Lazy Saturday

The first day of my first weekend here at Brown started out slow. I had signed up for the Newport trip that was happening today, but in the end decided not to go for two main reasons, despite the fact that almost everyone in the Summer@Brown program was taking part. For one, the weather forecast predicted more thunderstorms throughout the day, and I didn’t think the beaches would be too great in pouring rain. My other reason was to catch up on sleep in order so I would actually be able to function this week. While I knew that I would be missing out on some fun in the sun(?), there are still a lot of areas on the campus that I haven’t seen yet, and I was eager to check them out.

At around 10 AM, I met up with David, who hadn’t gone to Newport either. In the morning, Thayer Street was almost completely deserted, seeming like a ghost town, and we both knew it was going to be an uneventful day. The V-Dub was even emptier, with only a total of six people eating there for lunch. Stranded on campus, we wandered around for a bit before deciding to meet up with Ms. Kaplan, who had some free time on her hands as well. For the middle part of the day, we explored more of Providence, making our way through various shops on Thayer, parks in Providence, and enjoying frozen watermelonade drinks on a nice, sunny day. On the way to a Whole Foods Market, we drove through Benefit Street, the ‘nice’ part of Providence on the outskirts of the Brown campus.

We longed for a peek inside one of the houses, but didn’t get it and were satisfied with a view ofa spacious, beautiful looking backyard.

At around 2:30 PM, my RA called. He told me that he was taking kids from our floor that hadn’t gone to Newport out to have fun, and invited me to join. Ms. Kaplan dropped us off in front of the sci-li and I introduced the few people from my floor that was there to David. Donald took us on a leisurely walk through a different side of the Brown campus: Wickenden Street. Wickenden struck me as an older, retro version of Thayer with its numerous independent shops, art galleries, and restaurants. Donald also mentioned an eatery that stays open very late and serves delicious food, which might be useful to me and my outrageous bedtimes. It took us a while to reach our destination, a nice small park overlooking the harbor and the sea—not the beach, but better than nothing! After taking in the view and the smell of the ocean for a while, we had an intense but fun game of handball on the grass. There was some arguing and tension about the scoring, as we’re all guys after all, but I think overall everyone had a good time. The mile walk back to the V-Dub in the blazing sun felt just about the longest in my life, having exercised for a good hour. Once we finally made it, David and I decided to only have some drinks to cool off before dinner with Ms. Kaplan and our cohort.

The highlight of the day today was certainly to be experiencing WaterFire in downtown Providence. After heading back to the dorms to freshen up, Brown cohort I met again outside the science library (it’s just convenient) with Ms. Kaplan. Just piling into the car brought back memories of our first days on the East Coast touring colleges. We had dinner at Rick’s Roadhouse, a barbeque venue in Providence. I thought it was funny that, despite all of the significant decisions we have to make every day, everybody had trouble trying to decide what to order from the menu.

Following dinner, we dropped off the rental car back at Hotel Providence before making our way downtown. I admit that I kind of miss the fancy Hotel Providence with its great quality of accommodations, but I definitely don’t regret trying out life in the dorms at Brown. Downtown Providence was full of festivities everyone was in high spirits. It was fully decked out with not-too-large crowds of people, street vendors, and even a swing dance session.

Today started out slow but developed and ended up being relatively busy and interesting,