Left NYC in a rush yesterday evening, and many many thanks to Hans for arranging for my pick-up at New Haven on such short notice. Anand, also from Singapore, came along with this girl called Maggie to pick me up from the train station. Apparently Anand got the car from yet another Singaporean, and made the half-hour ride to pick me up. And that car was said to be the self-driven taxi: it’s always on loan. Oh, and the nice Wesleyans bought me dinner as well, even though it’s in their (nicer than Elon’s) dining hall. How nice!
Hans came along after his rehearsal, boy I was so glad to see him. We went out for a little walk around the campus after Anand dropped us back at Hans’ place. Nothing much to see at night, since everything was well dark and it was really cold, with a slight hint of rain in the air. Cigarettes did the trick to keep us warm, and the acrid scent of tobacco just complemented my mood. Grabbed a falafel on the way back to Hans’ place, and the hot sauce was really biting.
We talked to the wee hours about stuffs, and fell asleep.
Morning saw us going to a diner’s by the main street of Middletown. It was freezing cold, no thanks to a drizzle. A cosy little container-like structure, the diner’s was just rebuilt last year after it was destroyed by a fire in 06. Hans had a eggs benedict, while I settled for scrambled ones. They gave us coffee and bread to begin with, and they serve the most fantastic pound cakes with choc bits and a little fruit stuffs in them. We asked for refills, being greedy and hungry kids.
We each ordered a pancakes on the side, naively thinking that it would be just a single pancake. Heck no, it was a full three pancakes. We stopped at two, not wanting to spoil our appetite for the main show. The entrees were worth every penny of the fifteen bucks I paid. One of my best meals ever for this break.
We then headed to the Wesleyan bookstore, and Hans rested his eyes on this set of philosophical books that was going on 20% discount, so he went crazy over them and got a stash of nine books. I settled for one, and got another film-related book. Time to start reading more books.
Hit the gym in the afternoon, and I tried running on a treadmill for the first time. Pretty exciting, if you ask me, except that seeing that distance meter jump so slowly can be pretty painful at times. I naively started running at a measly 3.5 mph, before doing some basic math and realize that it wasn’t going to work out to me a normal pace. I doubled that speed not long after.
Dinner at the Usdan Dining Hall followed, and their dining hall was actually pretty impressive. Better than the Colonnades, I swear. With not only entree and pasta and pizzas, they have kosher fare, vegetarian food and some veg-and-meat grill section, making it a pretty wide selection for everyone. The bummer today was that there was a high school visit by some 300 students, and they were totally crowding out the dining halls.
We went on the catch the dance seniors’ thesis performance. A program of nine performances choreographed by the final year students. Mostly experimental pieces, I was particularly taken in by the final piece where three dancers were playing around with these small buzzing balls. The balls had two metal ends, and if you touch them on both sides, it’ll buzz. If you and another person touches one end each, and both persons touch each other, the ball buzzes too! How interesting. And they were passing out balls to the audience, who were happily playing with them mid-performance. The music was a simple melodic composition, further focusing on the simplicity of the piece. Movements were deliberate and mostly reactional, serving excellent dramatization of the sexual tensions between the characters. The repeated use of the question, ‘Are you nervous?’, and the denials add on to this tension, creating a sparring of sorts between the characters, with roles rapidly changing amongst the trio.
It has been a fun day, actually. Enough to lift my spirits. I was so in need of such a holiday.
