I encountered a Cornell tradition today. The Friday before spring break is “Dragon Day”. Freshmen from the College of Architecture design and build a dragon, which they parade around and burn. It’s quite a spectacle. Apparently there used to be rivalry between the architecture and engineering students, so the engineers build a phoenix every year to compete with the dragon. 
The event dates back to the early 1900s, and there are some pretty neat pictures on the Wikipedia page 
Tag Archives: fire
Fire
There was a fire in the parking lot right outside my office today. They were grilling for some sort of catered event in Duffield Hall, and the whole thing sort of went up in flames. The flames were maybe twice as big as in the photo above, and it was fortunate that there wasn’t anywhere for it to spread.
Luckily nobody was hurt, and the Ithaca fire department showed up in force. There were some gas tanks from the grilling that started to catch fire, and I think there was some concern that they might explode. The firefighters hosed them down for at least 20 minutes to cool them off.
I didn’t get so much work done this afternoon, but it was certainly quite a spectacle.