Did you know that one of the Starbucks in town has a library attached to it?
Yep. Well, sort of. For the first time today, I stepped inside the Starbucks at Baylor's Moody Library, which is sort of the entire lobby of the library. The library, it should be noted, has been there for a while. It opened in 1968. The Starbucks in the lobby opened this fall to significant popularity.
Those crazy college kids have already nicknamed the new-look library lobby "Club Moody" and it's easy to understand the monicker. I arrived at the Starbucks a little after 1 on Wednesday afternoon to find a lobby full of students casually studying on "dead day" before finals begin on Thursday. I had to walk through campus to get to the library, but that was quite all right on a sun-splashed afternoon. I kind of caught that feeling that you get on a college campus right before finals. Everyone knows there's just one more hump to climb over, then it's Christmas break.
That feeling intensified in the cafe of Starbucks, which might be the largest Starbucks on a college campus in the United States. The cafe includes the entirety of the lobby, which is roomy as illustrated in the photo with this blog. However, the Starbucks company will neither confirm nor deny that this is the largest Starbucks of any kind, according to the Moody Library people.
As coffee houses go, Club Moody has at least one thing going for it. It's hard to imagine it being too crowded to find a place to sit. Every now and then, I'll walk into my go-to Starbucks, look around the cafe to see that it is full to the very last table and head for my back-up Starbucks. Yes, I have a back-up Starbucks as well as a get-away Starbucks and a reserved-for-Sunday-morning Starbucks. But you don't want me to unpack all of this.
I don't know if Moody Library will ever be able to officially claim it has the world's largest Starbucks or whatever. Those kinds of titles tend to be kind of tenuous anyway. When I was taking a tour of the college I would eventually attend, the tour guide claimed that it was the largest campus except for Air Force, which included its runways. So I guess the Starbucks at DFW Airport could hold the title as "world's largest" if it included the vast acreage of runways there.
And I don't know if I'll ever put the Moody Library Starbucks in my coffee rotation. I'm not a student or a professor, you know? But then, maybe it could be my days-when-I'm-pretending-to-be-a-professor Starbucks.
One more bite: Last week I stated my belief that Trent Richardson of Alabama would win the Heisman trophy. Things have changed. I'm pleased to have observed in the last four days that Baylor's Robert Griffin III has taken over the frontrunner position. I don't know if I've ever seen a Heisman race shift so quickly, but I believe the hype. So, coming in the spring: Heisman-winner RG3's favorite Waco restaurants.
