2004 ESU Tour of America Diary New York City (Sept. 12-13) We had one night in New York, as it was merely a lay over. Matt a local debate coach entertained us. We went down to the village, got drunk in a small bar and decided that if Bush lost the election he would mount a coup attempt. We then wandered through some of the historic streets of New York. The next morning, before rushing to the plane, we had a chance to waste some money in the Empire State building and see the true extent of Manhattan. It has to be seen to be believed!
Wabash University, Crawfordsville, Indiana (Sept. 13-15) Our first stop, along with tradition we were told, was Wabash, a small liberal arts college (not dissimilar from a large private school in England only for University level students). The campus was incredibly beautiful, situated in one corner of a small town an hour north of Indianapolis in the wide, well farmed fields of the Hoosiers state. What made Wabash particularly stand out, besides it being our first stop, was the fact that Wabash is one of the last single sex schools in the country, sadly for us it was a boys school. The Tour started with a bit of a blip as we failed to find our lift from Indianapolis Airport for an hour and thought we had been abandoned. We were already quite nervous as we did not know what to expect a stop to be like, but the friendliness of the Little Giants (as their School Mascot is known) put as at ease and was a good introduction to the very warm sense of hospitality that was such constant throughout our trip. When we arrived we were given our first motion over a Mexican meal. It was “This House Would Negotiate with Terrorists�. We were told that Wabash did not have a large debate team at the moment so we would be facing some novices. Nonetheless we were nervous, I had not debated for some time, never with Rob, and I was worried about not having a style an American Audience would appreciate. My final concern was bolstered by the severe questioning we received from the audience after our speeches. But to my surprise we won the audience vote. It was nice to start with a win, especially one that had allowed us to get away with saying that Al Quaeda might have a point! The rest of our time in Wabash was spent meeting many very nice students and lecturers from the College and ticking off the first two items on our American scavenger hunt list; namely seeing guns for sale in Wall-Mart and getting drunk in a fraternity, both of which turned out to be more like the movies teach us than we could believe.
Rio Hondo College, Whittier, California (Sept. 15-18) We could not find our next host at the airport to begin with again and worried that this was some curse of ours until Gil Puga popped up. Gil was a lovely, warm, very energetic Latino debate coach from Rio Hondo College, a large community college with a mainly Latino working class studentship. One of the nicest things about the tour was the constant juxtaposition of different types of schools we visited. Most of the next couple of days were spent racing around the huge arching free ways, that cut across Southern California, linking up the many sprawling cities, which now all 1