Jonathan Shazar: Appreciating Philly after a week away

BINGHAMTON, N.Y. -- I take Philadelphia for granted, as do, I think, most Penn students. It only took a few hours stranded in a place like this to remind me how grateful I am to have both a 24-hour Wawa and grocery store within three blocks of my dorm, to sit with the limitless options of Center City just a $2, 10-minute trolley ride away and to appreciate just how wonderful it is to have immediate access to trains leaving for New York with great frequency into the wee hours. I woke up on Sunday afternoon to see the snow alongside my car, parked in a friend's Syracuse driveway, stained blood red. Unfortunately for me, the source was not a dead animal or a celebrant of the Syracuse University men's basketball team's upset win over Pittsburgh the night before, but my transmission. In fact, the crimson stream emanating from the passenger side wheel well was the entire contents of my transmission. In its final hours, this wonderful, nostalgic upstate road trip to see my high school buddies went terribly wrong, putting a serious damper on the 400-mile Syracuse-to-Binghamton-to-New-Paltz, N.Y.-to Philadelphia journey planned for that day. With great difficulty, my friends and I acquired three gallons of the correct transmission fluid, spent one filling up the bone-dry tranny and embarked on a treacherous 60-plus-mile expedition down Interstate 81 from the self-proclaimed "City for All Seasons" to the self-proclaimed "Carousel Capitol of the World." That I'm still in said "Carousel Capitol of the World" should tell you something about what happened next. Having lost something like a half-gallon of the precious transmission fluid during the trip, and having watched it hemorrhage from my car as fast as we could pour it in once we were parked, it was agreed among the relevant parties that she could go no further without immediate assistance from the kind people at Saturn. It was 6:30 p.m. on a Sunday, and we were stuck in Binghamton, N.Y. I want to make this clear: I harbor no ill will toward the city of Binghamton, in spite of the eerie shadow that bathes it at all times. I'm just a little bit annoyed that my car is currently parked on Leroy Street by the Susquehanna rather than on Spruce Street on the Schuylkill. And it doesn't help that the convenience store across the street looks like something out of 1980s-era Moscow, with shelves literally 80 percent bare. If I get thirsty, I have to cross my fingers and hope that they haven't run out of milk or Coke or Forties of something drinkable. Indeed, for the Binghamton University student living off-campus, a car is a necessity. I can drive to the land of plenty -- Wegman's, a fantastic grocery store open 24 hours -- but if my car were working, I'd be in Mayer Hall right now. In fairness, now that it's warmed up a bit, I could walk to downtown Binghamton -- about a 15-minute trek -- but then I'd be in downtown Binghamton and, well, that's about as exciting as it sounds. So instead, I'm watching a rerun of a Yankees game on the YES Network -- the availability of which in Binghamton saves the town from being a total loss -- longing for a place where I can get steamed mussels very late at night. It's long been my belief that, academically speaking, the best schools in the country are roughly equivalent in terms of undergraduate experience. Penn has an amazing faculty, professors I am profoundly grateful to have had the opportunity to study under, but so do Harvard and Columbia and Duke and the State University of New York at Binghamton. The Binghamton kids I know from home and those I have met subsequently are as bright and fun to be around as Penn students, if not more so -- and there's even a disproportionate number of Long Islanders amidst their ranks. This being the case, it saddens me that I have taken Philadelphia for granted and that I've not explored nearly enough of the opportunities afforded me by the fifth-largest metropolis in the country. And spending an unplanned night in this horrid, desolate stretch of cow country is fast rekindling my desire to do so. Curiously enough, Binghamton was founded by a prominent Philadelphian by the name of Bingham. It bears his name even though he never once visited this swath of New York's southern tier. Mr. Bingham had the right idea. The most important difference between Penn and SUNY-Binghamton, and between Penn and almost every other college in the country, is not our name brand or the fact that we're 200 years older or our ranking in U.S. News. It's Philadelphia. And if you do nothing else in your four years here, you should exploit that most precious quality -- proximity to a civilized place. As for me, I'm going to have a drink and curl up on the couch. There's nothing else to do. Jonathan Shazar is a senior History and Political Science major from Valley Stream, N.Y.

Please note All comments are eligible for publication in The Daily Pennsylvanian.