When Friends Visit

Many of my friends play the you-go-to-college-for-free-so-you-come-visit-me card, so more often than not I am the one doing all the visiting. But I can’t complain, I get to see gorgeous campuses all along the eastern seaboard, and my friends do have a tendency to brag about the friend that lives in New York City.  Luckily the city has tons of cheap and convenient methods of escaping, such as several inexpensive bus lines, trains, planes etc.

When I visit my friends, there’s nothing really complicated about it. They give me the grand tour, walking backwards of course, but it’s never too long since their campus and dorms are usually one in the same. There’s usually not too much to do besides eat, talk, sleep, walk around, work and go to frat parties.

Now that every school is basically done besides for a few stragglers, many of my friends want to come into the city and visit before we all part ways once again for the summer, but there are several issues I have run into. (Don’t get me wrong, I love my friends to death, but sometimes they can get frustrating.)

1. My friends like to tell me only one or two days in advance of their arrival into the city, but that’s unfortunate because I already have TONS of things planned, like fitness classes, volunteering, socializing, oh I don’t know, class? Work? FINALS? So they get angry with me when I can’t find time for them. Like, no. Macaulay kids actually get involved in things around the city that we can’t just cancel a few hours before for no reason. Especially when we pay for it.  Oh, also we still have class and finals coming up. That’s pretty important too, ya know?

2. My friends tend to forget that my campus and my dorm are in two totally different locations, so when they say they’ll be in the neighborhood and drop by, they usually assume the school on the UES. And on Saturdays and Sundays, I am not at school. In their cases, school means living quarters, but in the city, it could not be further from that.

3. My friends don’t realize that it takes longer than five minutes to get from one tip of Manhattan to the other. Yes, our public transport is wonderful and can get you anywhere, but no, it is not as fast as the speed of light. Many times my friends will have little windows of time between museum visits or shows and getting food and want me to come find them, because lord knows they can’t navigate the subways, but I usually have things to do and it takes time to get places. “Just hop on a subway! It’ll take, like, two seconds, not even!” No, that will take at least forty-five minutes, excuse you.

So my complaining comes down to a few morals, not really but whatever:
1. Make sure people tell you in advance when they plan on visiting.

2. Leave ample amount of time when travelling within the city, I recommend hopstop.com for pretty accurate travel times and directions.

3. Get involved in things around the city, you’ll meet new people and do things you wouldn’t by just sitting in your room.

4. Don’t let your friends guilt you out of doing work and studying for finals or whatever, because they’ll most likely be there after the summer, where as your good GPA, or whatever experience you could have, may not be.