Day 5

Philadelphia, PA

Thursday, March 2

We made it to Philly! For some reason as soon as we entered city limits, all of the G’s gained a “Philly” accent. No one actually knew what a Philly accent was, so ours was just some weird mix of New York and Boston with a little growl and flem in the back of our throats. We started the day by getting some Philly Cheese Steaks from two restaurants across the street from each other: Pat’s and Geno’s. Instantly a rivalry was born. None of us knew anything about either of these restaurants, but whichever one you went to made you a die hard fan and resent the other. For the rest of the day Ryan would be using his Philly accent to talk about how wet the Geno’s steaks were.

After the steaks, the G-Men toured the Eastern State Penitentiary, a very historical site where we learned a ton about the area and the prison system both in the past and today. We split up for a couple hours to do some different things after the tour. We met up at Temple University where the group we would be visiting are from. Some of the G’s had to get some work done and went to the campus library. Others went to walk around and explore campus and others got a drink at one of the bars near campus to watch the Michigan basketball game (really really disappointing ending against Illinois, but honestly nothing new for us this year).

We then met up with Broad Street Line, an all lower-voice a cappella group from Temple University. We shared some of our warm ups with them and they showed us some of theirs. We met all the members, sang a few songs, and were ready to go to the Temple serenade. The serenade was straight out of pitch perfect. The first Thursday of every month, each group at temple would show up to this open area on campus and sing a song for everyone else. The G-Men were invited to the serenade and we sang Candyman for them. All the groups there sounded incredible and we had a great time singing with them.

BSL took us to a party with all of the other a cappella groups and we had a great time meeting everyone before going to our respective housing situations. Huge thank you to BSL for giving us places to sleep! We then met up at Richie’s for breakfast the next morning before hitting the road for Princeton. I’ll catch y’all later.

-TJ