Bostonia

What a weekend.

Maybe I should make that into a "Wow, what a weekend."

The BW Model United Nations team made its 30th-odd trip to Boston to participate in the 2006 Harvard National Model UN conference. Most trips out to Boston are immemorable and given the quality of debate, much the same should have been expected from the 2006 excursion to Harvard.

Well, that certainly was far from the case and we should have all known it from the second we arrived at the airport.

Starting the amusement was Allen Stewart, having to get stopped and wanded at security because of his metal-studded belt. Then there was the waiting at gate C4... Léna sticking a cell phone and the an iPod into her mouth... then Tamoré shoving her fist into her mouth.

Yeah... it was not the most auspicious start to the weekend.

Things began to go downhill quickly after the Thursday evening session - yes, the session on the first night we were there. Kim and I went out to eat, but being that it was just after 11pm on a Thursday night, we were having a hard time finding any restaurants that were open. Not clubs. Restaurants. We ended up going to this place called Joe's on Dartmouth and Newbury. I had gone there last year and the food was decent. She had an Asian Chicken salad and I ordered French Onion soup...

... it took a good amount of time for the food to come out. The chefs had closed down the kitchen early and we angry with the manager.

Waiting.

Waiting.

Small talk with Kim.

Waiting.

The food came at long last. Kim's salad tasted excellent. The cheese on my soup was still solid... far from being melted in any way. The manager was kind enough to remove the soup from the bill, but I ate it anyway... cold and rather bland.

Yeah. So we made our way back to the hotel. Decided to invite Kim back to the room... chilled with Léna and Steven... watched some History Channel. Abby and Tamoré return, fully inebriated, sometime after that. Tamoré hits on me. Grabs me. Makes me feel pretty uncomfortable. I leave my little cot and retreat to the bed where Kim and Léna are. By the time I've reached the bed, Steven has left, I'm sure after having been made thoroughly uncomfortable by the topic of discussion.

Abby, being fully drunk, decides to go to sleep in the shower. Okay. Fine. Sleep in the shower. She brings a can of Baked Lays into the shower with her... and lays on top of it. She wonders where it is and Kim goes into the bathroom to assist with the finding of the chips. Under her.

Abby gets up and sets up a cot behind the room's door. It is snugly fit between the door and a wall, so that Abby, in her intoxication, can "keep watch." Okay, fair enough.

Eventually everyone is in bed. Tamoré, Matt, Kim, and I are in the bed. Léna is on the cot where I was supposed to be. Abby is in the other cot. It's sometime between two-thirty and three-fifteen. We're all asleep, or almost asleep, when disaster strikes. The fire alarm goes off... none of us knows what to do. We get Abby up and bail out of the room. I make my way down to the lobby to try to find out what's going on.

False alarm. Okay. That's well and fine. I go back up the stairwell, which is getting increasingly congested by the flow of students streaming from the upper floors.

Time to go back to bed, right? Not quite. None of us grabbed a key in our hurry to vacate the room. Someone goes back downstairs... this time via elevator, as the stairwell is totally backed up.

Okay... now it's time to go back to bed, right? Hell no. That would be far too simple and easy. The door won't open.

WHAT? The door won't open!

It seems that the opened after we left the room, lodging between the door and the wall, barricading the door shut. We putz around, trying to figure out what to do. Do we call for help? We do...

... and things go from bad to worse.

We go through several security people before the night manager, a large and burly man, comes up. He works on the door for several minutes, trying to force it open by his sheer weight. He stops and has the front desk make some keys for Abby, Kim, Léna, and me. Room 1053.

Léna, Kim, and I go to the front desk to pick up the keys and see our new digs.

It turns out it's the Imperial Suite.

The what?

The Imperial Suite.

Rocking.

...

well...

there's more... but I'm low on time. More will come later.

Leaving for DC tomorrow until Saturday (or Friday). More travelling. Fun.

-rl