Spring Break 2010: Day 5
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.
The last weekday of Spring Break finally got here. You might wonder why I’m not counting the weekends that this week is in between. It’s because there’s a group of students that stay back during the weekend before break, and there’s a group of students that come back during the weekend after break, even if most students just get up and leave on Friday and come back late Sunday night right before classes. So it’s only about the weekday. And it’s the last day of the week already.
The rain that started at midnight the night before continued all day. The day was gloomy and walking around was totally out of the question. I wasn’t going to walk through the rain and the puddles, so I lingered around at home, trying not to get too upset about my really choppy internet (the reason for the really short post on Day 4). After counting the few people still in State College, I decided on meeting up with a friend from an organization, mixing business with pleasure.
He picked me up and we went straight to downtown for some sandwiches and banter at Irving’s. Good conversation and great food make time fly, especially if you’re in the basement where you can’t see the gloomy rain outside. He had some meetings and I needed to get back home, so we parted ways after he gave me a ride home.
A bit of cleaning around the house and some taking care of emails filled the time until 7:30 when I had planned a dinner. Low visibility due to the pouring rain and the fact that it was very dark made it hard to take the right turns. So we ended up at a different place that was just as good.
After that I watched some TV and went to bed. It’s hard to glamorize and blog about a day that had lunch and dinner as its major happenings. And this was the problem with this whole week. While it started as an experiment on the what it feels like to spend Spring Break in an empty college town, it turned out to be an experiment on how excruciatingly difficult it is to squeeze something interesting and blog-worthy out of dull days. And since I didn’t ask any of my friends about whether I was allowed to mention them, some actually asking to be kept out, I had to make it even duller, taking out names of people, places and even taking out whole conversations or events.
In any case, this is the last post about this Spring Break. Now it’s back to, hopefully, more interesting posts about relevant stuff.
- end of day 5/5 -