7/5/15, 11:17 PM PDT
I'm not gonna lie, I was pretty nervous today. Not only because today is the start of my and Sam's New Student Orientation at UCLA (which meant that we'd finally be meeting some of the scary talented people we've seen on Facebook).
It was also because I was forced to eat Sam's cooking before we left.
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| That isn't meat. Those are pancakes. |
Fortunately, before we left, we managed to dilute the salmonella with some delicious, delicious ramen at The Boiling Point in Los Angeles. It's in the middle of nowhere, but it is TOTALLY worth it. Just look at this thing.
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| And they pour you more broth for free if you need it. |
After finishing most of the bowl (and Sam refusing to eat the lobster claw floating at the top), we downed it with a shot of mosquito eggs in sake.
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| It's mmm mmm good. |
Just kidding, it's some sort of basil seed drink that's really sweet and REALLY GOOD. Oh, and we decided to try out a delicious MANGO ICE CREAM MACAROON SANDWICH. And a thing they called a "snow cube." We got the green tea flavor, but they also had mango and pudding flavors.
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| No, the green tea snow cube wasn't just an ice cube they dyed green, it was also really good. |
Also, this wasn't in The Boiling Point's menu, but we also saw this in another restaurant before we left.
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| It's also what Sam calls me when she really wants to spice things up. |
After a thirty minute car ride and a BILLION steps up The Hill, we finally made it to our dorms in UCLA. We did a super awkward "icebreaking" activity called "Move Your Booty," where basically everyone gets in a circle, someone in the center says "Move your booty if you (insert some activity here)" and everyone that has done that has to switch places with someone in the circle. The last person to get a spot goes in the center, asks the next "Move your booty if..." question, and so on.
It was awkward because after the first six rounds, we ran out of questions. So every time some poor unfortunate soul got stuck in the center, they said
"Move your booty if.... uhh..."
Followed by silence. Awkward, painful, silence.
We eventually finished playing and walked to Westwood (the area that UCLA is in) to explore. They gave us free reign to explore as long as we knew that we had to wake up at 7 to check in the next morning. So we went crazy.
Just kidding. The craziest we went was walking to Target, finding out it was closed, and walking back to Diddy Riese to people watch.
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| The line was like half a block long and we were still full of soup, so we didn't wait in line for the 1 dollar ice cream. |
We went back up to Rieber (the building where our dorms were) at around 11:30, I met my roommates, Nick and Jose (who I accidentally called Juan by accident at one point which made me feel horrible), and went to sleep, ready for a big, big day tomorrow.
7/6/15, 11:19 PM PDT
Considering that the room we were in required us to share a single shower and toilet between SIX GUYS, we had to negotiate a bathroom schedule. We didn't have to be anywhere until 9 AM most days, so we shouldn't *have* to wake up ridiculously early, right?
Unfortunately, all six of my roommates took RIDICULOUSLY LONG SHOWERS so we staggered out our bath times to happen every 30 minutes. Me, being the pushover that I am, got stuck with the 6 AM shower time. So today, after four hours of sleep, I woke up a full two hours before I had to, shambled over to Rieber court in my zombified state, and got my BRUINCARD.
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| My face isn't normally this stretched out, promise. |
Soon afterwards, I met the lovely people I would be spending the next three days with. We were a nice group of humanities majors (all English or Linguistics, such as myself). Sirena, Theresa (which she explicitly said was spelled with an "h"), Artiom (which people liked to call Artery), Jaya, Hannah, Maria, Melissa, and our New Student Advisor, the mysterious woman known only as "Arnisha."
Today largely consisted of us going into the Ackerman Grand Ballroom for RIDICULOUSLY long amounts of time. Most of it was kind of informational, but I'm not gonna lie, I slept through a good chunk of them, with the whole four hours of sleep during summer sort of thing. Thankfully, I sat next to Artiom most of the time, and he fell asleep too, so when my group prodded him awake, they wouldn't notice that I'm asleep right next to him either, and I avoid getting in trouble.
You know what was interesting today though? The interest faire that they had during lunch. Sam and I found a creative writing club!
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| Cute name too! |
There were other clubs we were interested in, like ballroom dance club, and especially the Daily Bruin. But I think the highlight today was when UCLA's band performed for us. And they performed amazingly. Take a look!
At one point, the members of the band walked up to the crowd. And since we were right in the front row, I managed to take this picture:
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| She's happy because she sees Jake's future in the reflection of the trumbone. |
There was also the "World Famous" UCLA Cabaret/Summer Nights in the Union session, which was adorable. They sung a bunch of cute songs, and changed the lyrics to turn the songs into pro-UCLA, anti-USC propaganda. And damn it, it was so cute that it worked.
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| The most beautiful hour-long propaganda session ever. |
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| Here, they were performing a parody of Adam Sandler's The Hanukkah Song but with famous Bruins instead of Jews. |
As for the Summer Nights in the Union, it basically consisted of a casino area (with free poker stations where the person who had the most chips at the end of the night won a basketball jersey!), a board game area, a (missing) photo booth, and the famous "Club Jamba," where they basically turned UCLA's Jamba Juice into a dance club.
Not gonna lie, Club Jamba was pretty cool. It was also very sweaty, and Sam and I didn't really want to play poker or board games all night, so we basically went back to our dorms.
Sorry that Sam and I aren't party animals, guys. But we'll get turn up someday or another at UCLA, promise guys.
7/7/15, 11:29 PM PDT
Today, we were in for a very rude awakening, courtesy of burnt microwave popcorn.
Because some moron decided to cook up some popcorn in a microwave that doesn't have a working turntable at two in the morning, the fire alarms went off.
In the entire dorm. All nine floors of it.
Now I don't know what kind of fire alarm system is so sensitive that it evacuates an entire dorm from burnt microwavable popcorn, as opposed to, you know, figuring out that the "fire" is only in one area and setting off the sprinklers in that one isolated area. I mean I'm not much of a fire alarm expert, but I believe it was incredibly unnecessary to wake up the entire dorm (and especially me) over Orville Redenbacher's design flaws.
But whatever, it was a bonding experience. I got to hear a few of my orientation friends use new, colorful vocabulary that I've never heard them use before, so I believe ultimately, we were brought closer together because of this fire alarm.
The delicious UCLA campus food also brought us much, much closer together.
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| Only because there were limited seats in the dining hall, so we had to practically sit two people per chair. |
Later, we planned out our schedules for the ensuing feeding frenzy that is class selection happening tomorrow. It took forever to finally have a schedule that I liked, made more complicated by the fact that one, I had no idea how the class signups worked in UCLA, two, that I had a TON of requirements to fulfill, and three, that I had none of my AP scores sent in yet. Which was a LEGITIMATE concern since my AP scores could cover some of my requirements and save me some time at UCLA.
The first and second issues were cleared up by Arnisha and the awesome class selection workshop they had at Rieber today, but the third is still a BIG BIG problem (As of writing this, July 11, I still don't have my AP scores sent in).
But whatever. I eventually figured out which classes to sign up for, and since today was dedicated to figuring that out, Sam and I had a lot of free time to look around.
We found out what Geico cavemen do in their spare time.
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| So easy, ages 5 and up can do it! |
Sam's life slogan was there, right under that 500 days of summer sign.
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| As you can see, her mind is very very open to our love. |
And we found the bus that Sam was born in!
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| They named it "Tumbleweed" because that's what Sam looked like when she took her first steps on this earth. |
The definite highlight of the night was the scavenger hunt though. Basically, all of the people in orientation got into groups and had a list of things on campus to take pictures of at night. And it was FUN. They had us running around EVERYWHERE and even though it was really creepy sometimes, it was all AMAZING. Here's the stuff we found.
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| Founder's rock. |
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| Nursing building. |
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| The "tiny garden" east of the life sciences building, which was a total bastard to find. |
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| An "s-shaped" rock. |
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| The "diamond" above the life sciences building. |
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| The rules to the Mildred E. Mathias Botanical Garden. |
We got back at around 2 AM. 100% of us were very, very sweaty.
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| And yet we could still eke out a little smile at the end of the day. UCLA does that to you. |
I quickly took a nighttime shower, and got ready for a very very stressful day tomorrow.
7/8/15, 11:19 PM PDT
WE SIGNED UP FOR CLASSES. And it was ridiculously stressful.
The way it works is that you meet up with your orientation group and your NSA. Since they only let each group use two computers to prevent 200+ freshmen from signing up at once and crashing the system, we had to decide who in our group could sign up first and who could sign up last. And we did that by drawing numbers from a hat.
Thankfully, I drew the number 2, which means that I got to sign up for classes first, but it ultimately didn't make a huge difference because everyone in my group got the classes they wanted, which is AWESOME.
Afterwards, we had our last tour, where our tour guide told us a bunch of dirty lies about UCLA. I mean she tricked us about stuff like how a counselor died in front of a water fountain, or how if you ever need help on campus, you can just stand in place and hold up your Bruin Card and the student body will eventually help you out. Some of the little myths they told us were GREAT, because even though they're just urban legends, they make the campus a lot more interesting, it's amazing.
We ended the day by getting Bruintized. Basically, we dipped our hands in UCLA's famous inverted fountain, signifying that we were officially members of the Bruin family. After that initial dip, we are not allowed to touch the fountain's water until we graduate. And those that break that rule have to stay an extra quarter at UCLA every time they break it.
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| Pre-bruintization. |
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| The last time my hand will touch the fountain's beautiful water for the next four years. |
After heading back to Rieber, we packed up our stuff, walked around campus for a bit, and finally, at last, Orientation was over. It was a great four days, and I'm really thankful I got to spend it with awesome people. I don't think these past few days would have been as fun without every single person that I've met and hung out with. Hope to see some of you guys in the fall!
RFotD: Michael decided to lump these four entries into one because he didn't want the first day to be buried underneath the other three posts. Genius, huh?
