Our Saturday started with a visit to the student union's dining hall, for a reunion brunch. Here were the biggest changes since ![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
bunnyhugger was a student, although not so big since our attending the last reunion. Mostly the cafeteria has a bunch of individual stations serving various genres of food, rather than several rows offering the same cafeteria lineup. Also there's no trays; you're expected to hold your plate and anything else in your hands. I suspect this may be an attempt to make it slightly harder to eat too much, by making it take more trips. Well, I showed them; I'm willing to take the trips.
There was what looked, superficially, like a large number of alumni unable to press the 'pour' button to dispense coffee. This is an unfair characterization: the coffee machine had a lot of options, yes, but it also had no grounds, and therefore was just going to heat water forever without being ready. Eventually someone found a cafeteria staffer who knew what was what and the coffee logjam would break.
An excellent touch I don't remember from the last reunion: each table had a flower bouquet with the class years stuck in. The bad side of this is the numerals were not on really tall sticks, so the flowers obscured them. Many people didn't notice them and so the effort to get Class of '96 people together floundered against nobody really noticing it was there, or that it wasn't Class of '86 or '06 if they did. We accidentally scared some people off by pointing out what the signs were, but we tell ourselves they just noticed friends at another table.
We after this took the walk to the graveyard adjacent to campus, for a tour, one of a couple class-like experiences on offer to visitors. The instructor --- I think a retired history professor and if I'm wrong, it's not by far --- talked about the history of graveyards in Richmond, and how this one came about as a consolidation of then-downtown graveyards, and how the school secured eternal rights for faculty and students to wander the yard by selling a bit of property to it.
Also about the history of graveyards, and the American way of burying people through the early 20th century. There were some amusements, some accidental: he first person buried in the new graveyard --- and one of the people organizing the new facility --- had the last name Coffin. Some were on purpose: he shared a traditional snipe hunt (that bunnyhugger had missed when she was there) of looking for the ``Glass Tombstone''. When he pointed it out yeah, we had some slapped foreheads. There were other funny or novel tombstones mentioned, some too far away for an hourlong tour of a large mass of middle-aged-to-elderly people walking to visit. Not mentioned at all was a campus legend that cult leader Jim Jones was buried there in an unmarked grave. (Wikipedia is of the opinion that Jones was cremated, with ashes scattered at sea. Jones graduated Richmond High School so the legend is not as arbitrary as one might think.)
And then it was time to get to the next class.
Here's some more of Little Amerricka from the monorail ride:
This would be a boring shot except my hair blew into frame and you can see what a mess I'm working with these days.
Now we're all the way out to Bumper Boats territory.
The arc of the monorail is long and it bends toward the Scrambler.
That special moment where the monorail's track passes over the train's. Also one of the better views of how things are laid out at the park.
Did I mention that right next to the park is a graveyard?
Well, enough of that; here's the carousel from above.
Trivia: The first printing of the claim that French chefs are the best in the world seems to have appeared in the 1653 English translation of La Varenne's 1651 cookbook Le Cuisinier français, under the title The French Cook. Source: The Essence of Style: How the French Invented High Fashion, Fine Foods, Chic Cafés, Style, Sophistication, and Glamour, Joan DeJean
Currently Reading: Track Changes: A Literary History of Word Processing, Matthew G Kirschenbaum.
