It's Labor Day, and I was on my way up to campus from my apartment to run some errands. My apartment is in West Philadelphia, about 10 blocks west of the main campus. It's a nice area with lots of trees and Victorian style houses. On my way to campus I walk past two blocks or so of Penn fraternities and sororities before entering the campus proper. Up until now I hadn't really taken notice of them.
As I was walking to campus on this fine September morning, I started noticing the debris of what had to be quite the block party. As I walked closer and closer to campus, the volume of beer cans, red cups, glossy party announcement, and the pungent aroma of stale beer increased with every step. On one porch I could see a couch that was clearly no longer serviceable after the previous night's debauchery. In fact, you could use the cups and beer cans to track the very epicenter of this veritable explosion of undergrads celebrating their return to campus.
Ithaca doesn't have any fraternities on campus aside from a few music/honors frats. So most of this kind of action would have taken place on the Cornell campus. As I reached the opposite end of the two blocks of frats, a bemused expression on my face, I realized that I had fully entered the world of the grad student; the undergraduate population, which I had not too long ago been a part of, now felt so far removed from me that the site of such mayhem provoked a sense of detached hilarity.
The campus had been quite beautiful and relatively quiet all summer. It's going to be interesting to see how the return of the undergrads would change the dynamics.
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