UC Irvine

 Today we visited UC Irvine and UCLA.  We had plans to make about a half day trip to each, but we spent almost the entire day at UCI.  We got there early and walked around the arts center.  My son's girlfriend wants to go here for their dance school.  She loves to dance and her dream job would be to join a dance company and tour the world.

 We spent about an hour walking around trying to figure out how to get into the building to see if we could watch a class.  We walked past the theater kids who were putting on a puppet show with paper bag puppets and looked in on a class of kids performing on stage.  We saw dancers waiting outside the studio waiting to audition, but never could figure out how to get inside.

 The mascot is the anteater and they had several statues on campus.  Of course, you have to pose for a picture.

 At the bookstore, my son found these two shirts next to each other.  Is it fate?  Of course, we bought them both :)

 This is the computer science building.  He loves the architecture of the buildings at UCI.  I think they are weird.  UCI was built in 1965.  You can tell it was built in the 60's.  Everyone there is excited they are turning 50 this year.  For a college that's young.

 I liked this building.  It is one of the new ones.

 This was one of the libraries on campus.  Modern.  The campus is built around a one mile circle.  Easy to find everything.  In the center of the circle is a big, open park setting.  There were lots of kids out there enjoying the 85 degree weather.  I should have worn shorts.  I also should have remembered to bring deodorant!  I forgot mine at home and had to buy some at the bookstore.  I was getting pretty stinky. :)

 This is one of the dorms we visited.  The room was pretty big for a dorm room.  We ate in the dining commons.  I think it's pretty important to eat in the dorms when visiting a college.  You can really tell a lot about a college by the dorm food.  The people on the tour were saying how great the food was at one particular dining common.  I wasn't impressed.  My son and his girlfriend thought it was good...until we went to UCLA.  UCLA food blew the other schools out of the water by a mile. :)

Another mascot statue.  This was at the end of the second tour and they are still smiling.  They both really liked the school.  There are 23,000 undergraduate students who attend UCI, but it didn't feel crowded and they both felt like they could fit in here.  We have added two schools to our list to visit tomorrow on our way home.

And I got stuck in the LA protests tonight.  It's been a long day.  I'll post about UCLA later.