When I moved from UIUC to Stanford this year, I couldn't wait to lose the winters. I didn’t expect to miss the nights.
UIUC has a strong late night culture. You could go downstairs to the Allen Hall basement and find one person halfway through a bottle of wine after a math final, a game of Dungeons and Dragons around a table with chairs drawn from the entire building, students frantically finishing an assignment in the corner with a cup of dining room coffee, and a friend group lying down on a creative arrangement of foam blocks reflecting on the trajectory of their lives. You knew all of them, and knew that over the next two weeks you would occupy each of their spots. After a day of classes and study, you could step outside and walk into open restaurants, crossing a Green Street filled with cars and Veo bikes barreling far too fast. Once you were done, the MTD would be ready to take you home after a late night at your friend’s apartment.
Here, instead of being met with familiar faces biking home at 10pm, you're met with an empty Jane Stanford Way. Buildings are closed, and the few places that are open during the night (Lathrop, Green) are sparsely populated and diminished. Everything else is closed, except for TAP and On Call some days. But going to On Call is a cheap imitation of setting forth an expedition in the middle of winter with your friends to Taco Bell.
Where are the snowmen being built in front of Foellinger here? Or a quad where I can curse under my breath at the couples on dates, sprawling under a tree? Or the neighborhood behind ISR where I can walk around like I'm in the middle of the dream, until the bass of a house show draws me toward a wall of sound, before I realize the show is almost over and remember I don’t want to pay cover? Don't get me wrong, I much prefer the Caltrain to the idea of taking the Peoria Charter for 3 hours. The professors have been extremely helpful, the community welcoming, and the students inspiringly ambitious.
But where are the loud lines for fat sandwiches?