Scavenger Hunt!
Monday one of the sophomores in my hall was going to give a tour of the academic buildings at 10:00am... yeah, I slept through that. I slept until noon, actually. It was fun.
But I made sure to wake up at noon because I knew a group from my hall was going to take the bus to the mall for a day out. The busses only do this twice a year, so it's a pretty popular outing. We were going to meet at 1:00 to catch that bus; of course there were a lot more people at the bus stop (behind the library) than could fit on the bus. We didn't make that bus, or the next one. The third, all but four people got on--but one of those four was our RA, and she just drove the last three, so it worked out okay. I have more to say on the subject of busses, but it can wait until I talk about going back to campus.
Once at the mall, there was some picture-taking in front of the carousel (those are already on facebook, if you're on there and can see pictures of me), then we met with RA + passengers. And then our RA told us that she put together a scavenger hunt list, we should split into teams, and she would buy the winning team dinner. It was decided somewhat randomly that we should split into two groups--we were seventeen not counting our RA, who of course was not playing, but because the first group ran off to start without counting people, they had eleven, and my team had six. And the we split up further, and it was just me and another guy, but we failed to set up communication, so we didn't know which section we were supposed to do, so we decided to get as much as we could.
The list was separated into things to bring back and things to take pictures of; we got most of the pictures before we met up with the rest of our group and found that collectively we only needed about four more things to finish--something broken a store was going to throw away, a picture of a piece of clothing with the word "angel" on it, a picture of something "not lame" with the word "jelly" on it, and a picture of our team in a photobooth.
Those four took us forever... did you know that apparently, right now "princess" is in and "angel" is very, very out? And stores didn't want to give anything away, and what's "not lame," and we couldn't even find a photobooth!
Well, just to jump to the end because I'm lazy like that: We finally, finally found the word "angel" on a belt in Sears. We got the Build-a-Bear shop to look through things until they found a ribbon that had snapped. We took pictures of a few things with Jelly (including Jelly Baby Jelly Beans, which were my favorite) in the hopes that one of them wouldn't be "lame", and after being led on a merry trail (the person thought we asked for a phonebooth), we were finally directed to the mall's sole photobooth, which was out of order, so we just crammed in there and took a picture with the normal camera.
So we called our RA ("We just finished!") and hung out for a while before the other team came back and showed how much they got (they didn't find everything, hah), so we won, which probably made our RA happy because she only had to buy six people dinner rather than eleven. So we went to Friendly's, where I had my usual (quesadilla and oreo freeze, which by the way is $13.90 together...), and we were probably the most business the place had all day--we certainly got the row of employees all thanking us as we walked out, which is always cool.
So. Going home. It was a half-hour bus ride each direction, but there were two busses, so one was supposed to arrive each side every half an hour. We got outside to wait at 7:20. I overheard others saying they'd been waiting since 6:45. Obviously the busses were failing. It reminded me rather much of Prep's train busses, up to and including the crowd mobbing the bus once it actually arrived. And I tried to give suggestions like "Don't mob the bus while it's still moving, because it will not stop!" but nobody listened... and really, it just exemplified why I don't like busses. Nobody ends up happy! The bus driver was all annoyed at us, and he was like "Well, everybody waited until 8:00"--oh yeah, the bus didn't show up until eight--meaning they shouldn't have all tried to go back at the same time, and people were like "We've been waiting since 6:45!" and it was all very... very much like the train bus. It wasn't a pleasant reminder.
So once I got home I did things like ready myself for my first day of classes, then went to bed. Very fun.