Munchkin-wg.de

Today it’ll like to talk about sport as a recreation, buses and sport as a craze. Hope you’ll bear with me till “the end”.

In difference to German schools, most American colleges and universities are what you call campuses. Everything relativley close together in a space just occupied by the school. But it also means, that most members (ie Students) live on campus or close by. Hence, most schools here provide recreational facilities on campus. Especially as nearly every school has some kind of Athletics program, the facilities would be vacant on non training time.
As CMU is a research oriented school, the athletics department is pretty bad (the athletics group the school is part of is called “nerdy nine”). It still has one, tho. And you can go training anytime it’s not used by one of the teams. Wanna go for a swim after work? Sure, just show your ID and they will even provide a Towl. Really cool service.

But to get to work in the first place, I’ve to use the Bus. To be honest I never expected to be a public transport comuter in the states. I didn’t think it was possible outside of the major cities. I guess Columbus must have been a pretty bad example in this direction. I mean the system here is no camparison to Munichs, runs relativly seldom (all 30 minutes) but as multiple Buses go where I need to go, it’s all good. Well, not quite. As I’m not employed by CMU nor a Student, I don’t get the free Buspass all others get. But the Busdrivers don’t look to close on my ID. The only difference would be a small white bus sign. And so far, nobody has noticed. If they ever should start noticing, I would have to pay a full 70$ a month.

Speaking of Buses, you know what’s crazy in this city? It’s love for Sport. They have a pro team (and good ones at that) in Hockey (Penguins), Baseball (Pirates) and in Football (Steelers, last years Superbowl winners). Additionally, the Footballteam from University of Pittsburgh (aka PITT, called the Panthers) is pretty good. So the city really gets it’s craze on about their teams. The freaking BUSES show “Go Steelers”, “Lets go Pens” or “let’s go panthers” every couple of seconds. The destination display at the front and the side is temporarily replaced with one of these slogans. I’ve never seen are more sport crazy place.