A Nocturnal Summer

I am from Cincinnati, Ohio, and while the temperatures vary (similar to Saint Louis), I was not prepared for how hot Saint Louis was this summer. I decided to stay on campus earlier this year and take summer classes (most of them online), and occasionally work. This made my schedule very flexible, and with the blistering hot temperatures, made me want to spend most of my time indoors. With my friend Johan, who also decided to stay on campus this summer, I decided to stay awake most nights and sleep during the day. We were nocturnal.

Bored out of our minds during the day, this is how we spent our summer nights.  

1. We called people across the globe and learned something new.  

Obviously most people are not awake at 2 A.M. CDT in America, but it opens up time to talk to people across the globe.  

Johan is an International Ambassador so many of his friends are the international students who study at Saint Louis University. Many times at night, we would call his international friends. When they were busy, we would use an app called Goodnight. This app is a lot like Tinder, but a phone call version. You have seven minutes to make a good impression on the person you are talking to before you have to decide whether you want to match with them. We talked to many people from all over the world, learned new words in different languages, and even helped some people with their English. This brings me up to my next point, which was how we found out about this app.  

2. We watched so many videos and movies.  

Much to Johan’s dismay, as he doesn’t like movies, we watched so many videos on Youtube (where we found out about Goodnight) and Netflix. One show in particular which ended up being awful, but that we watched all the way through, was the Kdrama, Abyss (don’t watch). We actually didn’t understand the ending at all and ended up using Goodnight to ask people to explain the ending to us. Honestly, watching videos can only last you so long before you feel too cooped up inside and need to leave.  

3. We ate too much and saw a lot of nature.  

Every time we would get tired of watching videos and calling people, we would go get food. One of these nights led us to driving to every Steak ‘n Shake across the city to try and find a milkshake. For some reason, they were all closed this summer and we never ended up getting that milkshake. When we weren’t hungry, we would walk all over campus and hammock during the night (surprisingly, campus seems smaller without anyone on it) and when we didn’t want to walk, we would drive in the direction of nowhere in particular. At one point, Saint Louis felt like too small of a city so we decided to drive an hour and a half away to Pierre Marquette National Park. We ended up driving several times, one of them being at 4 A.M. to see the sunrise and go for a short morning hike. The outdoors are fun (and cooler temperature-wise) at night.  

I’m sure through this you have had the question of how long I was awake during daylight hours, and the answer is: not much. I would fall asleep around 6 am right when the sun was coming up and I would sleep in until around 2 or 3 pm (sometimes 5). And yes, it was hard to break this sleep schedule once school started again, but I did it, and now I have a normal sleep schedule. While this was fun, I really only did it because I was bored most of the time. I would not recommend anyone to do this normally especially if they are not a night owl.  

• adventure
• late nights
• summer