College Town #1

Tallahassee

The ride up from Spring Hill was interesting. I didn’t realize how similar to Georgia, North Florida is. The road I rode was an extremely desolate and somewhat depressing stretch of highway. Aside from my first Bald Eagle spotting, the only point of interest was the one stop I made for some boiled peanuts at a shanty set up in the middle of nowhere. Georgia does boiled peanuts so much better than Florida.

First Night: True to form, Jamie took Drew and I to a movie as soon as we got to Tallahassee--once a film student always a film student. The movie was Scott Pilgrim vs. the World. I’ve decided that I officially have a man crush on Michael Cera. I think being compared to him might be the most flattering comparison a person can get (Tanya). After the move, the three of us went to the most honkey-tonk bar I have ever been to, under the guidance of Jamie. To get a picture of this bar, it is literally in the middle of nowhere, it is actually made of corrugated steel, and the name of it is “The Pallace Salloon.” The first thing that hits you when you walk in the door is billows and billows of smoke (there’s something to be said for Athens for sure). The next thing you notice is dartboard after dartboard lining the walls. We hung out there for the rest of the night and then Jamie and Drew left me at said bar to play pong with some total strangers in the middle of a sketch part of a town that I‘ve never been to. We then swam for a couple of hours in Jamie’s sketchy apartment complex pool…at 3:30 in the morning.

Day: Drew and I slept together on a futon. When we awoke, college football was mercifully on tv, finally. After about seven hours of watching random games, we decided to go to the pool…again. On the 100 yard walk to the pool, we saw a fight, and a car getting towed despite the owner’s presence. The rest of the day went pretty much like that until we went out. The bar that we went to on the second night was slightly less sketchy than the first. Jamie managed to fall down the stairs and get kicked out--he claims that he was just denied re-entry, but I think that he actually got kicked out. As a result, he called me and Drew eleven times each in twenty minutes, and ran the two miles home to his apartment. Drew and I got a ride.

All in all, Tallahassee is a strangely different place from Athens. It is certainly a college town, but the mix of Florida people makes it a much more diverse campus than UGA’s. As I said before, Jersey Shore could pretty much have been written about most parts of Florida--Tallahassee is no exception. On to Pensacola for some R&R Air Force style.