VSA, Sooth Side Unite!

Mural in downtown Nashville, Tennessee

Picture taken at a Nashville bus stop

If you read my last blog entry, you would know that I'm at Vanderbilt Summer Academy. This program has been amazing and a great experience with so many things to discover and I still have a little more than a week left.

Since I've been here, I've discovered calamari (fried squid tentacle, which is actually really good), Sweet Ceces, hipsters, and the amazing way that the government controls our entire life.
So, let me elaborate on a few of these things....
I've discovered hipsters, but I still don't understand them. From what I've been told, they try to act obscure and ahead of the game, but they're still really cool. I really can't tell them from regular people, but whatever.
The government thing was from my American Legal System class. This class makes me want to crawl into a corner and cry before the government does it for me. They really can control way too much, they can even make you buy things that you don't want to, not much unlike the Obama care.

You'll have to excuse me if I get absolutely carried away, there has been so much in the past week and a half that it's hard to know what I would want to talk about first.

I would have to say that the first thing should be how nice everyone is here. I'm never worried about being alone because all I have to do is walk outside my door to find a friend that would love to hang out.  As far as I know, everyone seems to get along and enjoy each other, which is so rare in such a large group of teenagers.

The program gives us a large amount of freedom, all the while still keeping us pretty safe. They only ask that we keep someone with us if we stray too far from the large group and they have blue emergency phones everywhere; in fact, this was one of the first things that they let us know.
Other than that, we get things called soft nights often where we can participate in a large variety of events or we can explore set parts of Nashville and shop until our heart's content.

We do keep busy though, even on the weekends.
Friday they threw a really nice dance that was loads of fun, they even had a board game room for people that didn't want to dance.
On Saturday, they took us to a baseball game but it was rained out. They payed for everything, the tickets, hot dog, coke, and five dollars to spend on whatever.
Sunday, they gave us a choice of where we wanted to go. We could pick from The Country Music Hall of Fame, some plantation, an art gallery, and Nashville Zoo. Whichever you chose, they payed for you to get in. I went to the zoo and it was absolutely amazing!
We were allowed to explore and go wherever we wanted so long as we kept to the group requirements.

Tuesday they payed for us to go out to eat with our proctor groups (groups of same gendered people on your floor and an adult that helps take care of you if you need anything). We went to Chinese and that's where I discovered calamari. It was really good, so was the actual dinner.

Rainbow after the ballgame