Imagine if you will, a world of peace, collaboration and bliss. Your midterm hell week is over, it’s the Thursday before your four-day weekend (you don’t have classes on Fridays), and you are looking to go out with your friends for a nice, chill evening out before you go home. There’s only one problem, where are you gonna go? This is the ONLY problem living in a small university town, there is a real lack of bars. This is why I would like to formally submit an application for an on-campus, viking style, mead hall.
A place on campus where the spirit of camaraderie flows as freely as the mead, a place that will allow students refuge from the stormy seas that are exams and lab reports. This is what I propose, an unreasonably large wooden building in the dead center of the academic quad, with rooms for students to stay if they need to pull an all-nighter (or if they have an overnight guest and the residences are locked down for the weekend). You enter through the two massive doors and are greeted with an aroma that’s a combination of roasted meats and spiced ale. I cannot think of a better place to crush a few beers with my friends.
The mead hall could even be an academic inspiration, need to finish that paper on Beowulf? What better way to spark academic creativity than in a hall filled with history and mythology? Halls like this were home to many Norse stories back in the day, surely this environment is what could allow students to really bump their mark up in creative writing. Even the science students could get something from the mead hall, maybe they’d like the chemistry of fermented drinks or something I don’t know I’m an English major.
I imagine that we could even provide more student employment opportunities by constructing such a hall. Can you imagine telling people that your weekend job is an Ale Bearer? If you ask me, I think that sounds way better than being a “Bartender”.
More important than all of the things mentioned already, a mead hall would give students a place to strengthen and create bonds amongst each other. Forget awkward ice-breaker conversations. No more asking, “What’s your major,” now we’re talking about how to best conquer Dalhousie’s mead hall and eating smoked meat. Wing night turns into a whole chicken night and pool turns into axe throwing. The camaraderie built over a keg of honey mead as you toast to the end of exams is incomparable to anything else. This would be more than a mead hall, it’d be a bonding experience, one tankard at a time.
The mead hall would be more than a new building, it’d be a cultural revolution on campus, giving students a place to eat, drink, study, and work all within a large building made out of wooden logs. Now if someone reading this could tell me who I submit this to so that it can be built that’d be great cause I’m pretty sure all the administration team have blocked my email.
