UPenn

Matt is working at UPenn apparently once a week now.

It's in Philadelphia, which is about 45 minutes from our house.

Anyone who follows my pinterest boards might have noticed that I flooded everyone's news feed with things to do in New Jersey earlier this week. (My pinterest board is here, if you're curious. And I'd love more suggestions.)There was quite a few near or in Philadelphia, so I asked Matt if I could go with him. He was so exhausted from working in the lab all night that he finally okayed Tiny and me going. Woohoo!

So we bundled up and off we went.

Guys...I had no idea how big UPenn was.

It looks so cute and manageable on the map, but being there in person was a completely different experience. I understand now why they call it "University City". Finding parking was a headache, but since Matt was getting trained right behind the Children's Hospital, Madeleine and I were able to drop him off with no issue. But pretty much as soon as we left the parking garage we were lost.

Madeleine liked watching the helicopters flying in and out of the hospital while I looked around confused.

 I was so frustrated at this point. It seemed like most of campus was hospital,  but then suddenly I stumbled upon Lotus Way, then I started warming up to UPenn.

UPenn is beautiful. It's way bigger than Princeton, but it had a similar vibe. Madeleine and I strolled around for two hours. I think in that time we only covered about half of campus. 

I tired to take a picture of Goobie next to the Love sign...just there was a lot of construction by it

I have no clue what any of those places are...but I thought they were pretty.

There were a few things that I noticed that were different from other campuses I had been to. 

First of all, every building had the name of the building in huge letters. I loved it. It made it much easier to figure out where I was when I got helplessly lost.

Another thing was...everything was a year - 1920 cafe, the Class of 1942 bench, 1902 bridge...etc. I found that a bit amusing for some reason.

The architecture was beautiful. When we first moved to Princeton, it seemed like I was taking pictures of everything, and I just got overwhelmed. I now just take pictures of the doors at Princeton. I found myself in the same situation at UPenn. I wanted to take pictures of everything...so I started just focusing on the doors.

I absolutely loved this gate. For one of my Humanities projects at BYU, I put together a museum gallery of different artists' drawings and sculptures of hands. Since then hands have been particularly interesting to me.

Which led to me noticing another thing that was odd about UPenn...there were a ton of tiny doors.

Arch Cafe...I think Matt would have had a hard time going into that door

After we finished wandering, we found ourselves (completely by accident) in front of the museum I wanted to visit. It was the Institute of Contemporary Art. They let people take pictures there, so that's what tomorrow's post will be about.

We finished with the museum right before Matt finished up, so I started walking towards what I thought was the right way. We ended up taking a completely different way. Matt happened to call just when I was standing on top of this giant compass.  I had to stop there and laugh of the irony that I was completely lost and couldn't figure out where I was or which way I should be going, while standing on this giant compass. We found him pretty quickly all things considering and went home.

Then Tiny and I took a long nap as soon as we got home, after dropping Matt off at work.