This week’s extra-curricular activities started last weekend when I was invited to Kristen my house-mate’s parents’ house for a delicious lunch. Her mum and dad were delightful and are already plotting their trip to Scotland to visit! Kristen’s mum, Melanie also joined us for a shopping trip to buy some bedside cabinets for my room and a few other bits and pieces.
On Tuesday I went to a talk by Miss North Carolina. My reaction on seeing the advert for this event was that I don’t normally have anything to do with beauty pageants, but when would I get the opportunity to go to something like this? So I went along to what turned into a fascinating evening. Alexandra Badgett is Miss North Carolina 2019 – an intelligent graduate of the University of South Carolina. She is also a black African American, which puts her in the minority when it comes to winners of beauty pageants – although the statistics are improving. One of the key things I learned from the evening is the differences between Miss America (which is the competition that Alexandra is part of) and Miss USA. So for Miss USA, you pay to enter, you do swimsuit competitions and you win cash, and you get to compete in Miss Universe. Miss America in contrast, you don’t pay to enter, you have to do a talent competition, there are strictly no swimsuits, the emphasis is on academic work and community service and if you win, you win scholarship money – that is money you can use to pay off student debt or to enrol in graduate school. I have to say Alexandra blew away many of my pre-conceptions.
Another highlight of the week was experiencing the US version of Halloween. I think we stumbled upon the epicentre of Halloween by going to a party at Woody Pelton’s house. He lives in a great area of Burlington where there are lots of old houses with porches. Every year apparently he invites the international scholars, students and staff of the Global Education Center to
come around for drinks and food – in exchange for sharing the duty of handing out sweets and chocolate to the children who come trick or treating. This was Halloween on an epic scale, there were literally hundreds of kids in costumes, at times queuing to come up the path to the front porch! Apparently parents who live out of town also bring their kids to this area because every house takes part. So we gave out
approximately 1000+ sweets… that’s a lot of sugar! There were some amazing costumes. My favourite outfit of the evening was the girl dressed as Mac n Cheese with a white pot around her middle and then lots of cardboard toilet roll holders painted yellow for the macaroni – sadly she was away before I managed to take her photo! But there are a few other pictures here to capture the scenes.
Early in the evening Elon University sent out messages to say we were on tornado watch – that is one down the scale of seriousness from a tornado warning. Apparently with a warning, a tornado is heading your way, whereas with tornado watch, you have all the right elements that mean you could have a tornado. So as the evening progressed, it was only the very hardy kids that remained out as we were battered by torrential rain, tropical storm winds, and spectacular thunder and lightning.
Love reading what you are up to. So glad you are having a ball. Hope work is going well too….
Love the mac and cheese costume idea…! I also had no idea about Miss America, so thanks for the education 🙂