I’m not really unpacked yet, although all of my stuff is in my room. I’m slowly taking it out of the mass of boxes that are stacked precariously in the center of my room but I’m finding it difficult to find time to sit down and get it all in order. There are so many weird and random things to do!
Let’s start today and work backwards. Today I actually went to a nudist beach down in Lake Washington with some other City Year girls and one of their roommate/landlord’s. Needless to say she lives in an interesting situation. She currently lives in a little alcove in a house in Fremont with a nudist artistic couple and it was the male half of that couple that suggested we should check out the nudist beach. It was entertaining to go, but a little awkward and uncomfortable. Unsurprisingly there were a lot more guys than girls. Although unlike my other experiences with nudity there were actually some pretty good looking guys there in amidst the creepers. I think that usually men feel more comfortable in their skins than they should giving them a “why shouldn’t I take my clothes off? I look awesome!” attitude while women are a little more circumspect in revealing themselves.
Last night we went on a quest to find the “eighties dance party” that we saw advertised on various posters around Fremont but when we finally got there we found an empty bar and a very lonely DJ. We tried to make the best of it, spending some time dancing crazily on some barrels that we found, but ended up leaving to find somewhere else. We finally found ourselves in a pub where I spent most of my time talking to a to a thirty-something nerd/writer that I meant there. It was fun to finally have a nerdy conversation with someone, no one here has even heard of Firefly and comic-con and look at me completely strange when I talk about anime or webcomics. To them dungeons and dragons is something spooky geeks do in their mother’s basement. It’s a bit lonely sometimes.
After that we walked around a bit and got cupcakes at a cupcake lounge. A cupcake lounge!! We followed that up by getting lost and finally finding our bus stop only to check the schedule and realize that we had missed the last bus. The next one wasn’t coming until three in the morning. We had no other way of getting home and had started to resign ourselves to either spending the night at the stop or walking the hour home when LO AND BEHOLD the bus appeared, nine minutes late. It was a moment of pure and utter unadulterated joy.
Tomorrow is our first day of work, well, training actually. We don’t actually get into our uniforms and start working until the beginning of October. We have a full month to get to know each other and the various projects and learn about just what it is that we will be doing. It seems like a long time to train, but I figure that they’ve done this for a while and they probably understand what they’re up to.