There are many benefits to taking classes off campus. For example, you have access to a wider range of course offerings, you get to meet students from other schools, and you get to expand your knowledge of mainline traffic (that last one might be a drawback). There are, however, a few drawbacks, and I encountered one such challenge this past week. It turns out that not every school has spring break on the same week, and I found myself with two half spring breaks. One week, I didn’t have to go to my Villanova class, and the next week, I had spring break from all of my other classes but still had to attend class at Villanova. It essentially meant that I was staying on campus for a large part of spring break.
When you are on campus when most of the student body is not, there are two major challenges. The first is food; the dining halls are not open. The second is entertainment. With everyone gone, you and the few people on campus have to come up with creative ways to fill the hours that you would normally spend in class and doing homework. The food problem was surprisingly easy to solve. My friend has an apartment with a kitchen, so we got to spend much of our extra time cooking and baking to our heart’s content. One night, we even had blackberry-chocolate chip pancakes for dinner, with white chocolate chip brownie cookies for dessert. It was almost as good as a home cooked meal.
It wasn’t that hard to find fun things to do, either. My hellee and I caught up on a few of the movies we had been planning to watch. I introduced her to the gem that is Sweet Home Alabama, a thrilling romantic comedy set in the south, complete with two Civil War reenactors, a coon dog cemetery, several honky tonk bar scenes, and more country accents than she knew what to do with. The other big attraction was the King of Prussia mall, which is the biggest mall I have ever been to, and quite possibly the largest mall on the East Coast (the internet is undecided on this). This mall has over 400 stores, so there is a lot to do and see.
My personal favorite adventure around southeaster PA was to a place called the Baldwin book barn. It is a literal barn that is full of books and 1 cat. My hellee and I drove there on a rainy day, and spent hours in the unheated barn, listening to rain on the roof and perusing any book that caught our attention. I had read on Yelp that the barn had cats, so I went in search of them. After trekking through all five floors, most of which were unheated, and the fifth of which was rather rickety, I finally found a cat and several interesting books. Though it is a bit far from campus, it was a perfect spring break adventure.