Freshmen Fridays: Wawa-wonderful
Freshmen Fridays is a series of posts chronicling the foodie adventures of Penn Appetit’s freshmen bloggers. This week, Emily discovers Wawa.
Before coming to Penn a little over a month ago, I did what I’m sure every incoming college freshman does at some point before stepping onto campus that first, nauseating time–I googled the best places to eat for students (or was that just me?). Many of the answers were what I expected–any and all BYOBs, the food trucks on Spruce street, Pod¬–Philadelphia is a city, after all, and there are decent places to eat outside of the dining halls (which don’t really count as places to eat considering the edibility of the food served in them, excluding the ice cream of course).
However the one place that kept appearing in every blog post, Yahoo answer, and Facebook group was the one place I had never heard of before, having lived all of my 18 years in LA: Wawa. And the more I read the more baffled I became. Is it a convenience store? A restaurant? Some sort of bizarre cross between a Subway and a 7-11? And above all else, why would anybody ever choose to eat there, when its biggest attraction was that you could place your order on touch screens, minimizing your interaction with actual humans as much as possible?
It wasn’t really until after that first Friday night of NSO, when I was swept through the sacred doors by a crowd of disoriented freshmen on my way back to the Quad, that I truly appreciated the food Mecca that is Wawa. That very first visit, overwhelmed by the array of choices before me, I realized that my mistake had been to ask what Wawa was, when I should have been asking what it wasn’t, for the answer to that question was far simpler: nothing.
At 2:30 in the morning I could pretty much eat whatever I wanted: milkshakes? They have their own machine. Doughnuts? A display-case full. Wraps? Pre-made and by the door, the perfect grab-and-go option. But the best part by far, the part that had seemed so off-putting to me before my enlightenment, were the touch screens for the last thing anybody wants to do at 2:30 on a Friday night is expend the incredible effort required to interact productively with another human being. And maybe it was the excitement of finally being at a place I’d heard talked about ad nauseam or perhaps it was the unexpected joy of knowing that I could grab any kind of flavored (or unflavored, if you prefer) coffee imaginable at any and all hours of the night, or it might have been that the tiniest part of myself that loves any and all junk food (chicken tenders and mac and cheese and a milkshake and a quesadilla) had realized this was paradise, but the food actually tasted good. Far better than half the “meals” I had choked down at Hill or Commons the past few days.
Suffice it to say I have officially joined the cult of Wawa, and if that means I have poor taste, then so be it. If 24-hour access to ice cream is wrong then I have no desire to be right. But what is that intangible quality about Wawa that sparks such fanaticism? Is it the plethora of options? The free ATMs? Its convenient location just a short block away from the Quad? I do not know the answer to these questions yet, although I have made it my mission to go as many times as it takes to find out. All I can say is that it definitely lived up to the hype… it’s wawa-wonderful.
-Emily Waxman