The first semester of my junior year was the first time I left behind the dorm life and moved to my first village house. In the span of those four months, the green house on Union Street became my home and the living room became my favorite place to drink tea with my best friends.
Traditional housing
Oberlin has many housing options, ranging from dorms and cooperatives to apartments and houses. I spent my first two years living in a dorm, where I shared my room with the randomly assigned roommate I got in my first semester, and I spent my minutes hanging out with my friends in either my room or the common areas. Many of my friends love to cook, so every once in a while, they’d chef up recipes in the dorm kitchens accompanied by a lot of fun. As I’m not much of a cook myself, the dishes were always mine to wash :)
Oberlin Student Cooperative Association
OSCA is another housing option on campus, and although I was never a part of it, all my co-op friends seem to love it. OSCA stands for Oberlin Student Cooperative Association, and it entails student-run cooperative living. They assign roles, live like a family, clean their own space, and cook their own food – talk about independence and community living!
Village Housing
As much as I think that living in OSCA would have been an eventful experience, this year’s village house has exceeded my expectations in every way and I’ve loved every minute of it. Village houses are college-owned housing options in which students can live in domestic-style houses with their fellow student friends. In comparison to the shared and open community style life in dorms, the houses are a lot more private and intimate to the groups that live together.
My village house
The village house I lived in became my home from the moment I walked in. I arrived at Oberlin in late August, after having not been on campus for ten months due to my study away, and was instantly welcomed by my friends and roommates. We quickly and unintentionally started the tradition of drinking tea or chai at our house, so much so that my semester was defined by it. My core memories lay in the nights I had to prepare for my education class or my linguistics exams, drinking tea around the dining table; they happened during all the nights when at 2 am, my roommates and I would sip hot tea talking about spring break plans or studying Spanish sitting around the bar in our kitchen; these memories happened when I got sick at the beginning of the year and my friends would bring me tea each day; they defined the moments when other friends would come over and my roommate would make chai for us. I’d walk in every day to the sight of my favorite people sitting around the dining table, chatting, drinking tea, and filling out applications; and every time I’d walk into that sight, the Beatles song would play in my head: “our house, is a very, very, very nice house”.
There is something special about living in dorms, and I could not say that my dorm in first year was any less of a home than my house. However, now that I am sitting in the comfort of my home in Macedonia, a long way away from my village house, I find myself missing the tea time and all the moments in between.
To one more semester of drinking tea in my home!
