Starvation Gulch

I've had a great weekend. Well, it basically started on Thursday. Had a good class in the evening, went to the pub with my classmates. It's just that... I'm still happy. Right now the dorm smells like Indian food. Musa, my roommate, flips between english and her native, Zambian language with ease while speaking to one of her friends on skype. My other suite mate, Xuanyu, is speaking Chinese with her boyfriend. There is laughter, easy exchanges. The way people should communicate. Friday there was a poetry reading that I went to with some other MFA's and we went, again, to the pub afterward. It was one of the guy's birthdays, Eric. He grew up bilingual, and so when Kendell, another MFA, showed up with her Cameroonian husband, Djafar, they spoke french with everyone. Those of us who had basic knowledge listened more than we spoke, but I really like conversations like that, and different languages are really beautiful. The sound structures, the difference in consonant repetition and vowel sound, the stress of the the words. I want to learn all of them.

Eric's birthday was really fun, and because it seems I know someone who was born every weekend, there was another party last night, which coincided with one of the biggest events on campus: Starvation Gulch.

We set fire to everything.

This is from a few hundred feet away, on top of a hill as we walked down. Getting closer, we could feel the heat on our faces. It was so cold that later in the evening it snowed, but everyone was taking off their jackets and walking around in t-shirts and shorts. There was a rave in the middle of the crowd, people running around in polar bear suits, flashing glow sticks, illegal alcohol in an unimaginable number of bottles, being passed between everyone. We went to the birthday party before the fires, and I had a drink that put the gin back in ginger ale. While we were at the fire there was more gin, some really heady ale being drank from a water bottle (which wasn't helping the head) and some other flask (vodka, maybe?) being passed around the group of people celebrating Toby's birthday. The whole party sang happy birthday to him, he was given a Guy Fawkes mask, lifted up on top of the crowd, and carried around like a king. Looked like a damn good birthday. We went back to a kitchen rave, held in a small, small kitchen. Not sure why we chose the kitchen as the go-to spot, but decision making is always... hampered, at best, in those kinds of crowds. I met quite a few new people, and remember only one name. Re-met a few people from the fiasco party of two weeks ago and they all had a good laugh at some of my more interesting activities. Needless to say, this weekend was not a repeat of the previous. Which was great.

Tonight topped the weekend well, with hot cocoa and alcohol infused, chocolate flavored whipped cream, and a midnight jaunt in 20 degree (F) weather to hunt down the northern lights. Looked a little like amazing: