The old FIDM facilities used to be near the Escherian nightmare known as Horton Plaza, and from what others have said, it was an outdated dump. This brand new facility is smack dab in the East Village, next to the Icon condos (where my friend who organized our 20 year reunion lives) and the future new San Diego Library. Click here for a photo tour of the new campus, which, as you can see, is right next to Petco Park 
Here's the view from the 5th floor of FIDM's campus. Wow! I'm not a baseball fan, but the views here were awesome! You can see the original Western Metal Supply Co. brick building which was incorporated into the ball park's design.
They had coffee and tea out on the cantilevered balcony. Here's another view... You can see the Manchester Grand (the flat head Screwdriver building) as well as the building on the far right (not sure what it's called now) which I call the Phillips screwdriver building.
Several FIDM faculty members gave us a tour of their campus - We saw several classrooms, design labs/studios with mannequins, their library which is chock full of books and magazines on art, fashion, and design. It was basically a dog and pony show about their school, but that is what most of these tours/mini conferences are about. As a counselor, I do find it useful to visit the sites of the very places that we recommend to our students. Some of my co-workers have even gone on tours on the East Coast, Mid-West, and the US Naval Academy. We've had several students attend FIDM in the past. For the kind of money that the students pay to attend, they damn well better have nice facilities! Unfortunately, the live fashion show was canceled. Instead, during lunch, they had a slideshow of fashions by a company called BowandArrow. Their two designers and business parters were there as well. One of them was a Filipino by the name of Alan del Rosario. See his Spring 2007 collection from Mercedes Benz Fashion week here, his 2006 collection here, and a recent article from San Diego's Asian Journal here. I had a chance to briefly chat with Alan. I was pretty excited to meet a Filipino fashion designer in the flesh. The only ones I've heard of are way up in the fashion stratosphere, such as lingerie and sleepwear designer Josie Natori (see her website here). I have one of her bras from Nordstroms. Another Filipina (actually she's Filipina/French) fashion designer is one of the darlings of haute couture, bridal wear as well as red carpet and fashion runway favorite, Monique Lhuillier, who is one of Alan's friends. See her collections here.
Alan comes from Cebu, speaks five different Philippine dialects and has an engineering degree from the Philippines. He came to the U.S. to pursue fashion and met Monique at FIDM in LA; their moms are friends. Anyhow, he was very cool and down to earth and I was happy to see a fellow Pinoy in the fashion industry. It's not too often you hear of or even see a Filipino designer (at least in the U.S., I don't know how it is in the Philippines).
Lunch was on the 13th floor with spectacular views of downtown which you shall see later on in this post. For now, here is our boxed lunch which was wrapped in pretty sheer bows in pink, red and orange. I saved my ribbon and the other educators at the table ended up giving their ribbons to me since I was planning to give it to TC to either use for her hair or for crafts.
Since there are no kitchen facilities at FIDM, lunch was catered (don't know by whom though). Everyone had a box lunch and Fiji water. In the middle of each table was a multicolored Gerbera topped, white frosted cake which turned out to have strawberry filling.
The box lunch unwrapped. There were two halved sandwiches in there. The white bread had chicken salad in it. The container with the mustard packet was balsamic mushrooms and asparagus (mustard? ick!). The swirled rye bread had the same filling. Lastly, the container in the lower left was your basic pasta salad.
Their windows were nearly floor to ceiling glass! This is the view from the far right of their huge windows...
This view is slightly to the left of the pic on top. You can see the reflection on the glass.
And as you pan left, you can see the "sails"-like roof of the San Diego Convention Center, the San Diego Bay and the strip of land that you see in the far distance is Point Loma.
Ugh - you can see the reflection on the glass again. Here, you can see the Coronado Bridge and part of Petco Park. The weather that day was kind of June gloomy, but it was perfect for taing pictures.
Another pic of downtown and the ballpark. You can even see the mini ball park!
Here's the lunch with the tops off the containers. I liked the sandwich filling better than the bread. The balsamic mushrooms were pretty good, although the asparagus turned me off because it had a mushy texture.
Sandwich guts:
This was one of the nicest school tours I'd been to, plus they gave us a free lunch and FIDM goodie bags! After lunch and the fashion slideshow, my co-worker and I had to drive our asses back to work. : (
