Nashville is Sweet, Like Tea

I woke up at 7:00 AM today. I'm happy we had a relatively late start to our day (compared to yesterday at least) after going to bed pretty late last night. When I woke up Maddie was getting ready to jump into the shower, while Joceline had headed to the fitness center for a quick workout, how she can wake herself up just to exercise I don't know. Anyways, I continued on with my morning routine without any form of physical exertion, just how I like it.  

After we all got ourselves ready for the day we headed downstairs to breakfast, our hotel has a nice buffet style assortment of any breakfast item you could think of. I had a bit of oatmeal, a banana, a mini muffin (I really like tiny food), two slices of bacon (yum), and a cup of coffee. The food was really good for hotel food, I'm looking forward to our upcoming breakfasts there, maybe I'll even try out the waffle machine. 

After we finished our meals we headed to our first destination for the day, picking up our rental car. There was a slight bump in the road concerning our reservation, but the nice people of Avis were able to quickly help us and get us on our way. Before actually driving away, though, we had to pair a few phones to the bluetooth in the car for all our GPS needs. It took a bit of playing around, but soon we were moving on to our next destination. 

We arrived at the Country Music Hall of Fame museum at around 10:00, and quickly picked up our tickets and audio tours. Visiting the museum was something I had been looking forward to, so I was anxious to go inside and get started looking through the exhibits. The museum is three stories, you start at the top and work your way down, so to commence our tour we boarded an elevator taking us to the top floor. There weren't that many people at the museum when we first arrived, but as the day progressed the crowds became more apparent, I'm happy we chose to arrive pretty early in the day. 

A wall of gold and platinum records

The first part of the museum focuses on the evolution of country music, with about 5 projectors featuring old footage of early country music. I found this really interesting, seeing how different areas of the country and various artist had made their marks on the country. 

The next portion of the museum focuses on different country music artists, some of the more popular or iconic ones have whole sections dedicated to them, while others share smaller display cases. My favorite part of this section were the two cars which belonged to Elvis Presley and Webb Pierce (yes, actual cars), how exactly they got them to the third floor of the building I don't know. Both of these cars were amazing, Pierce's Pontiac had been customized for $20,000 (this was is 1962, so according to google it is equivalent $160,954 present day), complete with horse figures and decorative handguns places strategically around the vehicle. It's counterpart was Elvis Presley's Cadillac which was complete with 24-karat gold plating and paint which is primarily composed of crushed diamonds and fish scales. 

Joceline doing the sticky note activity

As we continued through the museum we saw an exhibit focusing on the evolution of instruments. In the back of my mind I tried to refer to what I had learned in the music chapter of my physics class and link the subjects, but it was hard to focus on that with so much more going on at the same time. The second floor featured a bunch of interactive exhibits, one let you mix your own music, another challenged you to create a song with magnets on a refrigerator, and even a quiz that gave you your ideal occupation in the music business, apparently I would make a great publicist. My personal favorite activity showed you three random pictures, after which you were tasked to come up with a song lyric based on the images and write it on a sticky note which you could place on the wall. The rest of the museum was composed of more outfits that famous musicians had worn, I was impressed by the apparent variation of style. There were leopard print suits, floor length ball gowns, short floral dresses with puffy sleeves, sparkly cocktail style dresses, and so many more. I couldn't help but want to try on many of them, it brought me back to my days of playing dress up in elementary school. We all finished up at the museum around the same times, I think I speak for everyone when I say we had a great time. 

My sweet tea!

Everyone was hungry so we went to get lunch, we decided to eat at a restaurant called The Southern. We all ordered after pursuing the menu for a while. I, along with Maddie and Evan, ordered a burger while Joceline got a hot chicken salad and Jennifer ordered a BLT with shrimp. We also all ordered sweet teas, our first authentic Tennessee sweet teas. They were delicious, not too sweet but not too strong, something in the middle. We all finished our meals pretty quickly, so we discussed our plans for the rest of the day and tomorrow. Before leaving, Joceline and I went to the bathroom, something I don't normally blog about, but the bathroom at The Southern is really cool. They had a projector playing a movie, The Sandlot, to be specific, and their sink is fairly unusual. It's simply a faucet over a granite slab, but the slab is angled so that the water funnels toward the backsplash instead of onto whoever is washing their hands. I thought that was pretty amusing, as did Joceline and the rest of the cohort. 

We took a bit of a stroll around that part of town afterwards, stopping at a swing for a while. I really like that Nashville has swings scattered throughout it, I think if we had those at parks back home people might be more tempted to visit them, well I would at least. 

Next we went to our main event for the day, our Vanderbilt campus tour and information session. The information session was held first, a Vanderbilt admissions counselor, Kayla, addressed our rather large group about what Vanderbilt is as a school, on a academic and cultural level, and they talked about the admissions process and financial aid. As the name states, information sessions are pretty informative, and I learned a lot about Vanderbilt through it.

At the information session-front row seats!

One thing that stuck with me was Vanderbilt's approach to financial aid, which they call Opportunity Vanderbilt. First, they are need blind, meaning that when reviewing your application they don't take into account what type of financial aid you will need into their decision. This is something that not all schools do, as some schools have more limited amounts of financial aid they can give. Also, they meet your financial needs 100%. This means that they calculate, based off tax forms, how much money your family can feasibly spend on tuition, then subtract this number from the total cost on tuition, resulting in your financial aid package. This means that your financial needs will always be met, which is something few few universities offer. Also they have three merit scholarships which you are welcome to apply for, these only require a simple essay and pay for your entire tuition, on condition your GPA remains above a certain number. 

Our tour was lead by a rising Vanderbilt Junior named Elizabeth, she showed us around quite a bit of campus and was able to give us some more information about student life as a whole on campus and her personal experience. Elizabeth was originally an Engineering major, but after taking some classes she realized that majoring in Science and Technology Communication and minoring in Engineering Management was a better fit for her, she was able to easily switch her major with no fuss at all. This came to me as a surprise as her change in major required switching from the School of Engineering to the College of Arts and Sciences. But, she explained that changing majors wasn't anything to worry about at all, the staff at Vanderbilt wants the students to study what they're interested in and what they'll be successful in. Because of this, even if a student is a physics major, they'll be able to take classes at the Blair College of Music if they'd like. 

One of my favorite buildings we visited

Also, during this tour I was able to talk to some other prospective Vanderbilt students. It was nice to get to talk to people of different backgrounds, something I'm sure I'll get to do more of at VSA. We met two students from Indianapolis, Indiana, and San Antonio, Texas, whom were named Jake and Emily. Emily is a rising junior and is already pretty far into her college search, she's looking into the STEM field, and I'm impressed that she's already thinking about and touring colleges. Jake is hoping to study physics, he was quite a character, but very friendly all around, he's also a triathlete which is pretty uncommon where we're from. 

We finished up the tour and stopped to look at the the campus, our new home, and then went to the bookstore to pick out some Vanderbilt swag. I got a cute light yellow crew neck that I'm really excited about, even though it's way too hot to wear it here.

Afterwards we went to an old-fashioned soda shoppe for dinner. The food was really good, but the milkshakes were even better, and even larger. Evan finished his in record time, it took me a bit but I was able to finish mine, it was quite possibly the best milkshake I've ever had. 

We then all filed back home, tired from our full day and ready to get some rest.