Lewiston’s Hidden Secret

This weekend was my most productive time since I’ve been back this semester. I have finished two job applications, had a meeting with my advisor, and chewed through all my readings for this week.  But on Saturday, I was about to get comfortable in the library when one of my friends peer pressured me into being his side kick for two hours while he drove around Lewiston to do some needless shopping.

Everyone here knows, Lewiston has the best thrift stores in the world. Our first stop was Salvation Army, followed by a Goodwill, followed by a stop at a small dive known as Orphan Annie’s. By far the best is Salvation Army, where this time I bought an awesome cowboy style button down shirt and a warm fleece jacket. (Can’t have enough fleece when you’re living in Maine!)  For some reason Lewiston is a hot bed for vintage clothing, and not a single outing in my Bates College career has proved this wrong. This time my friend, Zand, bought a VHS copy of the original live action Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles and The Last Waltz. Great finds!

 I am still in the market for a nice carpet for my single on Frye St. No luck this time, maybe I might just have to sell out and head over to a real store.

-Graham

Here’s a pic of two of my buddies showing off some of their recent Lewiston thrift store finds…. Walking around campus dressed like this on a Saturday night? It’s standard practice around here when your looking to have a good time. You bet he’s cold!

Snowboarding and Broken Collar Bones

Coming to Maine from Kentucky has given me many new opprotunities. My favorite has to be the sick snowboarding that is offered just down the ways. We have three great options:

1) Lost Valley:  a cool little place just down the road, sometime people go and do a few runs right before dinner…. it’s also free for Batesies!

2) Sunday River: my favorite and the old stomping ground for many of my friends. It’s maybe 1.5 hours away and makes for a good day of mountain shredding

3) Sugar Loaf: never snowboarded there myself, but my winter pass let’s me in. It’s further away than the others but during the fall of my sophomore year I hiked up it before the snow fell

This past Friday some of my buddies and I hit up Sunday River (I don’t have classes on Fridays this semester) and the six of us spent the day on the mountain. Unfortunatly, we brought along a little too ambitious freshman who was just learning how to ski and he nose dived on our second run and ended up breaking his collar bone. We plaid rock-paper-scissors for who had to drive him to the hospital. Carter is okay now but he will have to take the next few weeks off until he can get back out on the mountain. According to some sources, when Carter called home, his mom didn’t give him too much sympathy, instead she chewed him out for cutting his Friday class to go to the mountain with us.

 On the brighter side, at this weeks Outing Club meeting big Carter had a hilarious story to tell about the whole thing and it now has become the stuff of Bates folklore. (Let’s just say HIS version of the story involves a rabid mountain bear out from hibernation and a damsel in distress)

 -Graham

Here’s a pic of some of my buddies riding the ski lift before they shred the mountain:

 

A Comparative Look at Cairo and Bates

On December 10th, I caught a last minute plane ride from Egypt to Jordan. I took a bus to Petra, saw one of the New Seven Wonders of the World, and took a ferry back across the Red Sea. There I caught a bus from the Egyptian Sinai through the desert and back to Cairo. In Cairo I took my finals, wrote a paper, and with a group a friends hired a private taxi to the Israeli boarder and headed to Jerusalem. When I finally made it back home to Kentucky it was Christmas day and classes started up at Bates in two weeks.

By December I was tired of the desert, missed my friends at Bates, and was dying to get into my advisor’s office and tell him about my new views on Islam. But coming back has been wilder than expected. I’ve been back at Bates for two weeks now and when I look out across the snowy quad in my big winter jacket, I find myself thinking that Bates doesn’t feel too far from the Middle East after all. The chaos of the Commons dining hall at dinner time is a lot like the bazaars of Cairo, except instead of everyone trying to be your best friend, everyone is my best friend. In Cairo, people throw fireworks into crowded streets for fun. At Bates I have to watch my back and dodge snowballs left and right. In the Middle East, all the old men waste away their days at tea and sheesha shops. At Bates, my friends waste away their weeknights at the Ronj (a student run coffee shop on campus) where they drink hot chocolate, chai, and weird flavors of tea. Conversations are the same too; everyone wants to know if we are going to bomb Iran or if Britney will ever get her kids back.

I’m excited to be back, but I miss the Arab world. Luckily, I have a friend here who is from Palestine and we have a date to make some falafel.

 

BATES COLLEGE, PREPARE TO MEET THE MIDDLE EAST!

-Graham

 

Here’s a pic of me (far right), a buddy from Bates who came to visit (center), and the other Batesie who was studying abroad with me in Egypt (left). We spent one weekend camping in the desert, here’s us at sunset:

Hello world!

Welcome to WordPress.com. This is your first post. Edit or delete it and start blogging!