The grass is always greener...
At Caltech!
Quite literally. Since a couple months ago, the lawns on campus are being remodeled, for lack of a better word. It’s quite a long and arduous process actually. Landscapers come and first get rid of the dead grass with rakes; a lot of the grass is dead so by the end there’s really not much grass left, mostly just dirt.
Then, they’ll add this fertilizer-seed-mixture. A wonderful smell of chemicals and poop surrounds the area. In a week or so, bright green sprouts emerge. And the smell goes away! (a chem/bioengineer could explain this better to you; I can’t figure out how a smell can be so strong then disappear.) The grass is mowed, and looks like this!
You can’t really tell from the pictures, but it’s the brightest green color. It looks like turf but has the sort of reflective transparency that only live plants have. Every single blade uniformly stands straight up. Then a couple days will pass, the grass grows a little longer, and now it’s like a shaggy carpet.
No joke, I’ve seen people stop at the grass and touch it as if they were petting a dog. Okay yea it is just a lawn, but it looks and feels REALLY nice.
Over break I was home in Colorado, and though the weather was warmer than usual, I was still freezing. Pasadena will spoil you; I mean, the Sun shines and the grass grows all year. Actually, in 2005 Caltech pranked MIT where our students went to their prospective student weekend, handing out T-shirts that had the MIT logo on the front. After unwrapping the plastic and putting them on, the students realized that on the back of the shirt, it said “…because not everyone can go to Caltech” with a little palm tree drawn on the side. They’re still sold at our bookstore.
So, to conclude this rather random post, come to Caltech because our weather is great and we have green grass and palm trees!
Best,
Monica
