Labor Day Road Trip

I spent the long weekend with my family, driving my younger sister back to college. This will be her third year at Oberlin, but it was my first time visiting the campus. My perception of the school as being mostly hippie-ish was supported by the fact that they don't have RA's, but HLEC's ("Housing Loose-Ends Coordinators") - hers introduced herself as "a resource, not a police force"- and also the gender-free bathrooms:

Okay, this one isn't actually a gender-free bathroom, but others were and I liked this rotatable sign.

And speaking of bathrooms, I had never seen this before in a dorm bathroom, or any other public bathroom for that matter:

There's not even a shower head, it's just a straight up bathtub!

Most of the weekend was spent driving and unpacking, but I did get a brief tour of the campus. My favorite thing by far is the living machine in the Environmental Science building - it is basically a mini-wetland that handles the building's sewage in an eco-friendly way. Except apparently the building is sort of out of the way for most people, so its bathrooms aren't used to the capacity the living machine was designed to handle. The solution? They pay you to poop there! It's an honor system where you have your name on a piece of paper and make a tally mark for every piece you produce, and at the end of the semester you get 25¢ per poop!

Okay, sorry for the very toilet-centric entry, apparently my two years going native with middle schoolers is still affecting my brain. Now onto the eight hour drive back to Philly!