College Visits Day 4

Sunday, March 27, 2011

I woke up, very relaxed, and continued reading a book by David Orr (who facilitated the building of the Adam J. Lewis Center at Oberlin) called Design on the Edge: The Making of a High -Performance Building. The writing is pretty dense, and the paragraphs long, and I don't understand a lot of it as well as I could if my vocabulary was a little broader, but I still enjoy every word! I know I'm reading something written by someone extremely intelligent, regarding a topic that I'm passionate about...and every time I remember that it's about something that happened at Oberlin, it feels me with warmth. I like that place!

Anyway, that morning I also finished The Alchemist. I was stunned afterward - very moved. I will be writing another post about the book sometime soon.

So I spent a lot of time that morning sitting in bed, reading and thinking. And I drank some tea. After all of us had showered and gotten dressed, we walked out to find something for brunch. I was reaching a point of inner panic, having not eaten yet and not knowing where or what I would eat. We walked down to the Oberlin Market again...well, only after stopping by a little place we'd noticed called the Pizza Shack that offered pizza by the slice, but unfortunately was not open that Sunday. My mom got another German Chocolate muffin, but we couldn't find anything else, so we checked out a place called the Feve (pronounced fev), but it would have been a fairly long wait there, so we made our way back to the Oberlin Market, where I got a bagel and a blueberry bar. We had decided we'd go back to our "house" and eat the rice and lentil dish that my mom had prepared earlier.

After I took a bite of my blueberry bar, I was a much happier girl. I felt like a little kid again, only calmed by candy...although that blueberry bar was a lot better than any candy I've had! Anyway, we also stopped at Gibson's, the place with chocolate covered everything. I got some milk chocolate covered dried cherries and dark chocolate fudge. I just couldn't pass up the opportunity to get something from there...

We mournfully finished up our last walk through downtown Oberlin. At this point I just couldn't wait till I could eat that meal, and my stomach was feeling slightly knotted from having a few bites of the blueberry bar while walking... But anyway. Also, we stopped at a couple more pizza places while on our little stroll to see if they sold it by the slice, but they didn't.

We had a very nice brunch...Ok, well, it was about 1:30 or so in the afternoon, so more like a late lunch I suppose. We completed what little was left of our packing at that point, cleaned up the kitchen so it was just as we left it, and sadly made our way out the door and down the winding steps to depart our little home for the last time.

The drive to Kenyon was mostly in the country, and the winding road certainly did not make my stomach or my head very happy. When we finally arrived...boy was I glad to get out of that car!

We stayed at a place called the Kenyon Inn. It was like a small hotel, and the room was actually a lot nicer than most hotel rooms. But the first moment that we drove on campus, I just didn't like it as much as Oberlin. And when we opened the door to our hotel room, I was grateful that we could stay in such a nice place and be comfortable, but the house we stayed in at Oberlin - which was owned by a lady named Jo - was just so much more personal!

Once we moved in, we walked around campus a little bit. We were also looking for a place to eat, and weren't very successful. There were only about three places to eat on campus - the cafeteria and two restaurants, The Middle Ground and The Village Inn. The latter was closed, and the Middle Ground just didn't have anything that we wanted. The cafeteria wasn't open at that time. We ended up spending some time in the bookstore, which was my favorite part on campus. I read some of Alice Through the Looking Glass, which I actually found extremely interesting - partly because our school play was a variation of Alice's adventures called Alice in America-Land, and partly because there were footnotes throughout it that explained little things like the name of Alice's cat. Anyway, at this point I was getting hungry and annoyed, and my head was once again not in the best shape since I hadn't brought my glasses with me, so I was totally ready to get back to our room. We decided to just eat the food we had with us, which was exactly what I wanted to do.

Unfortunately, my stomach still felt pretty bad afterward. And then I got really full after not eating much, and then my stomach hurt but I was still hungry, and blal-de-blah-de-blah. However, my night was much improved when we turned on the TV and there were re-runs of Friends!