the culture of campus
Campus is weird.
Well, first of all, it’s a campus. A real one, like all those movies of college life that I could never relate to, all rolling lawns and stately trees and freshman antics. And that, my friends, is weird. It doesn’t feel real, frankly. I can’t get over it.
But it’s also a freaking CITY, with it’s own police and transportation and catering services. That is also weird. You forget how massive NYU is in terms of physical infrastructure because it’s all so integrated and dispersed; here it’s all jumbled and sprawled on a hill, it’s just mindboggling. It’s huge. You can practically feel it chugging along. The water bill must be incredible.
You can walk into any building at all without showing ID and proving you are a student.
It’s a city with a dress code. Bruin blue, people! I have never seen so many people wearing the same shade of blue in my life. It’s unnerving. Bruin backpacks. Bruin t-shirts. Bruin jogging suits. Bruin sweatbands. Bruin baseball caps. Bruin hotpants.
RUN!
THEY’RE EVERYWHERE! THE BRUIN BLUE PEOPLE AHHHHHH.
It freaks me out.
It’s also the only place I’ve been so far in LA where pedestrians rule the streets. I love watching the cars wait and wait and wait while streams of students (in blue) cross from every direction.
The best thing? Is when you take the shuttle in the late morning, and everyone is sitting calmly, languidly even, gazing out the window—no signs of anxiety or impatience whatsoever, no foot tapping, no wringing of hands—and then, BOOM the bus stops in front of Murphy hall and people are up and RUNNING FOR THEIR LIVES towards the main buildings. I find this astonishing and hilarious.
There is a whole mini copse of moreton bay figs in between the bus stop and the Anthro building. They are huge and gnarled with thick looping roots and apparently, in the wild, strangle other trees from the top down. I find them incredible. The fruit falls and scatters all over the pathways, all blotches of violent purple and millions of tiny seeds. (The Bruin Blue People walk amongst them, kicking fallen fruit with their Uggs, and never suspect a thing. Killer trees! Watch out!)
It’s best at night. Quiet, suspended. The sprinklers go on and the air goes misty and fragrant and glows gold from the streetlamps in between the silhouettes of trees and brick arches. It’s so hushed and mysterious and beautiful that it almost seems like it can’t be the same place.
And then you hear the muffled roar of a football game.
Weird.
