The Eph and I

Since I am still living at home I'm trying to keep my weekends busy, so this past Friday night I visited one of my good friends, Abby Rampone. at Williams College. It had been a month since I had seen her, so I didn't know if she had become an ultra hipster or something, but I was happy to find that she was stil the same awesome person. We did the typical college stuff, eating in the cafeteria and taking a tour of campus. We checked out her room and entry and then hung out in her dorm room. Their junior assistant was there, who I was slightly unimpressed with because he said he had been to UVM before with the Williams a capella group, and didn't remember what the UVM group was (guess I'm a little overly judgemental!) while the twenty-one year old freshmen hockey player came carrying a whole box of beer and is passing it around to everyone that was passing by. For someone that really didn't have much of a social life in high school, this was a major culture shock, so Abby, her friend Megumi, and I set off on our adventure through campus.
Even though we had eaten dinner before, we went to the Jewish Sabbath dinner anyways. We sort of intruded right in the middle of it and everyone saw us awkwardly coming in, but we were warmly welcomed. Abby was feeling a little uneasy about things, which was totally understandable because we were kind of getting the cold shoulder, so we left and then went to the Pop Rocks Catholic club "party." There was no one there, some party right, but across the hall we heard a bunch of laughter and chatter, which was from the Muslim Student Association. Abby recognized her friend, Bushra from Dubai (who also took a gap year working as a journalist,) and we went over there to see how it was "crack a lackin" (AKA what was happening.) Bushra invited us to join them, but I felt a little uneasy at first, maybe because I haven't been around many Muslims, but my time with them was by far the highlight of my time at Williams. They were the brightest people that I had met on campus and were also seemed happiest. I didn't feel like I was out of place at all. We spent over two hours sitting playing "fish bowl" (which is kind of like charades) and then went to do the typical college thing, eat ice cream at 12:30 in the student center.
Three months ago, I thought I knew that I wanted to be a dual major, maybe with History and Chinese or Environmental Science, but my past few experiences have changed my thoughts. My mother has said that if you want to become fluent in a language then you should really enjoy being around native speakers. Although I have met some lovely native Chinese speakers, the majority of them have not been people that I would find myself being friends with. But after my time with the Williams Muslim Student Association, learning Arabic is definetely on my checklist, as well as starting to be a Bollywood fan. (I am a little disappointed that UVM doesn't have an Arabic program.)