A couple weeks have gone by since I’ve moved here to Iowa City, and I finally feel like I know where I’m going on a daily basis (I did get lost a couple days ago in Burge, but in my defense, I don’t live there, and it’s a big place). This past weekend was full of new and fun experiences, and I wanted to share my favorite aspects!
Friday
Friday was a pretty chill day; after classes, my roommate and I went to Bread Garden for the first time since our dorm snacks ran out. Bread Garden is a small grocery store really close to campus on the Ped Mall, and it’s the go-to for everyone who doesn’t have a car to get to Hy-Vee or Target, or even for people who do and don’t want to take the time to get out there! Bread Garden may sound like a boujee name for a grocery store, but it’s actually super affordable for college students. It also doubles as a restaurant, with a salad bar and hot bar and a lot of seating inside and out! Go get your groceries, get a meal, two birds with one stone. 
Saturday
Game Day! I went to my first football game of the season out in the afternoon sun for the first Big Ten game of the season against Rutgers. We soundly took down the Knights with a 30-0 shutout win. I had a ton of fun at the game, and found out about a bunch of traditions that happen in the student section: jingling keys at kickoff, and the giant Fight For Iowa flag that gets unraveled in the end-zone part of the student section after every time we score. I was in the part of the section that was under it when we scored, and I was SO confused the first time, but I caught the gist after that. Overall, I had a great time and can’t wait to go to the rest of the games this season! Note to self though: don’t forget sunglasses on sunny day games.
Later that night, we also went to the volleyball game against Washington at Carver Hawkeye Arena. I used to play volleyball (for a year) in high school, and I still enjoy watching the game. Students get in free to volleyball games, so why not go? It was really warm in the arena, but not terribly hot. The Hawkeyes fought hard in four sets, even going to 32 points in the first set, but they did lose 3-1. Despite the loss, I had fun watching volleyball, and all the interactive events they had with the fans between sets, including Guess the Song and Guess the Price! I’m definitely planning on going to more volleyball games this season when I can.
Sunday
Sunday came around like the usual college kid Sunday: slept in until about 10, and then started on the pile of homework I had refused to do earlier in the weekend, mostly for my Rhetoric class. A fair warning: Rhetoric is a class that the vast majority of freshman need to take, and it’s a lot of work. It’s not terribly difficult work, there’s just a lot of it! In my two weeks of experience with this class, it seems easier to do the homework one assignment at a time over a couple of days instead of all of them the day before, just to spread things out and not be overwhelmed with the amount of work that needs to get done. Granted, sometimes that doesn’t happen for me, since I’m either busy with something else or frankly just don’t want to do it on a Friday or Saturday, but it really is easier to spread out the assignments.
I finished with my homework a lot faster than I thought I was going to, and then I went to my weekly Daily Iowan TV meeting. To those thinking about getting into TV news or journalism, DITV is a great place to get experience! I was hired with literally no experience in TV or news, and now I produce the sports section of the newscast once a week.
The last interesting thing I did on Sunday was going to the rally on the Pentacrest to see Bernie Sanders speak. I’d never been to a presidential rally event before, and it was exciting to see one of the candidate hopefuls in person! Presidential candidates frequent Iowa and Iowa City a lot, so I’m looking forward to more of them coming in the next year.
Other (slightly) less interesting things I did this weekend include: watching baseball (Go Brewers!), The West Wing, and doing laundry – life hack: if you do it at midnight, there’s no one there!
That’s all for this post. I hope you’re having a great first few weeks of school, and living your best life!
Talk soon,
Chloe