Bowdoin Alums have Adventures

So this weekend has been full of adventures! Friday night especially. Andrew came down from Maine to visit me for the weekend, bringing plenty of Valentine’s chocolate I ought to add. We planned to go to the Bowdoin vs Tufts hockey game: a Tufts home game and so conveniently located nearby. We’d been planning on it for weeks. A chance to route for the best Alma Mater there is! I perhaps was over enthusiastic: in preparation I donned my Bowdoin sweatpants, my Bowdoin class sweatshirt, my Bowdoin sun necklace, my warmer Bowdoin sweatshirt in place of a jacket, and my wonderful polar bear hat. I was ready to cheer our hockey players to victory. I had tried to be prepared by finding directions to the arena, too. I looked it up online, but couldn’t find out where the Tufts ice arena was anywhere. Tufts’ website was no help at all. After spending half an hour on it, eventually I gave in and told Andrew to call our Tufts-grad-student Bowdoin friend to ask her. I also posted the question on her facebook page–the night before, I might add. But there was response. So when Andrew texted me an address I was naturally suspicious–a little. “How’d you find that?” I said. “The internet,” he retorted. So I shrugged and said, “Alright. If you say so,” and looked it up to find the nearest T stop: Davis Square, all the way out on the Red line, out in Medford.

There wasn’t really time, but Andrew came to meet me at my school, also be-Bowdoined in his class sweatshirt, and we set off together to Medford. It took an hour by the T to get all the way out to Davis Square, and so by the time we got to the square we were well late for the game. After a considerable amount of deliberation, we decided to ask the friendly employees at JP Licks which direction along College Ave we should head to find Tufts. It took another 3o minutes to walk to 161 College Ave. Half-way through this walk I discovered that while sweatpants are marvelously comfortable for wearing around your room, they are significantly less comfortable to walk long distances through the cold in, since the crotch seam doesn’t fall in your crotch but instead right where your legs rub together as you walk. Ow. But it was ok, because we were together, and the cold was the sort of exciting, refreshing cold of a clear spring night.

Once we’d found the general vicinity of 161 College Ave, we called our Tufts-grad student Bowdoin friend who was to meet us at the game. After several back and forths, it became increasingly evident that the game was not, in fact, at Tufts. Rather, it was being held at the local highschool arena somewhere else in Medford/Boston/where ever. And since the game was at least half over, we would most certainly not make it there until it was over. Sigh.

I was rather irate. It would have been so easy for our Tufts-grad-student Bowdoin friend to have communicated the location of the game at any point prior to half way through the game. She could have responded to my facebook post–let’s face it, we check them at least twice a day, how could she not have seen it? Or perhaps she even have used deductive reasoning to figure out that a game held at a random high school is not the most obvious of locations, and volunteered the information. But since Andrew is so marvelous at making the best of things, we decided that it was all a rather funny adventure. I was certainly not, however, going to rush back. Andrew had teased me earlier about how carefully I had packed by little bag, but since it was after 8 and I still hadn’t eaten I was glad I’d brought my waterbottle and a granola bar. I didn’t eat the granola bar, I ate the candybar I’d also brought, but I was glad to have the granola bar just in case. (It is me, after all, and there was chocolate involved.)

Since Andrew had come down with the intent of also seeing these other friends we were to have met up with, we agreed to meet them in Chinatown–a stop on the orange line all the way back into town. Happily, we serendipitously ran into another Bowdoin friend on the train, and made quite a spectacle of ourselves. Andrew declared the journey worthwhile, and before we knew it we’d got to Chinatown. There was quite a bit of construction, and not quite as many Chinese places as you might imagine, but it was only a little bit sketchy. We popped into a semi-sketchy McDonalds, since lately I can’t seem to stomach Chinese food very well, and although I’ve read all the literature and seen all the documentaries, my brain still hasn’t convinced my stomach that it ought not to like McDonalds. We provisioned ourselves, and sat down to munch–and wait.

And wait. And wait.

At this point, something like 9, 9:30, it occurred to me that Andrew and I had spent the entire night trying to meet up with these couple of friends, when we could have been doing so many other things. I was growing a bit tired of it, really, but I wasn’t hungry anymore, so that was good. The part I didn’t tell you was that I’d been up late and early to get work/chores done before Andrew arrived, and that Andrew had been into work very early so he could get out on time. So we’d each had maybe 5 hours of sleep–which in the scheme of things isn’t that bad, I guess. But the point is that perhaps you can understand why I was a bit impatient. We’d decided that what we really wanted to do was go home, snuggle up and watch a cute movie with furry things in it.

After a long time, and several unanswered calls, just when I was on the point of suggesting we just leave, they called and said they were nearby but didn’t know where. Since we had a map, we set off into the cold–brrr, it was much colder by then–to find them. But then they figured it out, and we were to wait for them. But meanwhile the McDonalds had closed, and we huddled on the sketchy street corner as people shuffled by yelling at cars and people on the other side of the street, freezing cold. When they showed up 15 minutes later we set off for a distant bar called Cheers. I was a little grumpy, and rather uncomfortable, but at least it was warmer walking.

Alas, after that my tale of whingy woe must draw to a close, because when we got there, we met up (on purpose?) another batch of Bowdoin alums, and all sat round and ate french fries and talked and talked about Bowdoin, and grad school, and work, and science, and I talked about children’s books and everyone obligingly laughed, and it was actually great fun. It was sort of what I had imagined being a Bowdoin alum to be like. Which is actually pretty cool.

And, from there it turned out to be a much shorter walk to the dear green line and home. Where we ate chocolate and watched Ice Age and giggled a great deal at the squirrel thing in the beginning. And then proceeded to have a very lovely, cozy weekend which did not involve any more walking through the cold in sweatpants.