Parents Weekend

Statistically speaking, a significant portion of Providence’s population is students. Skewed as it may sound, there are too many colleges which call Providence home, and most colleges have students who call college as opposed to Providence their “home away from home”. Don’t get me wrong, Providence is a brilliant city, well at least the east side of Providence is brilliant, it’s just that it’s too expensive as a city, and you need a car to go to “cheaper” stores, umm well you could use RIPTA busses, but that would be more of an adventure than a trip to the nearest Target/Staples/Walmart/beach/... Actually I am not sure there is a Walmart around, but well that should suffice. Providence however does have some form of a nascent tourism industry, there’s WaterFire through the summer (the last one’s tonight ), then there’s move-in day at Brown and RISD when you have horde’s of parents, and there’s parents weekend/homecoming/stomp Cornell’s football team day/celebrate Red Sox victory day/... Currently there are probably as many parents and siblings, as students at Brown, and it’s somewhat strange. For one you get to see parents in the dining halls, why would you take your parents to the dining halls, when you get to eat the same food every day. Parents, Thayer and restaurants (cheap or otherwise) go together, but well I guess it’s a good way to spend the two guest credits they give us at the beginning of each term (I guess, could be year though).

I kind-of hated the first two days of move-in, because everything was parent centric, and it was kind of hard to keep yourself entertained. Walk anywhere near Faunce Arch and you were sure to be marauded by a huge group of parents wanting to know weird stuff about you and about Brown, it wasn’t too much fun. Parent’s weekend surprisingly is fun, for one people have settled in (you’d hope), and they have friends and social networks, parents stay within those “undeclared” but stringent social groups, and you get to meet only a few people’s parents, and that’s generally a good thing. Besides most people, with or without parents, always end up going to restaurants, and that in general is a good thing. Good food, or bad food, it’s different from the food, the V-Dub or the Ratty serve, umm OK the V-Dub and the Ratty vary their menu every meal, but somehow food at the V-Dub and the Ratty has sense of continuity to it, it’s almost as if no matter what you eat at either of these places, it’s somehow related to whatever you ate earlier.

So yes someone did take me out for dinner Friday night, amazingly enough to an Indian place on Thayer. It is Indian to the extent that most of the staff is Indian or at least South Asian, the paintings and statues all have Ganesh in them, and the serving dishes are similar to the ones you would encounter at some of the Government run restaurants inside jungles. The food however is not Indian, well it’s not American either, so it’s some sort of a fusion thing, but it’s not Indian food. For instance this friend of mine from Virginia was insistent that we all have samosas (amazing, the term ‘samosa’ is included in the OS X spell checker’s word list), because she had had them before (somewhere else, back in Virginia) and they tasted really nice. I would say they looked like samosas (though no samosa I have ever had in Delhi has been folded quite the same way, most people line up the crease or whatever at the center of the samosa, not the edge, well this is kindda hard to explain) and they umm didn’t really taste nice. It was as if someone had taken plain mashed potatoes, put them in a samosas shell, and tried to pass that off as a “authentic” samosa. I could go on to give an entire list of what made that food unauthentic, but it suffices to say, it was not bad food, however it wasn’t Indian food either (as my friend’s mother pointed out, it wasn’t American food either, so I guess we could call it fusion). It was a welcome change from the Ratty and the V-Dub however, so yeah for that ......

Being an international has its obvious advantages at time, and well being “stolen” for dinner is usually fun. One of my other friends wanted me to have dinner with his parents, and the fact that someone else had “stolen” me for the night led to a trip to Sekonk on Saturday morning. Sekonk is the closest I have been to the store lined cities in Maryland, all it has are huge stores, which is usually a good thing, though I couldn’t really come up with too many things I’d want from Target, Best Buy, Circuit City or Staples, and finally ended up going into Staples, and finally buying myself a pair of scissors (yay I can finally snipe through stuff without resorting to borrowing scissors from my roommate/other people in the hall/other people in the vicinity), binders, and ball pen refills, fun…

When someone with a name as interesting as Artemis invites you to a reception, you should generally go, attend, you may find interesting people. The fact that the invitation was on an embossed Brown University invite, with an enclosed RSVP card, was obviously meant for “both” parents and students (logically parent:student ratios should be around 2:1, but experience dictates it’s actually closer to 5:1), had deterred me from actually going. Good thing I met a few friends who insisted that I should, it really was quite nice, and though I had none of the wine nor the food, the place in general was interesting, and really pretty, with 32 flags (countries represented in the class of ‘08) strewn all around, lots of flags always look pretty… Artemis Jukawoski, the Chancellor Emeritus, didn’t give a long speech, he was a poised speaker, and he spoke for about 3 minutes, you have to love speakers like him. I got to meet and talk to my Math 35 TA, got a few questions clarified, finally met Sergei Kruschev (note Sergei, not Nikita, Nikita is long dead), discovered that Sergei Kruschev was originally a physicist, though now he confines himself to teaching Russian history through and after the cold war. A few days ago, one of my friends mentioned how her geology professor (he’s a really popular professor, and he spends a lot of his time helping NASA work on their planetary exploration missions) had returned from Russia, the night before, and how he was regaling them with stories about drinking vodka with old retired cosmonauts, being accosted by pro-communist demonstrators in Red Square and kalashnikov’s. THere were pre-froshs and their parents attending that particular class, and the parents didn’t exactly like this particular class, and my friend was pretty sure that they were not going to spend 40k and send their kids to Brown. Back then I had randomly commented on how a professor’s supposed to profess, and anything anyone tells you is knowledge. Turns out I wasn’t all that off, here you have a physicist, who spent some time teaching physics in the past, regaling people with his story, and doing it well enough to be a professor in International Relations. I wish more people appreciated the fact that everything you learnt was knowledge, knowledge probably applicable at a later date.

Oh and the Red Sox made it to the World Series, that’s been a big thing around here, though I haven’t heard much since their first World Series victory, probably because it isn’t against the Yankees, and because most people haven’t woken up yet… Oh well Red Sox victories equal more fun in my classics class, go Sox….

Ze Panda