Eurotrash Invicta! The Brown Campus

By Nilanjan Banerjeen | Tuesday, November 17, 1998

RISD kids with horns. Dance music in Arabic. Name-dropping Long Islanders. Brutal dorks.

I went to Brown on Friday. It was my first time visiting Providence, and my first road-trip in a long time. I didn't know much about it, just that half my high school went there, and it was supposed to be pretty weird, the Berkeley of the Ivy League.

Senior Editor Ram Murali and I arrived there late one Friday afternoon. We parked the car on some random street and split off for dinner. As we made our way through the campus, we discussed how nice it was, and how we wished we had applied here. It's really nice, with courtyards, brick buildings, quads, and lots of monuments. It's one of the nicest campuses I've seen.

Then we hit Thayer Street, the Brown equivalent of our Main Street, and were taken aback. Something was very wrong. It looked like the worst parts of the East Village. It was dirty and dangerous-looking, and for a second, I thought it was Halloween. It wasn't; that was last week. So I knew something was wrong.

Everyone had Mohawks, facial piercings, and/or strange makeup. We went to a pizza place for dinner. The food was horrible. Then we looked to our left.

Four people were sitting there, sharing a pizza.

One was wrapped in clear plastic bags over a long dress.

The second had a toga.

The third had horns made out of aluminum foil.

The fourth had a bone protruding from her forehead.

Petrified, we spun our heads back to our own table. We looked at each other. We looked back at the other people. We then decided to go about our own business. Later investigation proved that these students were attending the Rhode Island School of Design's fall ball.

We left the restaurant and went to some café where some other Reviewers were going to meet us. We ended up sitting there for a long time because we were literally afraid to walk around.

As we walked in, I ended up looking at the comment board. I started laughing. The comments were eclectic, the manager's reponses even more so.

'I walked in here and this place was filthy and disgusting. I'm never coming back here. You need to have some respect for the place where you work/we eat. And this was on Parents' Weekend, too.' To which the management responded, 'Gee, we're sorry we disappointed you.'

'You guys really f*cked up my tuna melt. There was no cheese on it, the vegetables were rotten, and that skanky portabello stuff ruined the sandwich.' To this, the management responded, 'Our tuna melt is now drenched in cheese, sorry to have disappointed you. And those 'skanky' portobello mushrooms happen to be a staff favorite.'

I killed the rest of the time imagining skanky mushrooms on Parents' Weekend and the anguish those poor customers must have endured. Soon, we were met by the group and Ram Murali and I decided to find out what people did at Brown U. on the weekends. It was only 8:30, and we were on our own. We figured it would be at least three hours until anything began to happen, so we met another Reviewer, who was staying with a friend. While looking for him, we ran into his roommate. He had no idea where our friend was.

'So,' I said, 'is there anything going on here tonight?'

'I don't think so.'

He returned to his book.

'Well, are you going out, or what are your friends doing?'

He looked up. 'Well, I'm planning on staying in and studying, and most of my friends are the type of people who do the same thing.'

'OK.'

He was nice, kind of. At least he was straight up with us, and a little bit helpful. Our Review friend later told us that, when he was trying to find the dorm, he got cursed out by three different people, presumably locals.

While wandering around the dorms, we encountered a girl walking down the hall. I thought nothing of it until I saw her stop, turn ninety degrees, and enter a room. She was only walking in right angles.

I asked Ram. 'Did you see that?'

'What?'

'I think that girl was only walking in right angles. Do you think she's obsessive compulsive?'

He gave me a strange look, but it turned out there is a sorority whose pledges have to do that for the entire semester. They also all wear the same thing and aren't allowed to speak. Wandering around some more, we ran into Brown's version of Webster Avenue... kind of.

What we actually ran into was a quad of dorms with greek letters on some of the doors. The fraternity 'houses' seemed interconnected, and had Brown U. keycard locks on all the doors. I randomly introduced myself and asked one of the passersby whether or not there was anything going on that night.

He gave me an odd look. 'Nope.' Since we happened to be where most of the
fraternities at Brown were, I asked a few questions about Greek life at Brown.

Apparently the fraternities and sororities there are all college owned, and the students refer to them as 'dorms.' They are known to have big parties, but they charge a cover fee at the door. OK. There was not much else that my informer had to say about fraternities.

The street was teeming with nouveau-punks, sparkly-makeup clad high schoolers and eurotrash. We were surrounded by extremely greased-out hairdos, tight black shirts, tight black jeans, and and 20-year olds driving German cars...dangerously. Someone in our group even watched a 20-something euro-cadet drive head-on into a patrol car. We walked past a ritzy little joint which advertised itself as a grill with an 'E'. We declined; the extra 'E' in 'Grille' usually adds a substantial markup to one's check.

We walked into a self-proclaimed 'Café Tapas.' I thought I was in New York City. There were several older men, probably in their 40s or 50s, and they were backed up by a crowd of Euroyouth. Paying worship to these people was a crowd of very young, blonde, black-clad, extremely thin, artificially stimulated women. They were transfixed by these foreign gentlemen, and hung on their every word, waiting for the next round to be ordered. I didn't want anything to do with anyone.

Soon, I spotted a couple who appeared to come from the same fiscal universe as we do. Turns out Jen and Keith were students at Providence College, just down the hill. They were friendly and open, and explained that they knew very little about Brown, and even less about Brown students or their social lives.

They had no idea why so many rich Europeans would congregate in Providence, a town about as likeable as Manchester or Buffalo. They soon left, leaving a great first impression of Providence College.

After a while, we were asked to leave our table. Apparently the tables get broken down and the place became one huge dance floor. It was more crowded than most DJ parties at Dartmouth.

Then it dawned on me: the music was in Arabic. Huh? Having lived in Kuwait for 2 years, I know what Arabic dance music is, and how it is revered in that part of the world. The music then reverted back to Greek, then French, and for all I know perhaps Latin, but it certainly never made it to any language I can speak. However the people around me persisted to speak a mix of French or Arabic. At least I didn't need to be concerned with what they were saying. In my plaid shirt, khakis, Timberlands and Field Tester hat, I started to feel like an alien from another planet. Where was I?

After a while, I finally ran into some Brown students. They seemed to be a lot like Dartmouth students, but they dressed a little more like they were from New York, and they appeared to be impressed by our going to Dartmouth. They said that many of the Euroyouth in attendance were Brown students whose parents had bankrolled their way in. They also admitted complete cluelessness as to why middle-aged European men would hang out at an Arabic dance club in Providence, RI. Seeing how sketched we were (more particularly, how disturbed I was), they led us to a dorm party. The street was much less crowded, I guess the high-schoolers had to go to bed.

We finally went back to the dorm in which we were staying, only to find that we had to sleep in a lounge. Are you sure? Yes, apparently it's a common practice at Brown, where there are real issues of Safety and Security which bother the campus, and a student crashing on a couch will not cause an international incident.

As I fell asleep, I contemplated what life would be like here. Yes, it could be fun. Yes, there are a lot of very interesting, sociable, and intelligent people there. My revelation came to me as I drifted off, if the people who went to Dartmouth went to Brown, we would all have a blast. And the people at Brown who know how to have a good time do that, and they love it — for the minority that rages against the dying of the proverbial light, there is still the knowledge that they have a lot of fun, a pretty campus, and a big bronze bear.

Eurotrash Invicta! The Brown Campus

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