ESU United States Tour 2003 – Tom Hay In the Autumn of 2003, Tom Hay, a recent Oxford graduate, and Tom Hamilton, who had just submitted his PhD Thesis at Durham, set out on a two month tour of the United States. During their ten-week trip they would participate in 45 debates, speaking for roughly seven and a half hours in front of around 0.001% of the US population. They would visit 30 Universities over 73 days and eat around 150 meals, many of them on one of their 30 flights. They would fly into Chicago O’Hare eight times. They would fire 40 rounds of ammunition from three different guns.
Hofstra University New York – Sep 11-13 We were met in New York by Chuck Fleischman of Hofstra University. To help us acclimatise, we weren’t asked to do any debating, and were given the very welcome opportunity to go into New York for the day to do some sightseeing. Ground Zero was a humbling site, especially the day after the second anniversary of 9/11. Thankfully, the emotional power of the scene wasn’t enough to get us to buy any of the slightly dubious souvenirs that were plentifully available. We packed in as many tourist sights as we could, hitting Central Park, the Empire State building, Coney Island, Wall Street, Time Square, and the very impressive Guggenheim. By the end of the day I felt, rather naively, that I had ‘done’ New York. In our shared Taxi on the way home, the driver almost got into a fight with one of the passengers who had