Specials

Long uninhabited alleys, small and unadorned rooms, with the pieces of furniture stacked up right in the middle, a suffocating and humid heat and, most of all, dirt everywhere!!

Our first impression of CUNY Hunter College, in Manhattan's Gramercy District, was definitely not good, and there was none of us who didn't think about the easier way to escape as soon as possible from that place...

All of us, italian students that came to New York City to attend a summer school al The CUNY's G.S. of Journalism, found accomodation at the same floor, the 10th. The left side of the alley was reserved for girls, while the boys stayed on the right. Actually, I was the only boy from Italy...In the central part of the floor there was a lobby, equipped with wood tables, dirty couches and a very old television, and beside it, we had a shared badly stuffed kitchen to cook our food. Two shared restrooms, one for each side of the long alley, completed the floor facilities.

After the earlier shock, with the days going on, we begun to get used to the campus life, and we also became friends with our floormates. I'm talking about the french, that we often saw studying in the floor lobby while we were always walking around Manhattan as real tourists. The french were nice guys, a little younger then us, and we missed them when they left. Actually, the boys somtimes were a little bit over the context, especially when they were running and screaming in the alley at 4 in the morning, or when they were strolling about the floor in their underware...But in the end it was ok!!

We did not only enjoy the pleasent company of our french friends, at  the 10th floor another constant presence were the cockroaches, that had their favourite meeting point in our kitchen, usually around dirty dishes or inside the cupboard. They told us that if we were a little luckyer, we could have had the chance to see even some cute rat, the most distinctive inhabitant of new york city buildings. Unfortunately, we couldn't see any of those...

During our first days at Hunter College, one of our main existential problems was the inability to connect to the wifi internet from the rooms with our laptops. Up to the day when we finally got the wifi password, the only way we had to connect to the net, was through the computers located in the game room, at the ground floor of the dorm.

The game room is an amazing place, with a tropical temperature always steady over 90 fahrenhite degrees, and with a strong vintage look, furnished with wonderful videogames from the 80s, sleazy couches from the 60s, and huge portable fans, probably dated back to the 19th century. In the game room there was also a tv/movie zone, a pin ball table, a ping pong table and, most important thing for us, a set of old computers from the early 90s, obviously kind of slow, but essentially efficient machines. In our first days at the college, we actually spent a lot of our night time in front of these computers, affected by a general web-addiction, chatting on msn messenger or posting pictures and stupid thoughts on our facebook pages.

One of the main characters that marked our life at the dorm, was no doubt Reema, our long dark hair room assistant. Reema is a 18 years old girl from southern India, that looks something like 10 years older, but may be that was also beacuse of the role she had to play with us. At the beginning Reema seemed to be a pain, but later she revealed us her nice and kind side....

In short, our stay at Hunter College was not so bad as we thought soon after our arrival, I can say that it was pretty like a short reality show of 18 days and 18 nights. We had many funny moments and some unavoidable light brush, but living in a true american college was an irreplaceable part of our wonderful New York City experience.