Last weekend was action-packed, which is hopefully a good sign for my time here at Princeton. Friday night started with services at Princeton Hillel, which no one here calls Hillel. It's the CJL, or the Center for Jewish Life. The building is big and well-adorned. Services were good, and very similar to MIT's. ( For those who care, we used Sim Shalom for our Siddurim.) Dinner afterwards was free for grad students (and will be free every other week!) and they had plenty of vegetarian options. I mistook the couscous for another dish because it was smushed together so much, but the food quality was reasonable for a Kosher meal.
After dinner, we did lots of singing, and I learned new hand gestures to accompany Kol Ha'Olam Kulo (and new English lyrics for it as well). The young woman leading the singing was especially bouncy--I'll have to see next week whether she is normally like that or just overly excited about the new term (I suspect the former). A few of us then took the Jew party to the dorms where I chatted it up with the underclassfolk.
Saturday, I bought a mountain bike for $100. It's in like-new condition, has front wheel suspension, and is only two-years old. It was a great find, except that the seat is a bit painful. I was scoping out other bikes and I saw some seats with extra padding--I need to get me one of those. The other problem is that it's mostly all uphill to class and I'm out of shape. The trip back is very pleasurable though :)
Saturday evening I went to an east coast swing lesson in the non-air conditioned main gym. The girls outnumbered the guys and the freshman girls probably outnumbered the total guys. So I met a lot of 18-year-olds. The lesson was a nice extension of Portia's brief introduction to the dance last summer.
From there I met up with my fellow politics department first-years (aka. my cohort) to go to a concert benefiting the victims of Hurricane Katrina. Turns out the concert featured Gza from Wu Tang Clan. And while I had definitely heard of the Clan, I don't think I recognized a single song and I was unfamiliar with this Gza fellow. Suffice it to say that my cohort and I were out of our element. We left early, though I must say that I gave Gza a chance: I listened to his music for over and hour. But, in the end, I think I'll stick with Jewel, Alix, and Dar.
Sunday I went into New York City, to take advantage of NJ Transit's free ride that they were offering students last week. I saw Rachel and Aswini from DFA-NH, and met up with Seth to watch the Emmy's. Seth said two of his lady friends were coming but they stood him/us up. So we talked about Seth's burgeoning music career instead.
And now it's back to the grindstone and the 500 pages / week I need to read for school.
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