds because of

my University President, Mr. Sun Kun-tseng, received a master degree from

Leeds and I was so closed to the University in York, England. I didn’t research the

City and then noticed the city is the second most populated in the United Kingdoms

next to London as a financial center, larger than Manchester and Birmingham, etc.

It was a long march in a day because the distance between the two location. Leeds

is a lovely city with both traditional and contemporary architecture. The University

campus is beautiful and the Armories is amazing.

I walked through the City Center with tall buildings and wider streets for vehicles

toward the campus. There is a main building in the front with a single tower and

a modern library by it. I believe that the main building is the original structure of

the University. I walked directly toward all the colleges behind it. I found the

college of education, department of physics, and turned to the school of business,

etc. There is a huge park with lots of tennis courts on it. Two ladies mounted polices

told me it’s a city park. Next to the park, there is an old church with a good size of

churchyard in front of a dormitory building. I continued to walk back and entered a

reception room for a welcome party of new international students.

I met a retired professor of the electrical engineering who came to the party to help.

He was from Hong Kong and with a Ph.D. degree from the Rensselaer Polytechnic

Institute. He was very surprised that I knew the university in upstate New York because

I made a special effort to visit the campus at Troy, New York one year because I did try

to apply for scholarship from that university when I was in Taiwan and also, a closed

friend of my brother, Frank Huang from our hometown, had his post-doctoral research

there in the mid-70’s. This retired professor was a nuclear power plant expert and he

told me what I had seen during my train ride from Bristol to Oxford and Birmingham to

York were not nuclear power plants. I checked the Google that the cooling towers which

he indicated might be the same designer of three miles island nuclear power plant.

I marched again on the opposite direction from the campus toward the Royal Armories

Museum on the Dock square of the River Aires. This is quite a new building with a very

impressed collection. I see all kinds swords, bows and arrows, halberds, armors for both

man and horse, pistol and rifle, etc. There are also rooms for Japanese armories collection

and I am very impressed with the samurai swords, improved rifle Japan edition with gunstock

inlaying with metal.