Room Hopping has been on hiatus–until today. Emi Noguchi and Noam Prywes bring you another little residential corner of paradise.

For 18-year old Chelsea Ward, C ’09, “where are you from?” is an extremely complicated question. She hails from Savannah, Georgia;  Hilton Head, South Carolina; Rochester, New York; and Buckinghamshire, England.  Add to that the two months she spent in Japan last summer.  

Memorabilia from Chelsea’s world travels abound in her cozy Hartley single: photos of her various host families and friends in Japan to complement posters from her visit to the Prado, next to the picture of her name written in Arabic that she got on a two-week backpacking trip to Spain.

The “quasi-Asian section” (She’s an EALAC major, already in her thesis seminar) is tranquil, replete with glowing paper lanterns and calligraphy samples a woman gave to her before she knew any Chinese.  She also has a startling number of books. “When I came to college I had to edit all the books I had at home,” says Ward.  “I had probably 300 books after the first narrowing down.”

    

Then there’s that glorious view of the quad from her two large windows.  When asked about the binoculars on the sill, Chelsea explains, “Those come in handy when watching demonstrations.  No one’s used them to peek in any windows…” She trails off. 

The room’s most striking item is framed by the windows, a painting (“Hang on, it’s skewed,”) by a high school friend based on Faulkner’s Absalom, Absalom!. 

A Hartley passerby’s favorite feature, however, would have to be the white board at the door.  The regularly updated poll, situated in a much-trafficked hallway, offers questions ranging from the spiritual- “If you meet the Buddha, should you kill him?”- to the highly annotated Valentine’s special, “When did you lose your virginity?”  Bwog discreetly left its two cents and bounced.