January 3

I kinda couldn't decide if I should go eat breakfast at the dining hall without Peggy but it would be rude to wake her up, and I was both hungry and curious to see it. So I tore a page out of one of my class notebooks and left a note for her, in case she woke up when I'm gone.

The dining hall isn't very far from my dormitory—actually, nothing on campus is. Once I was outside, I flew up to the top of the bell tower. I'm not supposed to fly too high because airplanes can hit me. Mister Salvatore said that they were working on a solution for that. He said it was okay if I stayed below five hundred feet. I'm not completely sure what that distance is; human measurements are weird, but it's surely higher than a building.

Anyway, that was a nice height to survey campus. Most of the buildings surround a central courtyard called the quad, but there are some others across a brick street. They're all different sizes, but most of them are pretty big, and they all have names. Some of them are only for classes and other ones are dormitories, like where I live. I had a map of the campus, which said what they all were, and now that I'd seen them from the air it would be easier to make sense of the map.

I guess everybody is a late riser? There weren't many humans around, although I could see all the way down to a big street that was between the college and the town and there were a bunch of vehicles driving around on the roads.

The dining hall itself is guarded by an older woman who sits at a podium and runs your plastic card through a little machine. The dorms have those too. The swiper machines, not the older woman guard. Although they have rays (it's spelled RA, but pronounced ray) to help out residents, sort of like Mister Salvatore and Miss Cherilyn can assist me.

She helped me take my card off the lanyard that keeps it around my neck and welcomed me to the dining hall. She said that the staff inside would be able to answer any questions, or I could go right to her, and she also assured me that everything was marked as to if it was vegetarian or not, which was good. There were lots of unfamiliar smells and I couldn't always tell by looking what the food was. Sometimes even the name wasn't too helpful.

There were open trays of hot food near the entrance, and then other tables that had cold food on them. I looked over the whole selection before I made my choice. It's wasteful to take more food than you can eat, although we were told that a lot of humans do that and nobody would be mad at me if I didn't finish what was on my plate.

It was weird seeing all that meat just sitting out there, like it was waiting to be picked apart by scavengers. I went to a griffon camp once and they had a similar setup, although the camp cooks kept the pony food upwind of the meat.

I wound up with some scrambled eggs—not too many, 'cause eggs make me fart—fruit (they had lots of fresh fruit even though it's the middle of the winter), bread, and because I wanted to experiment, a little bit of a cereal called 'Froot Loops.' I wanted to have some ansjos too, but I couldn't find any. I'm not sure of the human name for them, but I would have known them by the scent.

There were a bunch of different rooms where you could sit and eat. One of them had a noisy music-movie playing too loud, but it also looked over the courtyard. Another room had benches which would have been more comfortable, but it was darker inside and I didn't like that.

I finally chose the room near the food trays, because it had big windows that looked out over the back of campus, and since the dining hall was on the second floor and the hill fell away behind it, it was like being on a cloud.

I'd almost finished with my breakfast when a woman asked if she could sit with me. She had red-orange hair, and blue-grey eyes. Her breakfast was just Froot Loops, which I'd decided were too sugary for me. Good for a quick burst of energy, but not as sustaining as fruits and grains. Human metabolism is different, though.

Her name is Christine, and she was friends with Action Shot, who is the pony who studied here last year.

We didn't talk for too long, 'cause I wanted to get back to my room before Peggy woke up. She said last night that she was going to show me around campus today, and it will be nice to have a tour guide. There's only so much that can be learned from the little map I got.

Peggy was awake when I got back from breakfast. She said that we could tour the campus after lunch 'cause she wasn't a morning person, and that she was going to take a shower, so I decided to write this in my journal. She says that when she comes back, she's going to show me how to make a Facebook on her computer. She says that that's important to have.

Next Chapter: January 4 [Tour of Campus] Estimated time remaining: 66 Hours, 7 Minutes