Back 2 School
On Saturday, my mom and I drove my sister down to Champaign to help her move into her apartment. The campus looks basically the same, except a bunch of new apartment buildings popped up all over the place. Also, there's some new/different stores on Green Street. Remember when that area used to have a Yen-Ching Buffet and the Co-Ed theater? I already forgot what all of that looked like. Other than driving around and moving stuff for my sis, I didn't have a chance to visit any buildings, like Grainger or the Union, and I didn't check to see if R&R's really turned into a gay bar, as rumored.
I did drive by ISR to see all the students moving in, and it revived memories of me and Anuj packing all our stuff into his little Corolla and caravan-ing down to school with P, Vic, Chras, and Rod that day. I especially remember watching some daring passing maneuvers by P in his van on IL-47, a 2 lane highway. Anyways, I could write more nostalgic stuff about college memories, but this blog has seen too much of that already.
Another thing the trip revived was my doubts about whether or not there is an Old Country Buffet in the Champaign-Urbana area. Previously, people had informed me with great confidence that there definitely was, and since they insisted it was true, I just accepted it, even though I had never seen one in 4 years of being at school. Well, when we were down there on Saturday, we ended up having lunch at Hometown Buffet (on Prospect by Outback Steakhouse and across from Meijer). Since the place was so similar to OCB, I started thinking that maybe everyone who told me there was an Old Country Buffet before actually got it mixed up with Hometown Buffet instead.
So this bothered me so much to the point that eventually, I did what any self-respecting nerd would do and just looked it up on the Internet. Google pointed me to Buffet.com or something, where I learned that there were in fact NO locations of Old Country Buffet in the Champaign-Urbana region. However, the kicker is that OCB and HTB are run by the same people so it's pretty much the same thing. Thus in a way, everyone was right and everyone was wrong.
The drive to and from school used to be pretty much a weekly thing for me, one that I must have done close to a hundred times, if not more. I kind of miss driving on the relatively open highway for a couple hours at a time. It's really a relaxing experience, other than the million bugs that die on your windshield, and the occasional possum you run over that gives you a chilling look before the thump comes. One thing I have come to enjoy about the trip is analyzing other people's license plates. On the way back Saturday afternoon, my favorite was "JESUS 85". It made me wonder whether or not there were actually 84 other Jesuses (or is it plural "Jesii"? hmmm...), who wanted that license plate, so this guy ended up getting the 85th. Otherwise, why "85"? I was intrigued.
Well, I guess as all the school people start a new year, us working people simply start a new week. Have a happy Monday everyone.
