Spring Break 2010: Day 3
The Pennsylvania State University has decided that spring break will fall between March 8th and March 12th (counting only the weekdays) this year. I have decided that I will not be going anywhere. This means I’m spending a week in State College, PA, a town primarily heralded as being the home-away-from-home for the tens of thousands of students studying at PSU. This week, however, most of them are gone, making State College an empty shell. This is my story about that week.
Today was supposed to be rainy. I know this because I watched the local news. WJAC TV is very entertaining, and their weather team is trustworthy. At least that’s what they claim. Not very trustworthy if you ask me, since it only rained for about an hour or so at 9 pm. So as soon as I saw that it was actually just cloudy, I took to the streets.
It’s kind of hard to come up with original descriptions of an empty campus more than twice, so I’ll spare you another round of laments about closed buildings and streets that seem to be widening due their lack of circulation. Instead I’ll tell you about how I remembered something I forgot to mention about racquetball yesterday. As a very recent glasses-wearer, yesterday was the first time I played a sport (an official sport, at least) while actually wearing my glasses. At first I tried the protective large sports glasses that go over your actual glasses and felt just a bit weird as the ball kept wooshing by my racquet. I then tried with just the protective glasses that replace your actual glasses. The ball kept wooshing by, but intertwined with me actually hitting it from time to time. And then I took off any kind of vision-adjustment mechanism and was able to hit the ball much better, but still very bad. And I finally realized I never had good hand-eye coordination, anyway. So much for not wasting your time with this post, huh?
Back to today. Campus-walking ended with a short tour of the University Park Libraries, from the one at the Law School to the main one, to the one in the Engineering building in search of books for friends. Late lunch at the Corner Room and a siesta on the patio of Starbucks off of College Ave followed suite. Maybe it’s because the streets were empty, maybe it’s because they were wearing bright clothing, maybe it’s because of something else, but the local drunks and beggars were very evident and very friendly. Too friendly for our tastes. We decided to “take the party somewhere else” and went to see a movie at one of the local cinemas. And since romantic comedies were out of the question for a group of guys, we went with the action comedy CopOut, and spent an hour and a bit laughing. We tried to keep the funny going as we got to one of our houses, but the premiere is only next week, when we’re back to normal life.
So today was basically just as uneventful.
- end of day 3/5 -