Ep. 8: Winding Down

Notes from 6th-12th of March

And, by the time Week 9 at Purdue came to an end, the campus resembled the ghost town it once was when I arrived. The global checking-out that accompanies a mid-semester break is made very explicit when living in residence in the USA, and once the pre-break exams were out of the way on Tuesday and Wednesday, numbers fell off rapidly. The destinations of choice naturally, especially for a Midwest college still struggling to shed off the cold Winter weather, are the warmer climates of Florida - Fort Lauderdale being a particularly popular one outside of the usual choice of Miami. Having asked around a fair bit with friends of mine to see what they had planned, or even for those I didn't know so well, it gave a fairly strong insight into their personality/character to know where they were heading to with their week off.

As for me, plans with the two Italian exchange students to go out to the Southwest became concrete very rapidly. I must say, having done none of the organising outside of booking my plane ticket, it has been a very relaxing build-up to departure. Part of me was wondering whether it might be good to know a few more of the details surrounding accommodation, car rental and so on since I essentially bought a round trip ticket out to Las Vegas under the premonition that everything would be setup in place correctly. I guess we will find out next week!

The only highlight of the latter part of the week was the Big 10 Tournament taking place in Chicago. Since I was departing for Vegas on Monday night, it had crossed my mind to head down to the Windy City again and take in the games. The tournament is 5 straight days, basically an elimination-style affair involving every single Big 10 team (of which Purdue is one), so even the worst team has a shot at winning. Purdue had the No. 1 seed received a two-game (and therefore two-day) bye. The quarterfinal on Friday against Rutgers was a fairly tense affair, the Scarlet Knights having been the first team in the country to beat us this season at Mackey Arena back in January. The semifinal and final were more convincing displays however. Well, the final was convincing until Purdue gave up a 17 point lead in 6 minutes to only win out by 3 points. Nerve-wracking stuff, but it was nice to see Purdue hoist both the Big 10 Championship and the Big 10 Tournament Championship. Now all that is left in the season is the Big Dance AKA March Madness.

If you're not familiar with this tournament, in short it is objectively (in my subjective opinion) the best thing in sports. The top 64¹ teams in men's college basketball across the country play off sudden-death until one team emerges victorious. Why is it the best thing in sports? Well, the 64 teams are split into four regions, each region assigning a seed 1 through 16 to its teams. No. 1 plays No. 16. 2 plays 15 and so on. Since all the venues are neutral, since it is sudden death, and since the stakes are so, so high, upsets are aplenty. Purdue was announced as the fourth No. 1 seed, and will play their first match against one of the winners of the last four in games. Purdue has never won the national championship, and it has been many years since they even made the Final Four, so I am crossing my fingers, saying every prayer I can, that this is the year all that changes.

Lastly, it is worth noting that from Saturday midday, all the dining courts closed up shop until the recommencement of classes 9 days hence. For the kids in dormitories that are staying on campus for the week, which would be a significant minority, I have no idea how they survive. Well, I do, but it's pretty nasty. I mean the only options really available to them with the lack of a kitchen are 2-minute noodles, sandwiches, or buying food from some of the fast-food joints nearby like Chick-fil-a. It's a pretty grim prospect! As such, I actually went out for dinner on Sunday night to a ramen place in Chauncey (the main street/off-campus area near the PMU) with an Irish exchange. To my surprise, it was actually pretty decent, certainly comparable to the sort of stuff I would expect from such a place in Melbourne.

On The Nightlife in Lafayette

I was minding my business on Thursday night at the bachata class when a Colombian friend of mine, Manuela (pictured on the right, here), sidled up beside me with a pressing question. She is living in an off-campus apartment (Alight) and one of her roommates' boyfriend is starting his PhD in the middle of the year over in Australia of all places. And, as the coincidences on this trip continue to pile up, it is not just any place he is going to study in Australia, but at Monash University. My interest having been suitably piqued, I told her to poke him to get in touch with me in case he had any questions about life in Melbourne or the study itself. He studies maths and computer science as well, so I was eager to hear from him about which professor he was completing his research under. It was at this point that an offer from Manuela came to hang out with her roommates and the Monash-prospective on Saturday afternoon, an offer of course I did not hesitate to accept given as mentioned above the campus was fairly dead at this point in time.

After watching Purdue win their semi-final of the Big 10 tournament against Ohio State, I caught the bus out to Alight, no easy feat given that on the weekends the buses run so infrequently as to make walking a faster alternative to near any location within a 1 mile radius of the campus. Once I finally got there, I was greeted by a cooking frenzy. All of Manuela's roommates are Colombian, too, and they were preparing some specialties for an afternoon meal: coconut rice, guacamole and most importantly, patacones, which are a twice-fried savoury banana. I was rather apprehensive about whether I would like them given my disdain of regular bananas, but they were pretty delicious. I guess anything twice-fried is!

I chatted a fair bit with Andres about his move to Melbourne in the next few months. Thought Monash itself is rather well placed amongst other Australian universities when it comes to maths, that a Colombian should have selected it above all places seemed rather bizarre to say the least. The connection it turns out was that one of his home professors had brought on some colleagues of his to talk about their research, one of which happened to be Monash professor Ricardo Ruiz and from there Andres had struck up conversation with him about a possible PhD. At this point, Andres hadn't sorted out accommodation yet so we spoke mostly about potential suburbs I thought would be a good fit for him over the next few years. Most importantly, I've set up plans with him already to take him to an AFL game at the MCG when he gets there - safe to say that Hawthorn will be acquiring a new South American when he arrives 🟫🟨.

In yet another incredible coincidence, it was later revealed that he and his girlfriend Sara had met whilst abroad at Delaware University. I of course was quick to inform him of my parents' own tight relations to this quaint little state!

We then headed out to downtown Lafayette on the other side of the Wabash River to hit up Vault, a pool bar that abuts almost directly onto the main bus depot in town. On a Saturday night before Spring Break, the place was pretty quiet, mostly being populated by older crowds, dads with pot bellies that had been carefully cultivated over many evenings spent drinking at watering holes like this one. None of us were particularly proficient that night with the cue, but we played a few games and had an absolute blast, Manuela and I taking plenty of time to shoot some (what I think are) nice shots. With many of these, I took the opportunity to later practice editing them in Adobe Lightroom, mostly just giving the interior shots a slightly green/orange colour grade to add some further warmth to them and give them a vaguely "shot on film" quality. I'd definitely recommend scrolling all the way through the carousel below and checking out the weekly photo gallery (see the associated newsletter) because some of the shots I was very pleased with!

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Such a fun night and I am eagerly awaiting Andres and Sara's arrival in Clayton when I get back!

On Good Faith

Prior to bachata class on Thursday evening, I had earlier been wandering down to the university book store opposite to the PMU to take advantage of the final 3-point Thursday discount² for the season. I was however stopped in my journeying by a large stall set up in front of the PMU with a unusually large crowd gathered in front of it. Perhaps it was my quizzical glances, perhaps it was something else, but a few of the guys manning the store out front asked me if I had a few minutes to chat and naturally my curiosity got the better of me. They were part of a group called The Salt Company, a Christian college network of sorts with centres set up at a number of universities in the Midwest. At the start of the Fall semester in August, they were setting up what for them would be a very first - a brand new centre at Purdue with no prior establishment, and on this particular night they were putting on a preview service in the PMU to build up a bit of excitement for their arrival later in the year.

As has been mentioned above, I had very little to do at this point of the week, so I rocked up to the stated venue at 8 PM, not really knowing what to expect. What greeted me was a rather lovely evening, if only for the fact that I met a lot of interesting people with interesting stories to tell. Some of these people had driven from Iowa, Minnesota and Michigan, each of which is at least 8 hours of dull highway driving away, all to simply support the preview service, nothing more. Many were college students themselves that were planning on transferring or applying to complete their Master's at Purdue, again simply to be in the presence of the new centre and help to grow it. And for some, having graduated from college and started working, they were moving across the country to West Lafayette³ and volunteering what time they had outside of work to lend a hand. All of this, I must say, is extremely admirable, and symbolises a level of commitment to their faith that I have only really found in Australia amongst a small handful of people. As far as the service itself was concerned, I found it moving, not so much for the content of it but the intense, almost resonating, love and kindness that it emanated from those in attendance, which would have been somewhere nearing 150 I'd wager. Though I could sense a palpable disappointment in some when I happened to declare (mostly to avoid deceiving them) at some point in conversation that I did not share their same belief in God, the exceeding majority were thoroughly glad of anyone's participation, even a non-believer as myself.

One particular guy, Xander, who I met from Minnesota, is worth noting here. He fell into the category of ex-college student now working and moving to Lafayette, and was sticking around at Purdue for a day or two to explore living options and the general lifestyle here. With little to do on Friday afternoon, he was hanging out in the PMU and hit me up to see if I wanted to drop by and chat. For the third time in this piece, I of course accepted to fill up my own afternoon. What followed was a near 5-hour discussion⁴ on a broader variety of topics than you could shake a stick at. Many were well outside of either of our expertise, but we spoke in great depth about our own relationship to faith/religion, my own experiences with spirituality, meditation and my general lack of belief in a god, and above all else delineating the many areas where our worldviews overlapped in a non-trivial manner. Far from being a painful exercise⁵, it was as usual extremely enlightening - both Xander and Amanda had a great depth of knowledge of Christianity and communicated their views in a very effective fashion. Despite my fears, mostly emerging from the stereotype of a bible-thumping American, it was pleasing to find a great deal of mutual respect between both parties, and I have since stayed in the proceeding week or so I have stayed in touch to share any new findings or discoveries either of us might have had.

Footnotes