Friday night I stayed up all night for some cancer fundraiser walk-a-thon (`Cancer doesn't sleep so neither will we'). Each team was only required to have one member walking at a time but by 3am the only way to stay awake and warm was to keep walking so that's what most of us did. Talking helped to pass the time, and somehow during the night's conversation I was reminded of this little gem of a story from last spring's grad school recruitment visit to Indiana University.
I wasn't even sure in the first place whether to bother visiting IU; I knew I was probably going to rule it out anyway. But they were going to reimburse travel costs up to some amount, so I thought `Heck, why not?' Of course, by the time I made this decision, the departure date was sufficiently close and airfare sufficiently high that, if I was to remain under the reimbursement limit,* I'd have to sleep in the Indianapolis airport and take a 6am shuttle to Bloomington the morning of the visit. No matter, I thought. I can easily sleep in the shuttle (I did), and there's a website devoted to sleeping in airports, sleepinginairports.net, which gives Indianapolis pretty good reviews.
My plane arrived at around 10:30pm local time, and by then the airport was mostly empty. I found a nice little patch of floor in the international terminal, set my alarm and left a post-it note for passerby in case my alarm failed, and laid down for sleep . . . only to be chased out of the terminal by a fat man on a segway. I think that was for the better, because it turns out the lobby had nice padded couches instead of thin carpet, but I still got less than enough sleep since the high-ceilinged, polished-floored lobby caused a great deal of echoing.**
Up to this point, everything I've said has served no purpose other than to establish that I was tired. And spending the day touring physics labs, meeting professors, and hoping some of their information barrage would stick just made me even more tired. I was in no mood to try dinner and bar-hopping with the grad students, so I asked the hotel clerk for directions to a grocery store. I needed food for dinner that night, plus breakfast and lunch the next day, and it seemed like a good way to explore Bloomington on my own terms.
The directions given me by the hotel clerk were useless. They led to a back-alley where some hipsters watched over a room full of exotic fruits and vegetables. I continued to walk the streets of Bloomington (where snow briefly started flurrying) until I found a gas station clerk who gave me directions to a real grocery store.
I eventually found the filthiest Kroger I've ever seen: produce was poorly-stocked and decaying, floor tiles were missing, shelves were empty. Still, I was able to find the things I needed. I remembered a microwave in my hotel room, plus some cups and my titanium spork, so I bought some precut frozen vegetables (a mixture of corn, carrots, beans, and okra, the latter of which I'd never before eaten), microwave oatmeal, and a box of crackers.
Back at the hotel, it turns out I was wrong about the microwave. All I had was a coffee pot. Luckily hot water is all you need for oatmeal packets, and I was even able to heat my vegetables by pouring cups of hot water into the bag and letting it drain through holes in the bottom. But as I did so I noticed something: my vegetables were getting warmer, sure, but they were also getting slimier. It seemed that every cup of water left some kind of residue with the consistency of thick, mucous saliva. I tried draining the slime into the sink and ate anyway.
As I ate, I wondered about the source of the slime. It wasn't the coffee machine, because the oatmeal was fine. It was either tampering at the nasty grocery store or okra is just naturally slimy. Once home in Salt Lake I Googled okra and learned that it is indeed naturally slimy, but of course that wasn't soon enough to stop me from throwing away the last couple spoonfuls anyway. I feel bad about throwing food away, but mostly I feel bad because the slime accidentally clogged up the sink. Whoops.
* In fact, I should more accurately say `To not terribly exceed the reimbursement limit.'
** I felt somewhat vindicated with my decision to sleep in the airport when I noticed a number of other people attempting the same thing.
