Ice Skating on Occom!
If you read my blog, you know how often I'm trying to take advantage of Dartmouth's beautiful location to try things I've never been able to do before. I live in McLaughlin, the northernmost dormitory on campus, and just a small walk north lies Occom Pond. In the winter the entire pond freezes over, and Dartmouth students? We seize the opportunity to go skating.
The Dartmouth Outing Club (DOC) has a house at the north end of Occom where they provide rentals for all sorts of winter gear including skates. Now, I've never gone skating, and neither me nor my friends knew how the process worked, but we simply walked to the DOC house and handy signs guided us to the magical basement where all of the gear was stored. For the cheap price of $7, my friends and I were able to rent skates and, after a significant amount of falling on my part, we finally made it to the ice.
Ice skating is hard for a lot of people. Even people with balance are likely to find some difficulty in the artform that is skating. For me, an individual without any sense of balance, ice skating is probably one of the hardest things I've ever tried to do in my life. This unhappy fact for me is why you guys now have the opportunity to laugh at the pictures taken by my friend Azariah as he watched me stumble and cling to dear life in the form of a retrofitted trashcan turned skating assistant.
Nowadays, just walking to the Hop for lunch or grabbing a mocchachino from King Arthur Flour (KAF), I see students from all years holding skis, snowboards, skates, hockey sticks, and all variants of winter gear as they go to class or catch buses to the ski lift or elsewhere to tackle winter. It's pretty amazing to see my peers from some of the warmest places in existence get to not only witness winter but fully partake in some of the most exciting and enjoyable activities outside in spite of the cold.
When I went ice skating, the only person in our squad with a familiarity with the cold was Kylee, and even being from Alaska, she hadn't gone ice skating before. So even my friends from cold places are experiencing different flavors of winter here that enable us to forget about the studying and the midterms and the mounting amount of pages to read for my Indigenous Borderlands class.
Don't procrastinate, guys. It's not worth it.
Winter term is definitely quieter than other terms. Lines are shorter at the Courtyard Cafe (aka the Hop), which is amazing considering the Hop is legendary and their breakfast burritos (known lovingly as "bobs") are perfect for breakfast, lunch, and dinner. The library is extremely popular this term if only because everyone hides in there to study, sneak downstairs for coffee breaks in KAF or Novack Cafe, and then return to a quiet corner to read or do work. And it's warm, so we love that.
I hope you're all doing wonderfully and I can't wait to let you all know about my upcoming adventures in this New England wonderland. Aloha a hui hou.