Princeton – Miss Tofu

Thursday night, after 5 classes from 0800 to 2100 across 3 campuses, (well 3 classes today because I treated myself to a Mooncake Festival nap) I am usually exhausted and grumpy. But like a phoenix I am reborn after every Thursday. Long weekend ahead. Wooohoo 🙂 Now getting back to what I love to write about the most (may be second most) NEW PLACES! 😀

I cannot believe it took me that long to finally (pick up a pen and) blog. Even the WEATHER has changed from grizzly warm to crispy cold and I am only starting this piece now! Unbelievable… time to pick up my normal productivity.

To start off, these four photos are what I usually called pleasant surprises. Taken within Princeton University, all I did was imported them to my laptop, but something somehow went “wrong” (or right?) and these ordinary photos suddenly look artistic. It is kind of magical in a way. I have absolutely no clue what happened, but i just love how they look now. Sometimes things go wrong just so they can end up at the perfectly right place. 🙂

We couldn’t have picked a better day for this cozy town! The sky was painted white and light blue with light breeze and hot sun. It was the kind of town I like, small and old houses here and there, extending lawn from both sides of the pavement, decorated with constantly moving squirrels. (obviously why I still haven’t got a good pic of them)

In fact, perhaps it’s because Princeton is kind of old, it reminded me faintly of the castles I saw in Europe and all the vivid memory came swaying back to me in a sweet nostalgic wave.

There was a certain tranquility in the air. People were just chilling on the lawn, having nothing else in their mind but the current moment right there. We had a small lunch picnic and went to the Art Museum in Princeton.

Again, another decent surprise as I originally thought it was closed on Sundays, turned out they open only in the afternoon. We even caught up with their only guided tour for the day at 2pm :O Again, pure solid luck right there.

The guided tour lady just got back from Russia and she was such a nice person. Once she found out I am from Hong Kong, she made extra effort to explain more about Washington and American History to me. And that was time I thought wow, being a tour guide in a museum is actually a very decent job.

Picture this, meeting new people who are very likely less knowledgable than you are (duh, you’re the guide) and looking smart in front of them 😀 Let’s not forget you even get to always be in this perfect temperature and humidity. That environment is for the sole purpose of preserving the art, but you get the fringe benefit of having perfect hair the whole day!

Then things were finally tied back into Princeton University. This room is full of authentic and fake artifacts! And it is the students’ job to pick one and spend the entire course on that object proving that the piece is in fact real!

As if the day wasn’t interesting enough, we met a Princeton Grad student who majors in Math and can speak both French AND Chinese :O we then took a walk around the area and dropped by the highlight (yes, the highlight comes now) of the day – ICE CREAM!

It was highly recommended by a friend and thanks to her, we all had some really good ice cream 🙂 It has been awhile so when the staff asked how many scoops I wanted, I said 3 without hesitation…and it was only 5 bucks :O

And there you have it, an eventful day at Princeton. Of course life here is much more stable as in I do not take a flight every 2 weeks like I did last semester, but being here is definitely a different kind of joy.