Urbana! Champaign!

It's been four days since I set foot on the campus to which, if you had asked me freshman year at WashU, I might have considered transferring. As it is, I will get my chance to experience a DI college-town, and having begun to explore the campus on a run this afternoon, I'm beginning to see how such a large campus can also manage to be endearing.

I checked out a couple of the workout facilities here. Three words: Rock. Climbing. Wall.
I like the set up of the campus. The layout is well-organized, sitting a grid of east-west, north-south streets. Many of the buildings have a healthy patch of lawn, and the quads, all three of them, are bigger (and nicer) than what I used to have in St. Louis.

I'm expecting the food to disappoint. Still, Korean BBQ stir fry isn't too shabby for a first meal. I suppose the caveat is that this is considered the best that the dorm food has to offer. I believe I will start eating more tofu in an attempt to reduce the time spent in the kitchen.

I met one of my neighbors the other day. Amanda Heredia, a woman most likely in her 50s, who is doing her masters in bilingual education. She wants to go back to Chicago, where she's lived since immigrating from Colombia many years ago, to help the schools down there. We need more people like her.

My classmates? I believe the best i can do is make some general observations. People seem to form their little groups quickly, and it's easy to see who hasn't found their group yet. I seem to be hesitant to stay with any one particular group of people. Besides, classes haven't started yet, and I'm sure that's when core groups will start to form more aggressively. That's not necessarily a bad thing either.

I realize that the last four years have made me more acutely aware of certain groups around me. Whether it's the cooks at the cafeteria, the cleaning people in my dorm, or even the student clerks behind the desk, I try not let myself to obliviously pass them by. Sometimes, I enjoy these interactions more than the ones with my classmates. It hasn't been since freshman year that I've asked so many people the questions: "Where are you from," "Where do you live," and "What's your name again?"

I appreciate very much old friends who are down here for various schooling, jobs. I think the word "family" is fitting.

I also wonder if at such a big school, the urgency to find your "group" becomes even more important. I think that if I had come here for undergrad, issues such as "Asianness" wouldn't have been as big of a deal to me. I wonder if I will have time to have such thoughts once school starts.