St. Paul

Apologies for the lapse. My friend Mikey and I spent the last two days traveling from the eastern seaboard, my dear Philadelphia, to the back fucking woods of the Midwest. Welcome back to college. Fantastic.

The reason it took us some time to get out here was because instead of copping out and taking an airplane, we took Amtrak. It was the shit, for serious. The first leg of the journey was from Washington D.C. to Chicago, and it took about seventeen hours. It was enjoyable. We had dinner in the dining car, rolling through western Pennsylvania or Ohio or somewhere, and it was not too expensive and decent enough. The seats were about 3/4ths of a bed, and we didn't even have a sleeping car. They reclined and had big legrests and it was comfortable. I slept well, with the only complaint being that one of our neighbors snored rather brutally. Nonetheless, it was great. Mikey and I watched The Hebrew Hammer and it was fantastic, awful, but perfect traveling-movie material, especially when the viewers are Jews.

When we got to Chicago we had some free time around the Sears Tower area. We were going to go up to the top floor of said tower, but it was cloudy and expensive so we said fuck that and just walked around. It was snowing. We went to the Chicago Public Library and it was surprisingly small, but maybe we just didn't get into the heart of the building. I was very impressed with the architecture in Chicago. Everything was ornate, but modern. Then we ate pizza at some place called Giordano's which is great, apparently, or a chain, one of the two, but I enjoyed it nonetheless.

Then the train from Chicago to Minneapolis. Long. We found some other Macalester students onboard and talked to them, which was great, and played cards and ate lots of food. Everything was swell until literally ten minutes before we were to pull into the station in the Twin Cities, where a car swerved enormously out of its way to crash into the tail end of our train, setting itself on fire in the process. We were then stalled for an hour. It was not fun. But eventually we moved, got to the station, and got back to Macalester.

The semester starts tomorrow. I feel as if I have a lot to do in preparation, and I do (buying books, learning where my classes meet) but it still hasn't really set in yet that I am back at college doing work. Fuck that shit. I miss Philadelphia.

Seeing my friends is nice, though.