The last time I was in Hoboken, I actually got the exact same impression of it that I did when I was there yesterday. It's a college town, except there's no college. The school color was green and the song was anything you could get people to sing with you. St. Patty's day on Saturday is Jersey's Mardi Gras.
You had a pretty good idea of what was going to be going on when you got to the PATH station and waited in long, undulating, lines of green to board the trains, which were basically party buses, crowded and rowdy and drunk and singing and broken glass.
Moving from house party to party with a rapidly expanding / shrinking group is pretty much exactly the same thing as being in a band of roving freshmen, crashing in on parties, drinking all the alcohol and eating all the food, and moving on. It's like being in a locust swarm where all the locusts have cell phones to tell them where the next patch of delicious vegetables is.
The thing that really stuck out to me is the people who really seem like they didn't want to be there. I mean seriously if you that's not your type of thing, it was pretty easy to avoid, just stay out of that one square mile of Jersey (I still have a hard time believing that) for one afternoon. There was this one short brunette girl on the PATH train who was listening to her Ipod, flipping back and forth between different songs for the entire ride, oblivious to the soccer chants and shots being taken around her. Despite my best efforts to give her room, she kept nestling into me as if she expected me to project her from the Bacchanalia around her. When I asked her about being in her own little world, she was like "I'm ready to party, but just not now, not on this train." To be honest, a lot of times I actually enjoy partying with people I don't know at all even more.
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