prime Fall Issue 2015

BY THE DAILY BRUIN

FALL 2015

a space to dream UCLA students and planetary scientists work with NASA to leave footprints on the Red Planet

ART

Explore a few of the more unusual museums in Los Angeles

CULTURE

Three friends return to school for an alternative learning experience

LIFESTYLE

Hike up to a green oasis and panoramic view from Amir’s Garden

ART

6 12 18 24 32 37 44 45 46

MUSEUMS OF LA

SWEATER WEATHER

CULTURE

AGE OF LEARNING

A SPACE TO DREAM

A QUESTION OF FAITH

LIFESTYLE

ALL ABROAD

DIY: COLOR-CHANGING PINE CONES

RECIPE: CAMPFIRE COMFORT FOOD

HIKE LA

COVER PHOTO BY

AUSTIN YU

letter from the editors

Dear readers,

The stories within prime reflect only a sliver of the ones that unfold on our campus every day.

Within these pages, you will encounter people who have explored the streets of cities across the globe, experimented with fashion, spearheaded movements to study the vast potential of outer space and rekindled a spark for learning at UCLA decades later. From touring the strangest museums in Los Angeles to reconciling the divide between religion and culture, prime brings you stories about human experience.

As the year goes on, we plan to continue searching for these stories and capturing them within our pages. With every new team of editors, prime builds on the foundation set by previous years to carve out a powerful voice for the campus.

Thank you for picking up our first issue of prime. We hope you find enjoyment with every turn of the page.

With love,

Grace Lin

Aalhad Patankar

Grace Lin [ prime editor ] Aalhad Patankar [ prime content editor ] Hayley McAvoy [ prime art director ] Austin Yu [ prime photo editor ] [ writers ] Emaan Baqai, Hee Jae Choi, Natalie Green, Andrea Henthorn, Maryrose Kulick, Yael Levin, Hayley McAvoy, Allison Ong, Chandini Soni, Aubrey Yeo [ photographers ] Natalie Green, Andrea Henthorn, Maryrose Kulick, Aubrey Yeo, Austin Yu [ illustrators ] Kelly Brennan, Kelly Ho [ graphic artists ] Angela Cosme, Alice Lin Namrata Kakade [ copy chief ] Anjishnu Das [ assistant copy chief ] [ slot editors ] Hannah Brezack, Brendan Hornbostel, Paulina Lei, Arman Sharif, Derek Yen, Melissa Young [ special projects editor ] Michelle Chen Julien Brundrett [ online editor ] Vivian Zhang [ assistant online editor ] [ radio contributors ] Chris Campbell [ daily bruin ] Sam Hoff [ editor in chief ] Jeong Park [ managing editor ]

Austin Yu

Hayley McAvoy

Eldrin Masangkay [ digital managing editor ] Jeremy Wildman [ business manager ] [ assistant managers ] Caroline Dillon, Peyton Sherwood [ advertising sales ] Sarah Sanders, Jessica Behmanesh, Danielle Renteria, Danielle Merrihew, Ali Cazel, Liviya James, Michaela Milesi, Michael Hess Emily Hughes [ on-campus sales ] Isabelle Staff [ national accounts ] [ classified sales ] Lucy Mullin, Lizzie Ioannou [ production ] Tori Smith, Jimmer Young Abigail Goldman [ editorial advisor ] Arvli Ward [ media director ] The Daily Bruin (ISSN 1080-5060) is published and copyrighted by the ASUCLA Communications Board. All rights are reserved. Reprinting of any material in this publication without the written permission of the Communications Board is strictly prohibited. The ASUCLA Communications Board fully supports the University of California’s policy on non-discrimination. The student media reserve the right to reject or modify advertising whose content discriminates on the basis of ancestry, color, national origin, race, religion, disability, age, sex or sexual orientation. The ASUCLA Communications Board has a media grievance procedure for resolving complaints against any of its publications. For a copy of the complete procedure, contact the publications office at 118 Kerckhoff Hall. All inserts that are printed in the Daily Bruin are independently paid publications and do not reflect the views of the Editorial Board or the staff.

To request a reprint of any photo appearing in the Daily Bruin, contact the photo desk at 310-825-2828 or email photo@media.ucla.edu.

of

museums

WRITTEN BY YAEL LEVIN

& CHANDINI SONI PHOTOS BY AUSTIN YU GRAPHIC BY ANGELA COSME

Los Angeles is home to about a hundred museums, from the grand Getty Museum in West Los Angeles to the quaint Bunny Museum, located in the home of a Pasadena couple. Two Daily Bruin staffers decided to explore four of the lesser-known museums around town, each with its own specific mission and style. Some are gory and some are adorable, but all of them add a special flavor to the museum subculture of the city.

museum of flying

angels attic

S

quashed between a multistory apartment complex and a supportive housing center is a two-story white Victorian house with blue trim. This dollhouselike building is home to Angels Attic, Santa Monica’s dollhouse museum.

The museum was started in 1984 by Jackie McMahan to raise money for a school for children with autism that her granddaughter attended. The museum is run by Patricia Godoy, who used to be the nanny of McMahan’s granddaughter, and Charles Phillips, who also travels around the world to collect pieces for the museum.

Visitors are greeted at the door with a friendly smile from Godoy or Phillips, who offer to answer any questions they may have.

Intricate, handcrafted dollhouses of various sizes and shapes are displayed everywhere, transporting visitors to different times and places, such as upstate New York in the early 20th century, Paris in the 1800s and even the nursery rhyme of the old woman who lived in a shoe.

The front of the dollhouses can be opened to reveal a plethora of domestic activity – a cat roughhouses with its kitten while a maid is slicing bread in the kitchen, and a lady in a pleated ivory gown touches up her

makeup in an ornate gold-plated mirror and presumably gossips with her companion, who is lying naked on a chaise lounge.

A toy train complete with a conductor and passengers ticks along the top of the walls in one room. As the passengers look out of the windows of the train at you, you can peek into the dollhouses to see handcrafted pieces carefully arranged to capture a snapshot of life at a particular time.

Tiny collections of particular types of items – such as sofas, chairs or floral plates – are sprinkled throughout the museum. You can walk up a curved staircase with a dark wooden banister to view an exhibit of a playroom, where life-sized dolls play with dollhouses and tea sets.

Other rooms on this floor follow a similar theme, with collections of larger dolls and stuffed animals filling cases along almost all of the walls.

Although shops dedicated to dollhouse hobbyists were commonplace in Los Angeles about 30 years ago, Angels Attic is all that’s left of a dying art. Visitors shuffle in and out, but the the delicate, ceramic figurines in Angels Attic remain static – still stuck in a time when children played make-believe with dollhouses.

T

o the untrained eye, the Museum of Flying looks like part of the modest Santa Monica airport. Once discovered, though, there is much to be found, including replicas of the earliest planes, life-sized models of cockpits – both old-fashioned and modern – to explore and a flight simulator to ride.

The exhibits start with a replica of the first plane, invented by the Wright brothers just after the turn of the 20th century.

The plane does not have any seats or walls – it is simply a wood-and-canvas frame with a space in the middle of the wing for the pilot to steer, illustrated by a mannequin in the museum’s replica. Pilots flew the plane by lying on their stomachs with their heads toward the front of the aircraft as a way to decrease drag. In the museum, the mannequin automatically gears up the plane every few moments, getting ready for an imaginary takeoff. Pilots steered the plane by moving a cradle attached to their hips, and in turn, the cradle pulled wires to both warp the wings and turn the rudder at the same time.

Other old-fashioned planes with famous pilots populated the museum as well. The Vega, a six-passenger monoplane, was the plane that Amelia Earhart flew single-handledly across the Atlantic – she became the first female pilot to do so. A replica of the very first mode of flight, the hot air balloon, also resides in the museum.

The first hot air balloon flew in 1783, more than 100 years before the first plane did.

Reminders of past flights adorn the walls and line the floors of the museum. Seats in front of documentaries are old airplane chairs, with recliner buttons intact. A list of passengers from trip No. 7,992 from the mainland to Hawaii enumerates only 15 names, symbolizing how flying was once a luxury only available to some.

At the end of the visit, visitors can pay $8 to experience the flight simulator, a ride in which passengers can steer the plane using a joystick – almost like a video game – but the ride physically turns the passengers around in circles as they steer. The effect is enjoyable, if not a bit nauseating.

The Santa Monica Airport is arguably most famous for its role in the first circumnavigation of the world by plane. On Sept. 23, 1924, about 200,000 Angelenos ran to the runway of the airport to greet the pilots at one of the final stops on their six-month journey. Their trip was grueling, fraught with accidents, mistakes and disease, but finishing the expedition in Santa Monica symbolized hope for the future of flight.

The entire museum takes about 30 minutes to an hour to walk through. Although it is physically a small museum, its impact on Los Angeles and its visitors is anything but.

W

ith a heave, a heavy blue grated door from a dilapidated street corner on Venice Boulevard swings open to reveal a dark, humid room – the entryway to the Museum of Jurassic Technology.

You can pay the entry fees here and pick up bamboo or wooden hand fans to use on your journey through the museum. After moving further into the building, you can sit on a short wooden bench to watch a video about the history of the museum.

The purpose of the museum is to present visitors with detailed information about a variety of topics – from the children’s game cat’s cradle to the process of sublimation – that they may not normally think about, while leaving them to draw their own conclusions, said David Wilson, the director of the museum.

It was dubbed the Museum of Jurassic Technology as a way of saying “thank you” to one of the first donors, who gifted the museum with a large collection of jurassic fossils, he said.

From man-made gems and horns to the life of opera singer Madelena Delani, curious exhibits along the walls are illuminated with lights from behind, contrasting with the dark, quiet hall.

Moving toward the back, a room off to the side showcases mail that the Mount Wilson Observatory received between 1915 and 1935.

Upon entering the room, the scent of trees immediately hits, along with the sounds of a gurgling, gushing stream. Letters, postcards and telegrams adorn the wall, containing inquiries about the history of the solar system and even Christmas cards.

One yellowed postcard from 1931, containing scrawled, childish handwriting, asked those who ran the observatory to show Albert Einstein his telescope because “he is a big sientific (sic) man in education” who “is considered even greater than Charley (sic) Chaplin.”

After making your way to the very back of the museum, you will find a narrow staircase leading up to more exhibits and the Tula Tea Room. As visitors nibble on delicate sugar cookies and drink Georgian black tea, they can stroll into the Borzoi Kabinet Theater – decorated with shrubbery and a birdhouse – where films are screened every hour.

Despite the wealth of information presented with each exhibit, the museum deliberately leaves much up to the interpretation of its visitors. You will walk out with a sense of awe, momentarily blinded by the bright light on the street, unsure of what you just experienced.

museum of death A

n imposing black-and-white skull painting lined with fuchsia flowers welcomes visitors to the Museum of Death on Hollywood Boulevard. But inside the museum, visitors are faced with much more gruesome views.

The Museum of Death was originally founded in 1995 in San Diego’s first mortuary before relocating to Hollywood.

The concept of the museum is intriguing; entire exhibits dedicated to exploring serial killer histories, replicas of execution equipment and the Heaven’s Gate cult recruitment video all appeal to an innate curiosity about death. It eventually became so popular that the founders opened another Museum of Death in New Orleans.

But the actual interior of the L.A. museum is far more stomach-turning than anticipated.

All the exhibits are snugly situated in a creaky old house. According to its website, the museum has “the world’s largest collection of serial murderer artwork.”

Pictures of bodies from bloody crime scenes line the

walls of one of the displays, which are graphic enough to force some viewers to look away. Dioramas dedicated to Charles Manson detail his history of brutal murders of women and his abusive childhood.

Aside from these exhibits, there are also shrines throughout the museum to provide more stories of death for visitors, such as a glass case displaying World War II paraphernalia from Adolf Hitler’s reign. Vintage newspapers with headlines addressing mass murders and advertisements for old weapons clutter every wall surface.

But the museum goes beyond exploring human death. There is an entire specimen room purposed for taxidermy displays and snakes suspended in containers of mysterious colored liquid. The beady snake eyes glaring from murky solution containers might be enough to make you lose your lunch if you are not careful.

Because of its grotesque character, the Museum of Death is not for the faint of heart or the overly cynical.

If you have the guts, though, it might be right up your alley.

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museum of jurassic technology

@dailybruinprime | FALL 2015

sweater weather WRITTEN & PHOTOS BY AUBREY YEO

What do you look for in a sweater?

Hat – HUMANOID Vintage sweater – Purchased at Melrose Trading Post Vintage jans – Levi’s Shoes – Belle by Sigerson Morrison

“I think first it needs to be very soft and comfortable because I don’t like an itchy sweater. I’m more into solid colors and stripes. I like sweaters with a lot of texture.”

ART

12

Watch – Nixon jeans – Zara White sweater – Need Supply Co. Open toed clogs – MIA Black leather vest – Topshop

“I really love bell sleeves right now. So finding a crop that has a high neck and bell sleeves. Typically, a sweater kit is pretty basic, so if you can accentuate it with small things like a bell sleeve, it brings it to a whole 'nother level and really makes an outfit.”

eclectic classic

“

I like mixing eclectic pieces with simpler items. I just wear simpler clothes and then accessorize to make it more fun.

It's pretty classic, not too crazy.

”

describe your style

Sarah Kretzu Fourth-year communication studies student Favorite labels: Chloé and Equipment Favorite style icons: Audrey Hepburn and socialite Olivia Palermo

cool california

Lilly Thomas Fourth-year global studies student Favorite clothing label: Stone Cold Fox Favorite style icons: Jennifer Grace, author of fashion blog "Native Fox," and model Natasha Oakley

“

I don't ever want to live somewhere far away and I feel that influences everything, including my fashion – just being Southern California coastal.

”

“I don’t let a lot of people wear my clothes because I’m very protective ... my sister knew we were best friends because I let her wear my leather vest.”

Lilly Thomas

saraH and i are like two peas in a pod we totally understand each other.

Black booties – Steve Madden Embroidered skirt – Topshop Knit crop sweater – Revolve Clothing Jean jackeT – Wrangler

SARAH KRETZU Sweater Dress – Vince Sunglasses – Céline Shoes – Free People Suede Jacket – Joe’s Jeans Scarf – Purchased in Peru Large ring – Family antique Chevron ring – Bony Levy

age Learning of

WRITTEN BY HEE JAE CHOI PHOTOS BY AUSTIN YU

he three friends usually sit in the same spots for Astronomy 3: "Nature of Universe" – five rows down from the back of the lecture hall, three seats on the far right.

The row is far enough from the front of the classroom for anyone sitting there to avoid notice, but the three stand out. Sitting upright in their chairs, the three gray-haired gentlemen have no backpacks, no textbooks and no laptops.

In the midst of keyboard staccatos, Michael Stern, 76 years old, steadily scratches down a note or two on his yellow, lined paper.

Seated next to him, Harold “Rusty” Rosenblatt, 71 years old, gazes at the PowerPoint slides through his silver-rimmed glasses, which sit snugly on the edge of his nose. Meanwhile, 75-year-old Steve Loeb – tall and dapper, his hair combed to the side and polo shirt neatly tucked in his khaki shorts – peers over at Stern’s notes.

“Nature of Universe” is just one of more than 40 classes that the three friends have taken together through the Senior Scholars Program, which allows seniors to audit undergraduate classes at UCLA every quarter.

Loeb, Rosenblatt and Stern have been listening to UCLA lectures together for about five years.

The program, run by the the UCLA Longevity Center, aims to help people 50 and older keep their cognitive functions sharp through active learning.

Loeb, a former pharmacist who attended UCLA for a quarter before transferring to UC Berkeley, and Rosenblatt, a former attorney, have taken classes with Stern, a UCLA alumnus and former pharmacist, to satisfy their intellectual craving for a liberal arts education.

“There’s a certain satisfaction when it comes to learning,” Loeb said. “It’s intellectually stimulating that we’re fulfilling a part of our lives that we’ve waited until now to do.”

Liberal arts classes used to be luxuries that they couldn’t afford to indulge in because of degree requirements, job searching, marriage and the Vietnam War. Now in their 70s, the three friends are picking up where they left off – one class at a time.

CULTURE

18

Loeb, Rosenblatt and Stern have their methods when it comes to picking interesting classes.

It’s usually by word of mouth that they come upon intriguing courses. They ask students and fellow senior

scholars for recommendations. They also dig through BruinWalk and Rate My Professors – most UCLA students’ go-to sites during the class enrollment season.

“Oh! And we also Google everybody that we take,” Rosenblatt chimed in with his thick New York accent.

The three friends are among 150 senior scholars who are enrolled in the program this quarter, said Erin Der-McLeod, the Senior Scholars coordinator and administrative specialist at the UCLA Longevity Center. Senior scholars are allowed to take any undergraduate course – except laboratory, language and studio classes that require daily professor-student interaction – without having to do the assignments or exams.

Many of the senior scholars, ranging in age from their 50s to 90s, are retired and take classes through the program because they now have the time and opportunities to delve into their other interests, Der-McLeod said.

Stern said he came to know about the program through Bob Ross, a fellow senior scholar.

“I’m the troublemaker,” said Ross, grinning slyly. Ross, the “baby” of the group – being 71 years old – is taking his 52nd class at UCLA this fall.

Stern enrolled in the Senior Scholars Program in 2011 to take on-campus courses taught by UCLA professors, which he said were more challenging than the classes offered by the Osher Lifelong Learning Institute at UCLA, where he first took a jab at learning in a classroom setting again. Osher is a branch of UCLA Extension that offers instructor-led classes, discussions and other programs designed for adults 50 or older at off-campus sites in Westwood, Sherman Oaks and Hollywood.

“That’s what I call Osher – light FM. It’s easy listening,” said Ross, who thinks Osher is a great way to meet people but is less rigorous in content. “It’s fun but not too tough, so I asked the guys, ‘Why don’t you take the real deal?’”

Loeb and Rosenblatt joined the Senior Scholars Program in 2008 and 2011, respectively. Both came to learn about the program through their longtime friends: Loeb through Stern, and Rosenblatt through Ross. Loeb and Stern have known each other since "Abraham Lincoln made a speech at Gettysburg," according to Rosenblatt.

"Whenever we get good things in our lives, we share it with each other," Stern said.

For the three senior scholars, requirements no longer apply

in life. They said they decided to step into a lecture hall again because they genuinely wanted to learn.

“What motivated me was the absolute fun (of) taking a class where I wasn’t required to take a test or do anything,” Rosenblatt said. “In other words, there was no academic stress.”

Loeb, Rosenblatt and Stern are not picky learners. So far, they’ve taken courses in a variety of fields, such as Jewish studies, communication studies and art history.

One of Rosenblatt’s favorites were a German course about the portrayal of the Holocaust in film and literature. The class included a weekly meetup with Holocaust survivors, a program that was organized by Hillel at UCLA, an on-campus Jewish organization.

“It was always an amazing thing for me to walk out of there and realize that all of these people – you’d see them on the street but you wouldn’t realize all the trials and tribulations they had

to go through early in their life to get to this point,” Rosenblatt said.

In other classes, he said there are moments when he feels he can offer his own take on the issues and events that students are learning about – such as the Vietnam War – because he has lived through them.

But Rosenblatt and his other two friends refrain from talking in lectures or office hours unless the professors ask for their opinions, because the Senior Scholars Program emphasizes that the courses are first and foremost intended for enrolled students.

Still, the three said they are grateful for the opportunity to learn with UCLA students. Sure, they might be the only ones – other than the professor – who understand the jokes from “All in the Family,” a '70s TV show.

“But learning is what keeps you alive,” Stern said.

@dailybruinprime | FALL 2015

19

T

Rusty The Vietnam War was “hot and heavy” when Rosenblatt was attending the University of Akron in Ohio between 1962 and 1966. The war felt uncomfortably close – almost as if it were happening in the dorm room right next to his, he said.

“It was in the newspapers every day. That was (back in) the day when people read newspapers,” Rosenblatt said teasingly. “It would be in your face all the time.”

Men who weren’t in college were being drafted, but Rosenblatt said he wanted to finish his college education before joining the war effort. The Selective Service System, an independent federal agency responsible for implementing the military draft, issued deferment to full-time students making satisfactory progress in any academic field during the Vietnam War. Rosenblatt, a business and marketing student, was able to defer military service for four years during college and an additional three years when he decided to attend Brooklyn Law School after graduating from the University of Akron in 1966.

Rosenblatt said he thought it would be easier to find a job upon returning from service if he already had his degree.

“You had to carry a full load (of classes to maintain deferment), and you had to focus on getting a degree. Right after you graduated, you were going

into the armed forces,” Rosenblatt said.

Every summer, and in between semesters, he waited tables and delivered beer in New York and Brooklyn to pay for his college tuition. He was able to support himself throughout college and law school without taking out a loan.

“Sometimes, you had to shape up,” Rosenblatt said. “You appear at a union (hiring) hall early in the morning, and you just sit there and hope that someone kicks you to go out to work.”

Slouching against the union wall at 7 a.m., Rosenblatt would wait for a day’s job to fall in his hands. If he was lucky enough, he would be sent off to work at 2 p.m. and toil away until 1 a.m. He would be back at the wall at 7 a.m. in search of a job for the next day, because union jobs were relatively well-paid during those times, Rosenblatt said.

Experimenting with potential interests and passions was not an option because of time, he said.

There was the pressure of earning enough to pay for the next semester and completing his degree before being drafted into the army. Also, the courses were prescribed and there weren’t many electives that he could take.

“That’s one of the reasons I love the Senior Scholars Program – because you can experiment with anything you might be interested in,” Rosenblatt said.

When Stern is on campus – meeting, walking to class and eating with UCLA students – he said he feels like he’s an undergraduate student again.

“If you close your eyes, you forget that you’re old,” he said.

It has taken Stern about 40 years since he left UCLA in 1960 to have the time and leisure to learn about topics that he had always wanted to pursue. This year marks his ninth year of taking classes through the Senior Scholars Program.

The decision to sit in a lecture hall again, with pen and notepad in hand, came partly from his craving for the humanities – a “hole” that Stern said he didn’t have the chance to patch up during his undergraduate years at UCLA. Stern said he felt pressured to figure out what he wanted to do after college as quickly as possible. Once he had settled on pharmacy as his field of study, he didn’t have the time to explore other potential paths.

Although Stern regrets not taking as many humanities classes as he would have liked to in his undergraduate years, he said he wouldn’t have been able to do anything differently if he was back in college. As a former prepharmacy student, Stern recalled he had five hours of lecture and 10 hours of lab per week.

“I felt the pressure (to graduate) because I didn’t come from a family that had much money. (College) was still expensive for us,” Stern said. “I felt pressured to figure out my life, just like kids today.”

Stern’s parents were both immigrants who had traveled by sea from Europe to the United States to escape World War II. On the boat headed toward their new home, Stern’s mother, who had succeeded in escaping Nazi Germany with her sister, met her husband-to-be.

Despite the financial burden of supporting Stern and his brother – also a UCLA alumnus – his parents, who had not received higher education, understood the importance of going to college, Stern said.

“It was the motto – the driving force – in our family,” he said. “(My parents) wanted their children to be educated, successful.”

Stern said he couldn’t have felt happier on the first day of college. UCLA had been his dream school ever since he saw a UCLA-Stanford football game when he was 10 years old. Captivated by the game, the blue and gold colors and the “whole feeling of college,” he had dreamed of attending UCLA for eight years.

“It was just a sense of accomplishment – my first days of college life. Even today, when I walk on campus, it’s still exciting for me,” Stern said.

but learning is what keeps you alive.

Michael

“

“My priority was to finish grad school, and I had a girl I liked very much that I wanted to marry right after school,” he said.

Ruthie Loeb was a business student at the University of Arizona while he was a pharmacy student at UC Berkeley, and they met at a Zeta Beta Tau party in 1960.

“I’m still with her now, 51 years later,” Steve Loeb said.

He wanted to graduate from college as soon as possible partly because he felt the need to financially support himself and his future wife at the time, Loeb said. They tied the knot in 1964, right after he graduated from the USC School of Pharmacy. At 23 years old, Loeb was married and had a family that he was responsible for.

Loeb began working at his father’s drugstore after graduating and eventually took over the place, expanding the family business until 2004, when he retired and entered the “honeymoon of (his) life.”

“It gives you a chance to do whatever you want to do,” Loeb said.

When he’s not taking his wife out on dates, playing with his five grandchildren or keeping himself busy in other ways, he’s in class with Rosenblatt and Stern – the same spots, twice a week.

Steve

Loeb grew up helping his father at the family drugstore, located half a mile from UCLA. He worked there part time – cleaning the floors, helping the customers and running errands for his father.

“It was a chance to be together with my dad. I admired my dad, and I liked the work,” Loeb said. “I chose to follow in his footsteps.”

Knowing that he had a six-year pharmacy program to complete, Loeb said he focused on fulfilling his degree requirements. Taking the psychology, political science or music classes that he was interested in meant he might not have been able to finish the program within six years, which would have put a hold on his dream of working alongside his father.

Loeb said he recalls taking one or two electives as a part of his general education requirements at UC Berkeley. One of them was a course about art history, which he enjoyed learning about because it was a field he had never explored.

“The science classes were prerequisites. That’s how I equated them. But for liberal arts classes, they were something you were interested in taking,” he said.

But Loeb couldn’t nurture his interests, because he had set goals after college.

“

we’re fulfilling a part of our lives that we’ve waited until now to do.

A university campus is reality’s own version of Neverland, in a sense.

Visit a campus years from now, and it will remain a home away from home for kids in their late teens and early 20s.

“We consider this the fountain of youth, because nobody else gets old except for us. Everybody is 20 years old,” Rosenblatt said.

Many undergraduate students are still young and finding their commitment to learning, and the perspectives that senior scholars bring are valuable assets in a classroom, said Marina Belozerskaya, a lecturer in Renaissance art history.

“I find that they add a dimension of age and experience to the classroom that increases the energy level of the class and the shared purpose of education,” Belozerskaya added.

Although the Senior Scholars Program urges its participants to refrain from sharing their personal beliefs in the classroom, Belozerskaya said she encourages them to take an active role in class and ask questions.

“Chances are the rest of the class will benefit from the answer,” she said.

Learning among younger students is intellectually valuable for the three friends, but they said there’s more to the experience of being a senior scholar than just sitting

”

in a classroom.

They go on group dates with their wives to Schoenberg Hall for concerts and performances as well as Melnitz Hall for its film screenings. For the three friends, the Senior Scholars Program isn’t just about catching up on their liberal arts education – it’s the opportunity to learn purely for the sake of learning with friends that makes the program so valuable, they said.

Over the years that they have known each other through the program, the senior scholars have even created their own tradition.

For the last five years, Loeb, Rosenblatt, Stern, Ross and other senior scholars have been going out for birthday lunches when a person from their group reaches an oddnumbered age.

On Oct. 20, it was Loeb’s turn.

“Don’t write that he’s turning 75,” Ross whispered jokingly.

It was just the four of them, and a few others that they had met along their journey at UCLA and some meaty, savory goodness at Lenny’s Deli on Westwood Boulevard.

“We have the knowledge, we have the experience and the classroom. And we have the opportunity to have a camaraderie among our fellow students, the seniors – together,” Stern said. “That’s a big package.”

a space to dream.

WRITTEN BY ALLISON ONG PHOTOS BY AUSTIN YU GRAPHIC BY ALICE LIN

T

he movement to colonize Mars was founded by humans who dream of seeing footprints in the crimson dust of the Red Planet.

Technological advances have made interplanetary travel possible, if not yet feasible. In October, NASA released a plan detailing the steps it’s taking to land astronauts on Mars as early as the 2030s.

But these steps taken for mankind have not been taken alone.

Planetary scientists across the globe, including those at UCLA, help fuel NASA’s goals daily, sketching new layers of detail upon our existing knowledge of space. In the past year alone, facultyled initiatives have circled a dwarf planet near Jupiter, designed a 3-D printed home for future Martians and discovered a new planet 100 light-years away.

“The real top-level question in astronomy and planetary science is about the origin and distribution of life,” said David Jewitt, an earth, planetary and space sciences professor at UCLA. “That’s ultimately what we would like to know – what I would like to know for sure.”

UCLA planetary science organizations such as Astronomy Live! and the Institute for Planets and Exoplanets, or iPLEX, aim to inspire the next generation of scientists through outreach on and off campus. Scientists and engineers at UCLA continue to pursue the research questions most intriguing to planetary science: How does our Earth work? How can we find alien life? What exists beyond our stratosphere?

A curiosity about space begins with the students.

the real question is how to keep people with that childlike interest in science.

STARGAZING IN SCHOOL Icy comets, asteroids and other celestial bodies rain about 40,000 tons of primitive cosmic dust on Earth every year, occasionally igniting at our atmosphere’s edge to paint bright meteoric strokes across the canvas of our sky.

Real shooting stars are difficult to capture, study or explain to kids. That’s when science educators turn to the kitchen.

“Comets are called dirty snowballs for a reason,” explains Dave Milewski, gritting his teeth as he wrestles with a bag of Windex, sand and corn syrup threatening to explode within a furious cloud of vaporizing dry ice.

Milewski, a graduate student in astronomy, is recording a comet-making demonstration for the iPLEX website.

He manages to pack the creamy brown mush into a sphere and cradles it beneath his lamp; the comet’s liquid particles boil and hop from the surface like popcorn.

The iPLEX faculty has demonstrated this process to kids and families at the annual Exploring Your Universe outreach event. Representatives from iPLEX, UCLA science departments and local organizations give families rocket demos, science lectures and planetarium shows on

UCLA’s campus every November. More than 6,000 people attended the event in 2014. iPLEX is a networking and educational institution for more than 100 faculty members, researchers and graduate students who study planetary science across departmental lines, said Jewitt, founder and director of iPLEX. Since its launch in 2011, iPLEX has teamed up with graduate student group Astronomy Live! to bring space education to local schools six to eight times a month, showing curious students how to observe the sun using solar telescopes or construct models of the galaxy to scale.

Schools from Central Valley to Manhattan Beach have requested a taste of space from UCLA, said iPLEX director’s assistant Ivy Curren. iPLEX is also working to secure grants that would bring multiple schools to UCLA’s campus for large events during the school year.

“Every 5-year-old is kind of a scientist,” Jewitt said.

“You play with everything, and that’s how you figure out how to be a person. The real question is how to keep people with that childlike interest in science.”

Just ask Milewski.

Milewski – who, as a child, spent hours poring over

astronomy books in the library – once read a theory about how the sun, in 4 billion years, would grow into a red giant and consume the Earth.

A 6-year-old Milewski became very, very concerned with the future of humanity.

“Ever since then, I’m always thinking about space,” Milewski said. “Most people want to know what the origin of life is – what’s our place in the universe. Even if I could just take people a few steps of the way, that would be my life’s work, and I would be very happy with that.”

A painted comet streaks across the yellow wall behind his desk in the “comet room,” where he toils daily to study digital images of celestial objects called active asteroids. Observations have revealed that these rocky bodies can “spit” ice in intermittent spurts, sometimes with the force of a nuclear explosion at 5 kilometers per second.

Milewski talked animatedly about the science of asteroids, satellites, brown dwarfs and space exploration.

Still, he said he doesn’t want to force science on anyone; he only hopes to get people just as excited about science as he is.

Many UCLA students already are.

NOV. 8, 2015

2011

Annual Exploring Your Universe fair held at the Court of Sciences on UCLA's campus.

The UCLA Institute of Planets and Exoplanets, or iPLEX, established by David Jewitt, an earth, planetary and space sciences professor.

MARCH 6, 2015 FEB. 27, 2013

The Present-Day Habitability of Mars conference was held at UCLA.

The spacecraft Dawn enters orbit of asteroid Ceres between Mars and Jupiter in a mission led by UCLA professor Christopher Russell.

LATE 2016/EARLY 2017

UCLA’s first fully built satellite, the Electron Losses and Fields Investigation Cube Satellite, or ELFIN CubeSat, ready for space launch.

AUGUST 2016

Forty rodents will blast off to the International Space Station under a project led by UCLA dentists, plastic surgeons and bio-engineers in search of treatments for osteoporosis.

JULY 2014

UCLA professor David Paige and his team selected to build a radar for Mars Rover 2020 that will map out the subterranean layer of Mars.

SEPT. 19, 2015

iPLEX hosts International Observe the Moon Night on the roof of the Mathematical Sciences Building.

2016

iPLEX will host the Asteroid-Meteorite Connection Workshop at UCLA.

2020

NASA will send Mars Rover 2020 to Mars.

SOURCE: NASA, iPLEX, Broad Stem Cell Research Center, Institute of Geophysics and Planetary Physics. Graphic reporting by Allison Ong, Bruin reporter. Graphic by Alice Lin, Bruin senior staff.

MISSION CONTROL On a regular Tuesday in the Mathematical Sciences Building, engineers pop a little satellite out of an oven at 212 degrees Fahrenheit.

Without its green circuit boards, the Electron Losses and Fields Investigation, or ELFIN, satellite resembles the bare framework of a house. A researcher throws on his lab coat and begins to clothe the miniature satellite, known as CubeSat, in circuit boards with special fasteners, showing a fellow researcher how to select the right screwdriver for the job.

In late 2016 or early 2017, NASA will shoot the satellite into orbit so it can analyze space weather phenomena. NASA and the National Science Foundation have awarded ELFIN more than $1 million in funding since NASA selected it for the CubeSat Launch Initiative in 2014.

The ELFIN CubeSat will circle the Earth, analyzing interactions between Earth’s magnetic field and charged particles emitted from the sun. These interactions have numerous consequences on space weather, such as creating “killer electrons” harmful to spacecraft or giving us the aurora borealis – the northern lights we see tracing iridescent lines over our planet’s poles.

ELFIN researchers mean serious business. Some of them also happen to be undergraduate students at UCLA. “The best part about this project is bringing a concept to life, and that’s the magic of it,” said Lydia Bingley, ELFIN project manager and a graduate student in geophysics and space physics. “This model existed on software simulations, and then we fabricated it in-house. ... Students essentially run the show.”

On Oct. 7, the students transported their satellite prototype to Virginia for vibration testing, where machines vigorously shook the satellite to simulate

launch into orbit. ELFIN CubeSat passed the test.

“This is the future of education,” said Vassilis Angelopoulos, an earth, planetary and space sciences professor who founded ELFIN in 2010. “Whether ELFIN researchers go into academia or research, they (will apply) the same skills, solving challenging questions they believe in. That’s the recipe, and they learn it now.”

A class at UCLA also gives students the opportunity to conduct hands-on research concerning the sky.

Pauline Arriaga, an astronomy graduate student, teaches Astronomy 180: “Astrophysics Laboratory,” where students can conduct research on UCLA’s largest telescope.

Arriaga recently upgraded the camera of the 41-yearold Cassegrain, which will sit within a white dome on the roof of the Mathematical Sciences Building until her class in spring quarter. She flips a switch on the hulking, cannon-like telescope, prompting a deep mechanical hum.

A slice of the dome peels back to reveal a cloudy night.

“What we can do is study systems and formation – stars that are being formed,” said Arriaga, clicking through infrared photos taken of the Orion Nebula. The purple, flame-like dust clouds surrounding the nebula – a birthplace for stars – are only visible to the human eye through an infrared filter.

“This is my telescope,” Arriaga joked, tinkering with the computers and controls within the dome. “This one will keep going for a very long time.”

SPACEWALK As a UCLA professor, David Paige may not breathe Martian air during his lifetime, but the scientific contraption he’s helping to build might get a whiff.

In 2014, NASA selected a radar designed by the earth, planetary and space sciences professor and his colleagues

“

science fiction is resonating with our own present and what we think of as our future.

CULTURE

30

to outfit the Mars 2020 rover, which will depart for Mars in five years. The Radar Imager for Mars’ Subsurface Experiment, or RIMFAX, is a ground-penetrating radar that will create a 2-D map of the Red Planet’s subterranean layers.

“My colleague from Norway called me up and asked me if I wanted to get involved,” said Paige, chuckling. “It’s a little bit like a couple guys deciding to take a weekend trip to Las Vegas.”

In 2013, Paige chaired the international Present-Day Habitability of Mars conference at UCLA. During the broadcast event, experts from all over the world, including from Russia and Germany, discussed the prospects and evidence of biological activity on Mars.

“Understanding our place in the solar system and universe is important culturally, just to give people perspective,” Paige said. “I think it’s also the function of a university to reach out to the community and share what we’re learning, discovering or teaching.”

NASA’s recent announcements of salt water on Mars and water-ice regions on Pluto have garnered widespread attention. NASA’s Instagram photo of Pluto gained the agency 300,000 new followers, according to WIRED magazine. The popularity of NASA’s social media accounts – numbering more than 500 in total – inspired iPLEX to launch its own Instagram this fall, Milewski said.

But social media followers may be scrolling through pictures of alien microbes and extraterrestrial traces of life in the future. Last September, the NASA/Library of Congress Astrobiology Symposium invited science fiction expert and UCLA English professor Ursula Heise to Washington, D.C., to explore – along with other scholars

– the cultural effects of alien life discovery, announcing to attendees that the topic had reached a new urgency. At one point, they discussed extraterrestrial life denialism, a social phenomenon much like the denial of climate change.

Humans have continuously revised the themes of literary science fiction to reflect society’s relationship with the environment, machines and the idea of leaving Earth for a second chance at society, Heise said.

“Things change so fast around us that science fiction, in some sense, is the only genre that can really measure up (to progress),” Heise said. “We are, unintentionally, terraforming the Earth itself. ... That’s one reason that suddenly now science fiction is resonating with our own present and what we think of as our future.”

ELFIN, iPLEX and the physical sciences departments at UCLA will continue to pursue the goals of life discovery, deep-space exploration and interplanetary travel in the coming years. With iPLEX’s new collaborative research agreement with NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, UCLA plans on making even more contributions to the race for space.

In December, Jewitt will pay a visit to Hawaii’s W.M. Keck Observatory, home to the world’s largest optical and infrared telescopes. He hopes his two-night stay on the dormant volcano will bring him useful data for projects that he is working on – or hopes to work on soon.

“When I was a kid, teachers always gave me the impression that knowledge is this huge thing people have been accumulating forever, and it’s so big you’ll never get to the end of it,” Jewitt said. “But the edge of knowledge is so close. Sometimes it’s only one question away.”

”

A QUESTION OF FAITH WRITTEN BY EMAAN BAQAI PHOTO ILLUSTRATION BY AUSTIN YU

“Do you want anything to drink?”

“No thanks, I’m not drinking tonight.”

I pout. “Have class in the morning.”

A

s I pour Sprite into a red plastic cup to avoid further questioning, the taste of the white lie lingers on my tongue.

I am not drinking tonight, have not drank any other night and will not be picking up a beer anytime soon. But I’ve found myself uttering this half-truth more often lately.

“I don’t drink” takes one less word than “I’m not drinking tonight” – “I’m Muslim” takes two less – but explaining myself to a passerby feels too premature. Have they seen enough of me to view me as more than my religious adherence? Will they worry that I’ll judge them? Will someone judge me?

While I feigned sleep to avoid strained conversation with a distant uncle, my ears perked up when he lowered his voice during conversation with my grandmother.

“Is she asleep?” he murmured. I’m not sure if he even knew my name. “I hope you won’t be offended if I say something about your granddaughter.”

My nani told him to go ahead. I anticipated his words like the prick of a needle while I laid in the car, awkwardly hunched.

“She’s at the age where it becomes important to dress modestly,” he began.

I squeezed my eyes shut, as if closing them hard enough would obstruct my hearing too. I knew very well what he was about to tell her – what the Quran says God would want – that it’s time to stop

letting her granddaughter show her calves to his poor, innocent son. Frankly, at 14, I was already tired of this bullshit.

I am grateful to have been born into Islam and the culture associated with it; I have always valued the emphasis on morality in our holy book. In Islam, to advise someone toward a path of morality is considered an admirable act, and I know my uncle felt he was doing the right thing by advising me to cover up. I can’t tell this story without acknowledging his perspective.

But being made to feel that I – a 14-year-old girl at the time – had done something wrong by dressing as I had learned, was bullshit. Growing up learning that it was my job as a female to dress a certain way and then still failing to satisfy, was bullshit.

Perpetuating a double standard that allowed my uncle’s son to expose his legs but sent me into a tizzy of moral self-analysis every time I stepped into a pair of soccer shorts, was bullshit.

What bothered me most was that the same source guided my uncle to what he thought was right and guided me to what I thought was unfair.

“Is your family religious?”

My mother was raised in a fairly liberal environment relative to most Pakistani women at the time.

Although she was raised to dress to the standards of respectability for Pakistani Muslim women, my mother’s aversion to the hijab as a new-age religious

“

have they seen enough of me to view me as more than my religious adherence? will they worry that I’ll judge them? will someone judge me?

”

trend was clear to me throughout my childhood.

Though my Muslim family attended large communal prayers to celebrate Eid al-Adha and Eid al-Fitr for as long as I could remember, we seldom went to the mosque otherwise. My mother and I covered our limbs and heads to pray, but outside the mosque, she wore capris and wasn’t opposed to sleeveless shirts.

So the answer varied depending on who asked. We were religious to those who didn’t practice, but not to our fellow Muslims who prayed five times a day or our sisters who covered their heads daily.

As a child, the question threw me into turmoil because I didn’t understand why my parents didn’t make the effort to fast every day of Ramadan and pray daily, as mandated in the Quran.

That was what I thought being religious meant, and I wanted us to be religious, because I had been taught that only those who fully fulfilled Muslim rituals were allowed into Heaven.

I think my mother views the hijab as the symbol for everything she cannot quite accept about Islam – in many ways, these are the same aspects of Islam that have become difficult for me to reconcile.

During my years in Islamic school, I excelled at memorizing passages from the Quran. After coming home beaming after successful recitations, however, my pride would be quickly crushed by what I now recognize as my mother’s own religious soulsearching.

“Why is the emphasis always placed upon the memorization

of these words that you haven’t yet begun to even understand?” she would question.

And it was true. I was proud of the hours I had spent mastering the vocal inflections of Arabic, but I had no idea what the words meant.

Although her message brewed in my mind, a couple of years after the end of my Islamic school career, I decided I was going to pray five times a day. It was the least I could do – the least that was expected of me.

After a year, however, praying five times a day condensed into five speedy prayers recited before bed. The prayers became something I resented, a cursory ritual that I felt should’ve been more sincere.

I wanted to feel the love for God within myself that I had heard religious leaders talk about, the same affection and devotion for God that I saw peers of different religions and backgrounds embrace in a way I seemingly couldn’t. My resentment worried me, so I stopped praying.

Outside of Sunday school, I didn’t spend a lot of time with other Pakistanis or Muslims. I found the friends that I made in my public school easier to relate to than my Sunday school peers.

In high school, I clung onto the childhood values that taught me to stay away from drinking, dating and other things that I was still trying to negotiate the morality of. It wasn’t hard though – my friends and I were still as reliably innocent as ever. At the time, the only thing I felt differentiated my friends from me was the hemline of our pants – mine was always lower, except during soccer practice, on special occasions, at home or when it was hot.

As college approached, I was secure of myself and resolute in my values on an abstract level, but I was unsure of the specifics, like how much of my legs I could expose.

“You would probably go pretty crazy in college if you weren’t Muslim,” said a friend as we discussed our future in the summer before college.

The thought made sense to me. It was something that I had pondered – who I would’ve been without my culture and without my religion to guide me.

Yet the friend’s words bothered me. I felt that my choices and I were viewed as no more than the sum of my religion and my culture. Faced with choices I had never considered before, I still knew

who I wanted to be, but I had become irrevocably conscious of how I was perceived.

At UCLA, I occasionally feel isolated at my place in the center of a Venn diagram between “stereotypical Muslim” and “stereotypical American college student.”

In some ways, my position has driven me away from confronting my religious doubts or participating in the Muslim community on campus. My reasons cycle. I fear judgment – the very same judgment I know I’m capable of passing and that my uncle passed on me.

I believe that community practice encourages my faith to focus on procedure and rituals rather than the morality and compassion that I find important.

I want to develop my religious identity independently. But I’m not sure if I’ll find that devotion in time or if it’s my responsibility to actively seek it out.

Most of the time, I’m not sure what I’m doing with that cup of Sprite in my hand. It’s easy to say that the environment of rebellion coupled with a desire to fit in attracts me, but ironically, it feels like my feeble attempt to stick out – to not be limited by any part of me.

And when I do tell the whole story to someone who seems curious enough, or maybe just asks me at the right time, the inevitable comes up again: “Are you religious?”

The simplification of my own religious narrative into a yes-or-no question makes me realize I judge myself in a manner that I fear from others: calculating my religiousness based on how well I compare to the image of an “ideal Muslim,” one that I don’t even believe is necessarily the right one.

Every time I’ve thought about religion lately, it’s been to question my faith, to work through equations on what it means to be a good Muslim. I have focused a lot on whether or not how I practice is good enough, instead of the meaning of the practice itself.

I guess I am defined by my faith because I believe in God and am motivated by my faith to spread goodwill. I won’t drink, but I’m not sure if I think my level of skin exposure should mean something.

I’m not ready to assert why I believe or why Muslims practice as we do, and I’ll never be OK with telling you that I’m right and you’re wrong.

Even if I'm still lost with that Sprite cup in my hand, I’ll say how I feel: Yeah, I’m religious.

ALL

ABROAD This past summer and fall, three Daily Bruin staffers traded in a quarter at UCLA for an education abroad, joining the ranks of thousands of students each year. From walking the aromatic streets of Florence, Italy, to grabbing a drink at a local pub in London or Edinburgh, Scotland, all three found a unique flavor to their respective cities and experienced things they hadn’t read or heard about. We bring you just a few of their stories – a taste of their adventures.

@dailybruinprime | FALL 2015

37

ILLUSTRATIONS BY KELLY BRENNAN & KELLY HO

Edinburgh, Scotland WRITTEN & PHOTOS BY MARYROSE KULICK

M

y flat sits on the corner of Sciennes in Edinburgh, Scotland.

Take a left out the front door and soon you’ll hit the easternmost corner of the Meadows, a vast expanse of green grass that – on sunny days – lures barbecuers, dog owners and meanderers.

From there, turn right and walk down two blocks to reach Clerk Street, a bustling avenue for window shoppers and errand runners.

My mom and I took this route on her last night with me in Scotland’s capital, a place known for its spire-top churches and dismally cold winters. After a day of touring the city, we turned left onto Clerk Street, and we found ourselves inside a pub-style restaurant: The Abbey.

My mom had chicken curry and rice. I had steak and potatoes. We chatted about which ATMs I should use in the city and how my brother had just moved into his first college dorm. Even though we were halfway across the world, life was still normal – conversations still familiar.

But shortly the steak on my plate diminished to just a morsel, and then it was completely gone.

After exiting the pub, my mom decided to head back to her hotel to prepare for her morning flight back to the States. So we said our goodbyes, parted ways and she was gone.

And I was alone. Oh boy.

No one really considers the concept of homesickness when they plan extravagant trips to new and strange countries. At least, I didn’t.

Sure, the how-to-preparefor-life-abroad videos tell you all the warning signs, but I always thought I would be too busy, too engrossed with what was around me, to even notice that I missed home.

But as the new school year started getting underway – because yes, studying abroad does include studying – the thrill of exploring Edinburgh’s cobblestone streets, thrifting through designer cashmere and woolen shops and

experimenting with the flavors of haggis and black pudding quickly began to die down.

When I no longer had as much time for sightseeing, even the smallest things would make that horrible lonely feeling sink into my gut.

Grocery shopping, for instance – I’ve never had to shop for only myself, and I found myself panicking over what to buy, not knowing where to find tortillas and questioning why eggs in the United Kingdom don’t have to be refrigerated.

On multiple occasions, I made enough food for two or three but had no one to share it with. This isn’t to say I’ve been completely isolated from other human beings – just that no one told me how much time I’d be spending on my own.

But one night, that itching feeling, that nagging sensation that told me to get out of California and study abroad in the first place, said, “Hey. No.” It refused to let me sit idly in my flat making way too much food.

So the next morning, I woke up at 5:40 a.m., got dressed and ate some yogurt. By precisely 6:08 a.m., I was out the door and turning left.

When I hit the Meadows, I turned right, crossed the intersection and headed toward Clerk Street. The sun had yet to rise, which was just what I wanted.

Few people were out, other than the occasional shop owner preparing for the day. I passed a grocer sweeping broken glass off the sidewalk and nodded good morning to her while my feet moved briskly beneath me; my breath fogged my vision.

I was both nervous and excited – ahead, I could see the faint outline of a mountain looming over the still-sleeping city.

When I came to the edge of town, I made my way through an open gate into the wooded section of Holyrood Park.

The street lamps were all but gone and I could barely see my feet below me, but I knew two paths were laid out before me.

By the light of my iPhone, I took the path to the left.

My heart bounced around in my chest, invoking memories of counselors telling me not to walk alone at night. Did that still count at 6:30 in the morning?

I quickly made it out to the street that surrounds Arthur’s Seat, a long-extinct volcano and Holyrood Park’s most prominent feature. Already the sky was starting to get brighter, and I grew nervous at my pace. I had about 45 minutes to make it to the top for the sunrise at 7:30 a.m.

– plenty of time, but my feet quickened to almost a run.

Halfway up the hill, my lungs were sucking in cold air and my nose was running, but the speed of my movement kept me warm. By then, the sky was light enough so that I no longer needed my phone to see the path. Stopping to switch it off, I looked back to assess my progress, and laid out behind me were hundreds of twinkling Edinburgh lights. They bounced off the Firth of Forth to the right, and it was almost serene enough

for me to stop there and watch them slowly disappear.

As I kept climbing, I envisioned being the only one at the summit – the only one in the world to see the sunrise from this peak on this day, ever.

That, of course, was not the case. Two people had made it up the 250-meter summit before me, which was fine.

Two more people joined us soon after. I perched myself at the highest point of Arthur’s Seat and waited – I had 15 minutes to spare.

I sat and watched the skyline. The subtle colors of dawn created a soft, peachy hue. The lights from the city below us were still twinkling – and then, right on schedule, the sun came up.

First, the red light bouncing off of the clouds slowly began to intensify, crafting abstract jagged lines that wove themselves throughout the sky. Then, ever so slowly – as the sun is never in a rush – a bright orb emerged, washing the hilltop and the surrounding city in orange light.

My companions and I all pulled out our cameras to capture the moment. While the earth’s rotation makes this phenomenon a natural daily occurrence, we were still the only five people on Earth who could say we witnessed the sunrise on Oct. 9, 2015, from the top of Arthur’s Seat.

So why did I decide to study abroad?

Like everyone else, I did it for the culture, the risk, the adventure.

But for the most part, I did it for the Scottish sunrise.

Florence, Italy WRITTEN & PHOTOS BY NATALIE GREEN

W

alking through the streets of Florence, Italy, stained my white Birkenstocks a dingy brown. The ash from the citizens’ chain-smoking created a black sealant over every exposed surface. Most days, I spent my time looking down at my blistered toes, avoiding cobblestone ditches and dog poop, all on a sidewalk that fit 0.26 of my person. Scents rotated between heavenly baking pane and the sewage of thousands.

And then, whenever I looked up, I saw architecture that dated back centuries. I zigzagged through narrow streets of graffitied buildings, which stood perpendicular to designer stores. On my way to class, I passed the David replica, crossed the Ponte Vecchio and Fiume Arno and attempted to enter the Basilica di Santo Spirito, which holds an original Michelangelo. Firenze is a city that breathes history in addition to pollution. Its locals move at a slower pace, making time for two-hour lunch breaks and kisses on both cheeks.

My first weeks in Italy, I fluctuated between grateful, terrified, morose and exhilarated. Having never left the country before, I ignored all my degree requirements to “push myself out of my comfort zone.” But I hadn’t realized that I might have to actually face the repercussions of foreignness while roughly 6,000 miles away from Los Angeles.

The thing is, every study abroad experience is more or less the same. I tried to “study” by exploring my city and traveling to new countries overnight. I was open – to places and to people – and constantly ready for the next adventure.

I spent most of my money on transportation, cheap booze and castle views. Momentarily, I felt waves of homesickness when confronted with an unexpected cultural barrier or a friend’s first-day-of-school Instagram post. When people say studying abroad will change your life, it isn’t an exaggeration.

Thanks to the people who let me into their lives, I made a city halfway across the world into a home; their stories are the special ones.

For three months, Signora Gabriella Bianchi cooked, cleaned and joked in Italian, while I lived in her spare bedroom. Inarguably the head of the house, Gabriella mocked the simpering princess television shows that her granddaughters, or nipoti, loved – complaining that intelligent women had worked too hard for this to remain the model for young girls.

In Italy, families remain tight-knit – uniti.

Gabriella’s house held her daughter, son-in-law

and three bambini: Sara, age 6; Ghaia, age 4; and il bebè Zach. The apartment was also shared with three birds, one guinea pig, one kitten and my housemate, Annie Erdahl from Minnesota.

A mother to three and host mother to countless, Gabriella put up with my stutters and mispronunciations with loving chagrin – reminding me her last students spoke only Italian at home. Each evening, a “pronto” at my door signaled my favorite time of day.

Homemade lasagna, stew and tiramisù would appear – and then disappear – in front of Annie and me. Sempre buoni.

Gabriella asked if we wanted seconds while putting them on our plate. Zach giggled at us from his high chair, and tiny Ghaia begged to mango – or eat – again.

Gabriella has traveled and eaten her way around the world – from California to Africa to Egypt – drawing the line at tasting spiders and dog.

She likes American action movies, John Steinbeck and “Who Wants to be a Millionaire.”

Marcella Delitala is from Sardegna, an island off the coast of southern Italy. For three hours Monday through Thursday mornings, she taught basic Italian to 20 tired – and occasionally hungover – college students. In the course of one semester, Marcella somehow coaxed us through

three consecutive language levels. Every morning, she bicycled past me with a “buongiorno.”

Petite and brunette, dressed in flowing pants and sweaters, Marcella is 42 but looks a decade younger. She has three children and claimed she could do without 17 more – she couldn’t help but laugh when half of our questions began with “come si dice” and “che significa.” With remarkable energy and exaggerated facial expressions, she rearranged our seats every day and forced a new language into our reluctant brains.

With an “allora,” the class began a piedi. We groaned and circled up as she reached for the tiny colored ball that signaled the beginning of popcorn verb conjugations and counting exercises.

Marcella made examples with our names on the board to help ingrain grammar lessons. She took pictures of us on class outings and counted her ducklings as we trailed behind her.

She studied abroad in Ohio, does silly dance moves and ordered me chestnut cake – castagnaccio – at the farmer’s market.

Annie Rimmon is a third-year applied mathematics student from Los Angeles with multigenerational Italian roots. Program mates constantly asked us if we were friends prearrival, as I blushed from embarrassment.

We met last year at UCLA Volunteer Day, where I managed a gardening site at a local elementary school. Annie was a lead volunteer, and she said I was good at being nice – after which I ignored her

on campus. This may or may not be entirely factual, but I cannot imagine my study abroad experience without her.

Annie is one of the most genuinely warm people I have ever met – so warm that she’s able to make the people near her feel warm too. She holds an ability to discover patterns and beauty in nearly everything and cares about people to a fault.

For the past three months, she kept poking me on the arm – whether we were looking out over the city from Piazzale Michelangelo or pestering our friend with singing – and saying, “Look, we’re in Italy,” reminding me how fortunate we were.

She writes her own songs, takes improvisational comedy classes and wants to be a radio host.

There were the owners of the corner sandwich shop from school who taught me the Italian names of vegetables. There was the restaurant manager who invited me to his band’s jam session. There was the old man who stared out of his garage shop every morning – as if he was always waiting for someone – when I walked by for class. There were Italians who adopted me, Italians who catcalled me and Italians who ignored me.

My favorite thing about Florence – not including a gelato from Gelateria Perché no! or Gabriella’s roasted melanzana – is the people. Waiting for a check without prompting could take an entire night, and don’t count on anything being open in the early morning or afternoon. Tempo al tempo, or all in good time. People in Italy seem content to spend time with their family, eat good food and smoke.

I’m ambitious. But living in Florence has given me perspective on a different pace of life – with a slowness, and sometimes ineffectiveness, that I probably couldn’t maintain for very long.

Nonetheless, I hope to return with a greater awareness of all I have to appreciate. And most importantly, I want to return with the same mentality that I embraced while abroad: one of openness, whether that means to the coastline of California, the new neighborhood café or the stranger standing near me at the bookstore.

London, England WRITTEN BY ANDREA HENTHORN PHOTO BY CHIKA MATSUMOTO

C

od sizzled while we walked past a Sherlock Holmesthemed storefront. The flaky bitterness of the malt vinegar-covered fish was almost tangible through the air.

On the same street was an old church, its blue and white paint flaking – almost like the fish. The archaic facade of the church seemed out of place after we cut through the garden and ended up on a modern, busy street filled with bakeries and boutiques.

This was London, this was Baker Street, this was home.

For three weeks, our mission was to become wanderers.

Armed with maps from 1779 and mindsets from 2015, my classmates and I were led by the ghost of 18th century Romantic poet and engraver William Blake to roam the streets of London.

Blake, unlike many of his contemporaries, chose to highlight the world for what it was not. While studying, we were told by our professor to step outside the boundaries of our classroom walls, and we were shown the ghost of the old London that inspired Blake’s critiques of authority and society. He emphasized the dual nature of his world by both criticizing and beautifying it with his words.

We were standing on the cusp of two Londons: one antiquated and belonging to Blake, one modern and belonging to us. By walking the streets one district at a time, we saw with our own eyes the reflection of what Blake wrote about in the late 18th century.

Our professor tasked us with understanding that Blake, and others like him, were surrounded by people who defined themselves along the lines of class, economics and – most importantly – time. But ironically, experiencing

Blake’s London is not unlike walking through a city today and seeing the dynamic between modern-day realists and Romantics – those who are aware of time, and those who enjoy their time.

The crackle and snap of frying cod in a white- and black-tiled restaurant is timeless, as is dinner in a conversation-filled pub with friends. The long grass in an open field at the poet John Keats’ home scratches against your legs and makes you forget that you even have a watch around your wrist.

That joyful timelessness was undermined by the other parts of life we saw: open fields turned into shopping malls, and ever-expanding business centers in previously historic districts.

Time, though we all become a slave to it at one point or another, never seemed more malleable to me than it did during the three weeks when I went from a UCLA English student to a London straggler. While reading about each author’s personal revolution and how they fought to see the beauty of nature and individuals in a constantly industrializing world, I tried to put myself in context of that struggle.

As I walked through each new place, I attempted to see both Londons.

Sitting in a pub overlooking the River Thames, I envisioned what used to be docklands in the 18th century, where many Chinese immigrants found themselves in a new world. I

heard the past echoes of early morning bustling from a meatpacking warehouse. But now, as up-and-coming real estate, the former docklands stand lined with pubs, the only remnants of their history found in the Chinese cuisine and blocked-off alleys to the river that dotted the road.

The London I saw and felt wasn’t really there, and it prompted me to think about the constantly transitioning city in the context of my own constantly transitioning life.

What values did I want to keep, and what did I want to leave behind?

As students, professionals or workers, we live by time. Our existence is ruled in terms of the next deadline, the next promotion or the next week that will finally bring the long-awaited break from self-inflicted busy schedules.

But for three weeks, I wandered, timeless in the cobbled streets of London.

as i walked through each new place, i attempted to see

both londons.

CAMPFIRE I

DIY: color-changing pine cones

magine yourself on a camping trip with friends and warming your hands over a comfortable fire – only the fire is tinged with your favorite color. These treated pine cones are easy to make and can add a little extra spark to the flickering flames. Try tossing a few of these pine cones into your campfire and watch the magic happen.

INSTRUCTIONS

Bucket Slotted spoon or tongs Pine cones Flame colorant of choice

1. If you gathered pine cones from your backyard, or somewhere equally outdoorsy, line a baking pan with aluminum foil and bake the pine cones in an oven at 200 degrees Fahrenheit for one hour. This opens up closed pine cones and removes bugs as well as sap. Allow the pine cones to cool. Skip this step if you are using pine cones purchased from a crafts store.

2. Pour half a gallon of hot water into a bucket. Add 1 cup of your flame colorant, then stir

COLORANTS

Boric acid (green) Copper chloride (blue) Potassium chloride (purple) Epsom salt (white) Table salt (yellow) Strontium chloride (red) Calcium chloride (orange)

until dissolved.

3. Add pine cones to the solution, making sure that the liquid completely covers each pine cone. Soak the pine cones in the solution for at least eight hours or overnight.

4. Remove the pine cones from the solution and set them to dry for at least three days.

5. Now your pine cones are treated and ready to be burned!

Toss pine cones one at a time into your fireplace or bonfire and watch the pretty colors appear.

T

recipe: philly cheesesteak

he crackle and pop of a roaring campfire bring to mind toasted marshmallows and s’mores – foods that may not be filling but will at least warm you up. If you want a hearty alternative to hot dogs and hamburgers for those hungry hiking or beach days, throw a few treated pine cones into the fire as you cook up a simple Philly cheesesteak under the stars. Here’s our take on classic campfire comfort food.

INGREDIENTS One large loaf of garlic bread 600 grams of roast beef 500 grams of provolone or mozzarella cheese Three bell peppers One onion 2 tablespoons butter or oil

MATERIALS Aluminum foil Knife Frying pan Spatula

INSTRUCTIONS 1. Slice the bell peppers and onion, then sauté until the bell peppers are cooked through. Note: If you are planning to finish the food preparation at a campsite or bonfire, make sure to pack the cooked mixture in a cooler.

2. Slice the loaf of garlic bread in half lengthwise.

3. Spread the bell pepper and onion mixture over half

the loaf.

4. Layer with cheese and roast beef.

5. Wrap the entire loaf in aluminum foil and warm the ingredients in the oven.

At campsites or bonfires, place the package near the hot coals of a fire until the cheese melts completely (around 30 minutes).

6. Cut into hearty slices and enjoy!

@dailybruinprime | FALL 2015

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MATERIALS

hike la.

AMIR’S GARDEN

WRITTEN BY HAYLEY MCAVOY PHOTOS BY AUSTIN YU

H

aving lived in Los Angeles for a little more than two years now, I’ve made a few obligatory visits to Griffith Park. But it wasn’t until recently that I ventured into a nook in the park and discovered Amir’s Garden.

A sign at the park’s summit sheds a bit of light on the park’s history.

After a fire in 1971, the trees burned down and the mountain side was blackened – the entire area became dead. As the story goes, a man named Amir Dialameh carried and planted hundreds of plants up the mountain. He cared for the garden and saw it flourish into a green oasis, continuing to tend to it until his death in

2003.

Today, the park is nurtured by volunteers.

Amir’s Garden is a small nook, tucked away on top of one of the park’s rolling hills. Compared to my Northern California home, lush greenery is much rarer in Southern California, but Amir’s Garden is as close as it gets.

Two different paths lead up to Amir’s Garden.

One of them is long and gradual, while the other is shorter but steeper and involves stairs. I recommend the second one, because it gives the best view of the valley below.

The entire hike doesn’t take more than 20 minutes for the ascend – going at a leisurely pace

– but that doesn’t mean it’s not strenuous. It’s directly uphill, so the stairs are decently steep.

Taking short breaks to rest allows time to look at the incredible view of the city below and the mountains in the background. Going at sunset might provide a panoramic view of the colorchanging sky.

But what’s even better than the view are the plants that make up Amir’s Garden. At the top, there are various benches and tables nestled in between the greenery. Sitting up there among the trees almost makes me forget that I live in a city.

As Amir would often say, “In the land of the free, plant a tree.”