T'was the day before the flight...

It seems like a long time ago since I last wrote anything here. Well, it could really be quite a long while ago, but then again, I'm just allowing my verbosity take over here. *shrugs*

I'm now located in New York City, New York, bunking at my room mate's house here in Jackson Heights. Like most normal people, he's currently asleep (despite what the calendar actually says on the post, the real time here is actually 0344hrs (-0500hrs); I've decided to keep the poor blog running on SGT (+0800hrs) since it is actually a pain to adjust all the timezones correctly). I feel like I'm starting to become a vampire of sorts, awake only when the sun goes down, and of course the innate bloodlust which, till now, I've not been able to fully explain it's cause.

It was a really messy trip. Mo and I were awake throughout the whole of Tuesday and Wednesday when we were back in Pittsburgh. We watched movies in our room with Phil till about 12am, while I did my laundry concurrently. Then, feeling kind of peckish, we decided to call the pizza place for a delivery. The operator took our order and gave us an estimate of 45 minutes before the food will arrive. So, we waited happily while playing ping pong.

An hour and a quarter later, there was no reply from the pizza deliveryman nor the pizza place. Feeling somewhat irate (and very hungry), Phil called up the pizza place, only to find that it was already closed. How could the pizza place be so irresponsible? I mean, when they picked up our order, they could have told us that it was not likely to be delivered, and probably advise us to look elsewhere. It was a really bad service attitude I guess. So anyway, we have three very hungry guys who just want to grab food. So we decided to head on to one of the cafeterias on campus for a late night.

And I changed into my polo t-shirt and jeans, wore a pair of sandals and put on my jacket and followed the rest of them out of the dorm and heading into the general direction of the cafeteria. Out of the dorm and in the general direction of the food place, we met Robin, who asked a weird question: "Is there any place that is still open for food?" Well, we answered "Skibo", but he told us that it wasn't open. We were all speechless. How could the only food place on campus that serves late nights up to 2 am be closed?

Since it was the last day of school, we had cleared up almost all the food that we had in storage, and so the three of us made a mad decision: to hike up Squirrel Hill (in the cold) to get to Eatin' Park to grab breakfast/lunch/dinner. And so we did.

It was a dumb exercise. For one, the temperature was sub-zero (centigrade scale, not Fahrenheit), and I was wearing this very worn pair of sandals. It is so worn that I had to actually use SuperGlue to hold the two halves of the sole together, since I've managed to make a really deep fissure in the sole itself. And then, hiking up Squirrel Hill meant that we were actually moving uphill, and that in itself was painful. And then. we had to ensure that we could return in time to do packing (yes, we've not packed...) so as to be able to catch the early bus to reach the airport early to avoid all kinds of horrible last minute issues.

So it was a brainless exercise performed by three very hungry geeks. Happily, we managed to the restaurant without any severe frostbite or mental degeneration, and after a very hearty meal, we went out into the cold and marched down the hill back to our dorms.

Then the mad scramble began.

Mo and I packed our luggages frantically. For this short trip, we decided to bring only one luggage, and so we more or less had our work cut out in front of us. Thank goodness I did the vacuuming of the floors a few days back; otherwise we would have been so screwed for time. Anyway, we managed to do our packing (with a lot of cursing and swearing and wondering aloud how in the name of Zeus did Linda manage to pack everything in 10 minutes (or so she claims)), and were ready to go.

Suffice to say, we managed to clear the checking out procedures and managed to get to our early bus and reach the airport way ahead of time.

Oh my... look at the time... it's 4am now. I guess I'd better hit the sack before I collapse.

Until next time~