This past Monday, I signed up to be one of the first hosts for the illusive and mysterious Dinner With 7 Strangers project. This was my dinner.
Being a host for DW7S started as many Monday mornings do for me, with a frantic trip to Trader Joe’s. I filled a basket with a weeks worth of bananas, yogurt, and blackberries, plus the goods for my dinner, several cans of tomatoes, beans, refrigerated cinnamon rolls, salad supplies, and
three fabulous Peruvian mangoes. I had decided to make chili and cinnamon rolls (yes, together, you dip the cinnamon rolls in the chili) because it’s a classic Wyoming dish, it’s a little strange, and probably would be new to everyone, so it seemed to fit the DW7S theme. The friendliest of all the Trader Joe’s employees helped me magically disappear all the ingredients into my backpack, and we were off to the races.
Step two began after my 12pm class. Several chopped onions (and a few unwilling tears) later, I was sauteing onions and corn in enough chili powder to make a jalapeno blush. All of this went into my roommates handy-dandy crock pot with about six hundred cans of miscellaneous chili-esque ingredients (as per the first Google hit for the search term “Best Chili Ever”). There was a minor mishap with a semi-functional can opener that led me to use a kitchen knife to open a can, and I can pretty much guarantee that even though she’s 2,000 miles away, my mom could sense this bad decision and probably said out loud, “That’s how you lose fingers, missy.”
After my soon-to-be chili was safely in the crock pot, I headed off to Yates, returning just in time to toss a tray of cinnamon rolls in the oven and open the ever mysterious guest list email. In this email I found six strange names and one passing aquaintance. No less than 10 minutes later, one of these strangers was at my door. My first stranger walked in, introduced herself, and asked if I needed any help. Together we located 8 plates, bowls, cups, and sets of silverware (never have our cupboards been so bare), and in minutes my apartment was packed full of some of the friendliest and happiest strangers I could have expected.
After brief introductions, scrounging a few extra chairs from our desks upstairs, and helpings of chili all around, we settled around the table. Mentally, I was prepared for a little awkwardness, but I was surprised by how easy it was to get the conversation going. We did a little Major/Year/Hometown/HowIsItStillNotNSOver stuff, but before long we had waded deep into who had watched the most recent season of House of Cards, complaints on the excessive regularity of the German department listserve emails, and 
general thoughts on summer in Budapest. We worked our way through a smorgasbord of interesting topics along with the blueberry salad, cinnamon rolls, and dessert mangoes.
After washing the dishes together, my strangers and I stood around for a few more minutes and snapped a picture for one stranger’s notorious Instagram account. In the span of an hour, we had talked, laughed, and most unexpectedly, actually gotten to know each other. One topic of conversation we couldn’t resist was why we had all decided to sign up for DW7S. Everyone’s reason was a little different, but fundamentally the same. We had all seen fliers, Facebook posts, or under-the-door messages at different places and times, but all of us had the same reaction– we thought it was something worth doing.
Overall my strangers were an interestingly perfect sample of life at Georgetown; a freshman in the SFS interested in STIA and agriculture (like me!), a freshman in the College who used to be pre-med (like my roommate/best friend!), two sophomores and a junior who are interested in languages, study abroad, and the workings of the global community, and a second junior who identifies as a foodie and has an elaborate 
spreadsheet of the best of DC and New York food that would put professional critics to shame. The other senior in my group of strangers was someone I had met before, and in a lot of ways, it was really cool to see a familiar name on a list of Hoya “strangers”. Being a senior can, at times, be isolating, particularly in that it often feels like a good portion of my friends have graduated. But out of hundreds (maybe thousands) of possible strangers in DW7S, 1 out of my 7 was familiar to me. I guess Georgetown might be a small world after all.
My DW7S experience was a phenomenal one. I can officially remove 7 names from the long list of Georgetown students who are still strangers to me, and within 24 hours of our dinner, I saw one of these new friends out in the world, and I realized that this was not the surreal, otherworldly experience that would be forever suspended in my apartment like a dream. With my days at Georgetown numbered (T-60 days to be precise), its hard to find opportunities and to rationalize making new friends and meeting new people. But that is exactly what is so phenomenal about DW7S. It’s not a club, it’s not a reoccurring time commitment, and it’s not a networking event. It’s just dinner. In a bizarre way, that’s what makes it transformative. It’s a dinner that might be just what I (or someone else) needs at that moment, it might lead to a new friend you greet when you pick up packages at the RHO or order coffee at MUG, it might lead to a mentorship or to a deeper friendship, or who knows, maybe it will lead to something deeper still (fingers crossed for a DW7S boy band). My dinner was what my strangers and I made of it, and though it started at my kitchen table, I know it won’t end there.
If you’re considering it, do it. If you’re not considering it, do it. Otherwise, do it. Do it now.
Butt Naked Travels 