My first experience on the Quinnipiac shuttle line was like something out of a low-budget independent film. I am a freshman, and have spent my first two weekends here bouncing around from dorm to dorm, trying to meet as many people as possible during this awkward stage of my college career. By the third weekend, my suitemates and I decided that it was time to explore what lies beyond campus. The process of actually getting into New Haven was loud, crowded and chaotic.
The first and most obvious asset to the Quinnipiac shuttle line are the hordes of girls wearing heels they can’t walk in and dresses that can’t cover their backsides. They swarm the sidewalk, flashing their Nokia cameras in every direction. I believe they are attempting to blind every single person around them. Now I won’t lie, it’s not like I was wearing sneakers and an oversized hoodie, but some of these girls are ridiculous. Drunk female messes stumble around and fall all over guys who (understandably) look like they have never been in a happier place in their lives. Out of nowhere, things get a little violent.
People are shoving behind me to get to the front of the line, security guards are barricading off the road and chasing down students who stray away, and a random drunk girl angrily accuses me of flirting with her boyfriend because I am pushed into him by the anxious crowd. Great. I wonder if I will spend more time on this obnoxious line than I will in New Haven.
The line moves and the sight of the neon-colored numbers in the hands of security guards brings things to a whole new level. These numbers indicate which shuttle you will take and turn the line into a complete stampede. Arms jut out from every direction, friends are dragging each other along in order to be on the same shuttle, toes are violently being stepped on. If the line itself wasn’t so unbearable, maybe no one would be so adamant about removing themselves from it to board the shuttle.
When my time came, holding that little neon number in my hand was the most relief I have felt in a while. It was like receiving an acceptance letter. My suitemate and I boarded the shuttle only to find that the other half of our group got left behind. A security guard caught my roommate handing off her QCard to another suitemate of ours, because she had accidentally left hers in her room. The shuttle took off and we panicked as we watched my poor roommate get scolded by the security guard and stared at by the line during her first attempt to go to New Haven. Thankfully she was allowed on the next shuttle after my suitemate raced back to Perlroth to retrieve her Q-card.
After leaving the club and finding our way back to the shuttle line to get back to campus, things worsened when we bought a pizza pie but were forced to leave it on the sidewalk because we did not know we couldn’t bring food on the bus. I’m hoping this is a typical freshman misjudgment.
And how could this get any worse? The security guard that banned our pizza was the same who kicked my roommate off the shuttle the first time around; making the pizza incident our second offense of the night.
The moral of the story is that my first attempt on the shuttle line really defined what Saturday nights are like when going out to party in New Haven. Of course, the whole going-out experience of Quinnipiac just wouldn’t be the same without the underdressed (and not very sober) girls, the pushing, the shoving and the stern security guards. Sure, it would have been nice for my group of girls to get on the shuttle all at once and to have eaten some pizza on the way home, but it all adds to the whole experience. I wouldn’t trade my first New Haven outing for anything, especially knowing I’m going to have countless more nights like this over the next four years of my life.
