Hello readers :).
It’s been a fairly spectacular Thanksgiving break for me. In previous years, I’ve gone home to Minnesota over Thanksgiving, but this year I decided to stick around. Despite having only one of the dining halls open (of course that’s what I comment on) and campus being mostly empty, I’ve had a wonderful time.
Break began on Tuesday, with a trip to Boston “after class.” I put this in quotations, because it’s something my friend Suman announced that really doesn’t make much sense at Wellesley. First of all, school and home are pretty much the same thing (wait, you have a weekend without homework? What does that even mean?) and second of all, all of our classes end at different times :). Luckily for me, I have great friends, and they waited for me to finish my class at 3:30pm before heading out to Boston!
After taking the free bus into the city, we proceeded to wander around lost for a while. Karina, a swim team alum who graduated from Wellesley last year, and who has been in Oklahoma being a teacher for Teach of America since then, had returned for the holidays, and we were all going to have dinner with her at the Friendly Toast. None of us had ever been to the Friendly Toast, of course, but with the use of cell phones, GPS, and even some old-fashioned directions, we managed to make our way over. It’s an odd place, the Friendly Toast is. I think they began by painting all the walls kelly green, and then just had to keep on adding more things in an attempt to out-weird their initial choice.
What a wonderful crew :). On top, we have Erin P., her sister Abby who’s visiting, me, Suman, and Karina. On the other half of the table down below, we have Keelin, Tiffany, Ika, and Theresa.
The food was decidedly delicious, though. I had a gigantic pumpkin pancake filled with raisinettes, which I’d never heard of but involved chocolate. A lot of us had breakfast food for dinner (I also had a salad, which was an odd combination) and there were a lot of burritos and smoked salmon events as well. We had a great time chatting, especially since we were all tightly squeezed together in that booth (yay for swimmer shoulders!) so that there could be multiple conversations flying over the table at once. It reminded me a lot of home, when visitors are often baffled by the two or three conversations being carried out by five people at the same time :).
Ika had TWO gigantic pancakes– I was quite jealous. Before and after, with Theresa contributing in the background :).
After our meal (and subsequent trip to the bathroom—I’m quite against traveling to the bathroom in packs, but with a group that big, why not), I announced I was leading us back to the bus stop. Really, they should have stopped me, because I love leading, but the last time I led during the summer I ended up walking Alice, Iulia, and Erin half an hour out of our way, through a drug deal, and into a lot of sunburn. Heh. As promised, we did get lost, but we eventually made our way back because Erin and Tiffany know north Cambridge (I’m more familiar with the Boston side.) It was a lovely walk. Chilly but not cold, with chattering friends, and the Charles River to walk along at 8 pm in the evening.
After returning back to Wellesley (also on a free bus! I should go into Boston on the weekdays more often), Tiffany came over to my room, complimented me on my decorating choices (I’d been waiting for someone to classify which colors I like, because I can’t do it very well myself, and now I’ve been informed. For future reference, I like pictures involving transitions between blue, purple, and green), and then we talked. For three hours. How excellent is that? I never give myself enough time to just sit and talk to people when there is homework to be done, but I love one-on-one long talks with people. Then she walked home through the rain, I read for a while, then went to bed and slept in the next morning.
Wednesday I did a swim practice with the team, which was quite humorous as I haven’t been in the pool for a month and a half. Despite this fact, I did pretty well except for being slow, and was much congratulated. Then I walked over to our one open dining hall and went and fetched a plate of food. Then another. Then another. Then another. And once I had five plates of food laid out in front of me (I had eaten dinner at 6 pm, and I hadn’t made it to breakfast that morning, so by this point it had been about 22 hours since I’d last eaten), I set upon them. And it was great.
I did homework for a while (and tried very hard not to fall asleep—I need to stop working on couches and beds), had dinner with more swim friends, then was summoned back to my dorm by Suman demanding where I was. I went up to her room, and then we chatted. For three hours, again. Nonsense I tell you, but wonderful nonsense. And then the resident director (the adult who lives in our dorm) called all of the remaining students down to eat pumpkin and apple pie, and we each ate two slices, then we went back to Suman’s room and talked some more. And when I returned to my room, I read for a little while, then went to bed… because on Thursday, we were all heading over to Tiffany’s house for Thanksgiving dinner.
The snacking began at noon on Thursday, and the singing never quite stopped. Tiffany had put on her Disney playlist, and as most of us were proper Disney/Pixar/Dreamworks/etc. fans, we knew enough of the lyrics to at least try. We weren’t too off-key either; they are a lot of singers in that group, enough so that when we watched Phantom of the Opera later there was some definite harmonizing going on. Also a little bit of harmonizing when we watched Tangled, though the comments then were more along the lines of: “What? People aren’t supposed to die in Disney! … Oh wait, I’m calling it. It’s gotta be the magic tears. Am I right or am I right?”
Happy Thanksgiving! From left to right, bottom to top: Tiffany, Abby (Tiffany’s sister), Suman, Erin Y., Theresa, Maria, Erin P., Theis (Ieva’s friend), Keelin, me, Abby (Erin P.’s sister), Jackie (a family friend), Patricia (Tiffany’s sister).
We played Scattergories, ate a fantastic meal made by Tiffany’s mom (thank you Mrs. Chen!), then Suman and I slept over so that we could work out the next morning with Tiff. Friday at 7 am we started out strong by swimming 100x100s… which is 6 miles and 100 yards, as calculated by me on probably the eighth 100. There were some challenges (first, I’d never swum that far continuously before. Then my cap broke. Then Suman’s goggles broke. Then we totally beasted it) but we made it through victorious! After which we proceeded to demolish the leftovers, and now I’m sitting in Tiffany’s bed, being very immobile and nimble-fingered and knowing my traps (trapezius muscles? How strange—Google teaches me new things every day) and forearms are going to be sore tomorrow.
Post 100 x 100s :). Me, Suman, and Tiffany.
In short, this has been one of the best breaks I’ve had so far, and I am so thankful for all that I’ve been given. Mine’s a blessed life, and I mustn’t forget it. Hope you all are enjoying yourselves, and forcing the Christmas music on your nobly resistant siblings,
Monica
And as if all fun wasn’t enough from this week, I have pictures from last week as well! Wellesley did FANTASTIC during their home meet at MIT. Three school records and winning 9 out of 16 events! Yeah Blue! (pic from Papa Chung)
And I’m hanging out with the team’s wonderful parents :). Shout-out to Papa Chung for taking pics of all of the Wellesley swim alums in the stands!
And on Saturday we went and watched Catching Fire with Cathy, our Team Impact swim adoptee :). Here we have Rebecca, Suman, Emma, Sarah May, Cathy, Tiffany, me, Gabby, and Dorothy.