Vice Provosts Gone Wild
Word from the mother land
This week a delegation of about 40 representatives from College Station came for the 2004 Academic Convocation. It’s a pretty interesting group of people, they include several vice provosts, deans, professors and students. There is a lot of meetings, social events and idea sharing. So overall it’s a pretty cool thing to see the interaction between the two cultures.
One of the social events was a dinner on a Dhow (two story traditional fishing boat) while it cruised around the bay. The invitation for this stated that it would go from 5:30 to 7:30 and I had assumed we would be meeting with the students. When we got on the boat we learned it was a 4 hour dinner. All I could think of was great another night gone. It wasn’t too bad Kara and I met some people we didn’t know and talked about random things. We were all on the top level of the boat for this part. We then went down to the first floor for our dinner which was the usual Arabic dish. There were lots of meat and bread with a little bit of steamed vegetables.
Then it happened
I’m not going to judge others but personally I disagree with the concept of exotic dancers, strippers or whatever you call them on about 10 different levels. So as I was eating dinner with my wife, a number of other couples and some pretty important people in the TAMU system that I thought we were trying to make a good impression on when we got a surprise. The music was cranked up and out popped a belly dancer that looked like she was one step above a stripper. Not only was she three quarters naked but she was eliciting some interaction from the crowd.
I was told that this was normal and it’s an art. Well I can appreciate going to a ballet and watching that type of dancing or Hawaiian hula girls and guys doing their traditional dance. This was definitely not either. The whole time I was just thinking who thought this was a good idea with this company and maybe next time they could indicate that there will be adult entertainment on the invitation. I was definitely not the only one who was embarrassed but of course the single guys messed with me for not looking. So fun times, I’ll try to post some pictures that the nights photographer took but this is a PG website so there might not be that many.
This week a delegation of about 40 representatives from College Station came for the 2004 Academic Convocation. It’s a pretty interesting group of people, they include several vice provosts, deans, professors and students. There is a lot of meetings, social events and idea sharing. So overall it’s a pretty cool thing to see the interaction between the two cultures.
One of the social events was a dinner on a Dhow (two story traditional fishing boat) while it cruised around the bay. The invitation for this stated that it would go from 5:30 to 7:30 and I had assumed we would be meeting with the students. When we got on the boat we learned it was a 4 hour dinner. All I could think of was great another night gone. It wasn’t too bad Kara and I met some people we didn’t know and talked about random things. We were all on the top level of the boat for this part. We then went down to the first floor for our dinner which was the usual Arabic dish. There were lots of meat and bread with a little bit of steamed vegetables.
Then it happened
I’m not going to judge others but personally I disagree with the concept of exotic dancers, strippers or whatever you call them on about 10 different levels. So as I was eating dinner with my wife, a number of other couples and some pretty important people in the TAMU system that I thought we were trying to make a good impression on when we got a surprise. The music was cranked up and out popped a belly dancer that looked like she was one step above a stripper. Not only was she three quarters naked but she was eliciting some interaction from the crowd.
I was told that this was normal and it’s an art. Well I can appreciate going to a ballet and watching that type of dancing or Hawaiian hula girls and guys doing their traditional dance. This was definitely not either. The whole time I was just thinking who thought this was a good idea with this company and maybe next time they could indicate that there will be adult entertainment on the invitation. I was definitely not the only one who was embarrassed but of course the single guys messed with me for not looking. So fun times, I’ll try to post some pictures that the nights photographer took but this is a PG website so there might not be that many.
posted by Russell at
9:23 AM
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