My second week back ended with a very late Sunday night (don’t get too excited – I was doing homework), so apologies in advance if I veer off topic in this post.
This weekend, I spent more time on other college campuses than I did on my own. Saturday through Sunday I was at University of Virginia/UVA with my friend Heather. Friday night I stayed in Richmond and hing out with Toliver for a while. He goes to Virginia Commonwealth University/VCU. I had hoped to get a feel for their campus at night, but ended up spending two and half hours playing Mario Kart instead. It would be a lie if I told you that I have even an inkling of videogame-related talent, so when I say “playing” I actually mean pushing random buttons as a roomful of guy calls them out to me. As interesting as I’m sure you find my gaming habits, I’ll move on and describe something that applies to you. I guess you’ve finished college applications by now and realized (hopefully) that they really aren’t as bad as you’d expected and are now faced with the task of choosing a school. I talk a lot about UR in this blog, go figure, so I’d like to dedicate a little time to explaining what I perceived as the differences between UVA, VCU and UR. Since I’ve been to all of them in the past three days, those differences are pretty fresh in my mind haha.
We’ll start with VCU. It’s a much more urban campus than UR, which isn’t much of an achievement since UR isn’t urban at all. VCU is in the city. It feels like a city. It has the flickering streetlights, pedestrian crosswalks, one-way streets, clubs, local restaurants and night-long hum of traffic that go along with being in a city of any size without the huge population of somewhere like New York. The dorms themselves are gigantic, but their rooms are smaller than ours. Being there made me appreciate the more comforting feel that the similar architecture and warm brick of UR’s buildings provide. Our campus is so small and closed off that it feels like a defined home rather than a sprawling community. I would feel very alone at a school that huge and spread out, but most people I know there enjoy it.
UVA is only an hour or so from Richmond. When you pull up through the mountains and off the highway, there are little V’s all over the place so it’s very easy to find your way around. The central part of the campus –the lawn, specifically- is beautiful. I had a great time wandering around there with Adrianna during the day and Heather very late at night/early in the morning. It’s a bigger school, so there’s a bit more to do, but its not so big as VCU that you feel lost and confused if you take a wrong turn.
Here’s Adrianna enjoying peanut butter fro yo. Yes, fro yo. You’ll tell yourself its silly and that you’ll never refer to frozen yogurt by anything other than its actual name, but you will. I promise. Unless you’re a guy…I think “fro yo” may just be a girl term. The pizza at UVA was great (ours tastes like health food rather than greasy, delicious junk), but other than that I wasn’t too impressed. I found myself disappointedly searching for the panini bar and taco station our D-hall has whenever I was in a dining hall there. I may be a bit biased, so you should know that Heather agrees we have better food too. Whenever she comes home she makes a point of stopping by to eat at UR. Sure, she wants to see me, but I get the feeling that only accounts for half of her motivation to visit.
These are the dorms off the lawn - gorgeous, cozy, hard to get. They have to heat them with wood-burning stoves!
This was the first time I’d gone to visit my friends at their respective schools, and I had a great time doing it. I almost applied to UVA and it was amusing to imagine how my year would’ve turned out had I chosen to go there instead of UR. We went to an APO party at a third-year’s house, walked around downtown, ate a Gus Burger and wove through the old and new dorms. Heather gave me the grand tour and I finally got to see all the places she was whenever we’d held our 2-hour marathon phone calls. It’s still weird for me to think about my friends, my friends who I saw and ate lunch with at one table every day of high school, being spread out across the state…or the many states, I guess, is more like it.
Heather, being adorable/ridiculous as usual…
Back here, it’s freezing. Whenever I sit at my desk, I find myself tucking my feet under my hot laptop charge cord for extra warmth. It snowed a little over the lake and I enjoyed watching the flurries out the window during sociology. Here’s hoping some winter weather comes your way! Enjoy your last year of real snow days while it lasts!
