Right now I'm in a bustling and crowded town called Hanover, which is not nearly as nice as the place I just came from. I miss Middlebury a lot, the town, the people, the school; all of them are so warm and welcome.

   In the morning we had a satisfactory meal at Middlebury Inn, a relatively cheap place with standards as high as that of the five-star hotels. There was an abundance of choices for breakfast, and everything was fresh and local. After that we walked around the Middlebury College, and rushed to the admission office for the information session and campus tour.
   The information session was led by a lately graduated student. Compared to other full-time admission directors, she was a bit of a rookie, and the most duration of the info session she was talking in a monotonous tone, which was pretty painful as I had a hard time keeping my eyes from shutting.
   Middlebury is famous for its language programs, especially ones during the summer. Our tour guide later told us that if we saw someone looked like Middlebury students on the street, we'd better not approach theym to ask any questions, because they were very likely to be in the language program, for which they had signed pledges swearing that they would use no language other than the one they were currently learning. This type of full immersion programs are rigorous and helpful, and the director just couldn't stop talking about it.
   Another unique thing about Middlebury is that it has a 4-1-4 schedule: students take 4 courses in the fall term, 1 in the January term (J-term, as it's called by the Mids), and 4 in the spring term. The J-term allows students to take classes they normally wouldn't have the time or the courage to take during the ordinary school years. They will have a month's time to choose something that does not necessarily fall into the range of their majors, but interest and intrigue them. It is a great opportunity for them to try something brand new, and to really help them discover their potentials and interested in areas they haven't found yet.
   Besides the regularly enrolled students who arrive in September, Middlebury also has a student body of ninety to a hundred who come in February. These students take a gap semester between high school and college to do community service, travel abroad, or take part-time jobs earning money for college. They come in later than the regular freshmen, and they graduate a semester later as well. It doesn't have much appeal to me, though, but I still think it's worth mentioning here because it is really something that is only offered by Middlebury but not any other schools.

   The tour after the info session was even more informative. Middlebury has a beautiful campus, and a pretty big one. The tour guide spend a lot of time explaining the housing system in Middlebury, which to a large extent resembles the housing assignment in Harry Potter. One interesting fact I found out during the college trips is that almost every college likes to compare some of its features to those in Harry Potter in order to attract high school students. So far I've heard schools that say they have Hogwarts dining halls, Hogwarts houses, Quidditch, and many other things that are not entirely familiar to me, but do obviously attract those die-hard Harry Potter fans, which, not surprisingly, meas a very considerate population of students.
    We drove to the Breadloaf campus to visit Robert Frost trail, and the annual Breadloaf Writer's Conference happened to be there at this time of the year. We saw a lot of writers sitting on the chairs overlooking the beautiful grass in front of them. It would be even more amazing in spring, I assume, when flowers of different colors are all blooming with their own gestures and personalities, and really make everything looks like a painting instead of reality.
   After that we had a nice lunch with my host mother and sister at a local bakery. It was nice to see them after two years. Staying with them familiarized me with the American cuisine, and it's from them that I learned terms like "bagels" and "smoothies". Lunch lasted for almost an hour, and we forced ourselves into the car after we were all full of foods. The next stop was Hanover, New Hampshire, in which Dartmouth College was located.
 
    I didn't know that Middlebury was that close to Hanover, and when we actually arrived it was only five in the afternoon. Just like that, I arrived in time for a reading of my favorite author, Jodi Picoult. Weeks before when I first learned that she was going to be Hanover the day I visited  Middlebury, I was disappointed that I just missed this one-in-a-million-years opportunity to meet her. But by chance her reading started at six, just outside of the hotel we were staying in. I paced myself and bought a book of hers, and saw her in flesh, reading a chapter of her new book which would come out in February next year. She signed my book and wrote "hello Zoe" on it, it was all very amazing.
   Other than that, I didn't find Hanover charming. For one thing, the Hanover Inn was just overcharging in every point. We spent almost three hundred for one night's stay, and we still had to pay everything we asked for, which was barely nothing: hot water, hot tea, hot coffee, even parking. I was mad at my mom for paying this much to live in such an inconvenient hotel with horrible service and everything.
   It started to rain in the late afternoon, and the temperature sped down. The streets were still crowded with cars and noisy people, and every single restaurant was so insanely expensive. I hope the trip around the campus tomorrow could somehow cancel up the bad impression I had about this town, but right now I really do not like the place, and it's really the first time since I came to America that I feel upset.