The Life-Changing Cheesecake, A New Home, and...I Wish "Agave" Was Pronounced "Aguave"

I've missed you, World of Words.

I've missed you, blog.

And you are, simultaneously, two different things inexplicably intertwined with each other, and the same thing altogether. (I like that sentence!)

We got back from our college trip on Saturday night. Despite now - superly unfortunately, since summer is the time to not do this - being a little stressed about getting things done that need to be done (such as studying Chinese and finishing at least the first unit of my online course), the trip was very worthwhile.

Here are the collegs we visited, in order, with ratings from 1-5 (1 being the worst, 5 being the best):
Cornell - 3
Harvard - 2
Brandeis - 2
Wellesley (the campus only, since we didn't have time for a tour) - 5 (but that's not taking into account any information about the college, or the fact that it's an all-girls college...just the fact that the campus was beautiful and green and hilly and Hogwartsy!)
Brown - 3
Yale - 4
Vassar - 2
Bard - 4
Oberlin - 5.....mmiiIILLLLIIOonnn

Especially after visiting Yale, which was the first college that I actually liked, and didn't just feel that there was something I didn't like about it, I was afraid that I'd go back to Oberlin and have the exact same feeling as I did before - really liking it, feeling like I could fit in, and familiarity with the town - but nothing less or more. This would make my decision more difficult, because I would be torn between something that I thought was a perfect fit and something that was a good enough fit and would give me tons of resources along with credentials. ('Cause really, someone hears you went to Yale and it's like WHOA!) But that wasn't my experience at all.

When we drove into the town of Oberlin, at about 9:00 at night,  I actually felt this release in my stomach. Like I'd been uncomfortable, holding some sort of tension, and as soon as we were in Oberlin that left. It felt like we were home - even for my parents. I felt comfortable and confident. And the food was so good!

Here's how it went: Aladdin's for dinner, with a giant Pita Pocket salad with felafels and some hummus from my mom's; mid-morning everything cookie and green tea with cardamon and honey at the Slow Train Cafe; and lunch at Cafe Sprouts. Cafe Sprouts is a little corner restaurant that is all vegan, gluten-free, beyond organic, local, mostly raw, and SO GOOD. Beyond belief tasty.

Especially their cheesecake.

I'm talkin' raw, pineapple banana coconut cheesecake. Cold and creamy - oh-so-creamy - it melts in your mouth like heaven. Like the best heaven ever. Better than brownie heaven or cookie heaven or cake heaven or smoothie heaven or tea heaven or fresh fruit heaven or whatever kind of food heaven you like the best, better than that. It's like eating a cloud (or what eating clouds might be like if they weren't just air and tasted like pineapple and banana and coconut).

We also had raw vegan sushi with this nutty mock chicken stuff and really good soy sauce and a raw vegan veggie-burger (with some really good rice-ish chips on the side), along with free samples of a "blueberry blondie" smoothie (which was extremely invigorating). We shared everything, along with the bottomless cup of tea that my dad ordered (you get unlimited refills....but wouldn't that be cool, a bottomless cup of tea that actually held tea? Haha, that'd be a funny joke - put "bottomless cup of tea" on your menu for a really good price so that people pounce on it, then actually give them a bottomless cup! Haaahaha, too funny...and cruel.).

After my first bite of cheesecake I was in a meditative state. Like, I'm not kidding, I seriously felt like I was meditating (let's note: I don't know what meditating actually feels like, I've never done it). For the rest of the day I couldn't help but walk around with a smile on my face, and I felt so calm, calmer than I've ever been, calmer than I feel lying in the sun or waking up to the chirp of birds or after an afternoon nap or anything.

Earlier that day we'd also walked through campus, spent some time resting in front of the Conservatory of Music, where there is a beautiful fengshui-ish pond with fishies (!); looked around in the bookstore, read some, and I got an Oberlin shirt (I made a decision to not get college shirts on this trip unless I really loved a place, and this certainly fell under that category); and walked through the Family Fun day stuff that they had out on the streets. (Mostly tables that the shops had put out.) We also checked out this really cool antique store  - I could've spent hours in there - and my mom and I got some awesome cheap sunglasses. At one point, walking along the street between the edge of campus and the town, where the street was closed off and retro cars were on display, with 60s music playing and children laughing and tables full of books from a used book store to my side, and my parents walking on either side of me, I wanted to freeze that moment and store it away somewhere so I could revisit it time and time again. I was so happy...and that was before the cheesecake.

So that was the day that raw vegan pineapple banana coconut cheesecake changed my life. That was the day when I felt ready to clim another step on my way to adulthood, to responsibility, to whatever-my-life-will-lead-to. I felt like honey, smooth and warm and flexible and real. I felt like the breeze, the clouds, the soil below my feet, the leaves reaching up to the sky. I was P-E-A-C-E. I felt like a mass of warm, cofrmting air, and I felt like nothing could disintegrate me. I felt sturdy as an oak. I am me, and that's that.

And it was also the day that I found a new home of sorts - Oberlin. The bike wheel sculpture bike racks, and the composting cups, and the recycling bins everywhere, and the huge clock besides one of the main streets (CVEC, you'll know why that's important), and the vegan/vegetarian friendly restaurants, and the gardens, and just everything, felt so ME. I could definitely live there. I could live there right now. 

So you see why I gave Oberlin a 5. Million.

And even though we went on that long trip and saw all those colleges and my parents had to deal with all that New England traffic, just to come back to one of the first ones we saw a while ago and still love it, even more, I'm still glad we went, because now I'm sure that I love Oberlin a LOT.

One more thing: Agave is pronounced "Ah-gah-vay" but I really wish it was pronounced "Ah-gwa-vay," because that's how I've been saying it, and it's just so much easier to slip off the tongue than Ah-gah-vay."  (Agave nectar is a sweetener we use in lots of our healthy desserts - think of something between maple syrup and honey.)