Days 20 & 21 - Wake Forest

We arrived in Winston Salem, North Carolina after two flights from Miami. The frequency of flying on this tour has led me to develop excellent sleeping on plane skills (I'm rarely awake for take off), but also an increasing level of Carbon footprint guilt... This was especially acute on this journey, where the second of our two flights between Charlotte and Greesboro took about 12 minutes, covering a distance that takes just over an hour in the car...The flight was one of many that day and full, making America's very high Carbon output unsurprising.

After putting my environmental guilt aside, we were met at the airport by two of Wake Forest's graduates who took us to us to our hotel. We've been really lucky have always stayed in great places thus far, but our North Carolina abode is ridiculously luxurious; it looks just like an English country estate and is super nice. We particularly enjoyed doing our debate prep in the 'hospitality room', complete with a freezer full of ice cream.

After settling into our new and plush surroundings, we headed to dinner with some more of the Wake Forest guys. Wake Forest is one of the top Universities in the US for policy debating, and has a strong team of grads who coach and help out with the programme. Anthony, one of the grads who help out with the programme, was coordinating the debate and also took great care of us. After an excellent dinner, we heared to a bar in Winston Salem, the small town in which Wake Forest is situated (we also saw an Obama doppelganger! My theory was that it was him in semi-disguise, chilling out in North Carolina...others disagreed). We then moved on to what we would now call a 'getty' (Miami lingo for 'get together'; we're trying to spread it across America). We enjoyed some great hospitality and an excellent welcome from everyone. Excitingly, there was a fire pit in the garden, which was particularly educational for Lewis, whose London-centric world has not incorporated the concept of fire before. A great first night in NC!

Our second day in North Carolina was a welcomingly relaxed one. We spent the morning, after an excellent hotel breakfast, sleeping, blogging and debate prepping. Having some time out in such nice surroundings was good, and allowed us to catch up a bit. We headed to lunch with Anthony and Jarrod, who is the Director of Debate at Wake Forest, and then returned to the hotel for more debate prep/napping/free ice cream. The evening saw our public debate, on "The House should prohibit women from wearing the burqa and the niqab in public". We were prop, and it was a tough side, but an excellent debate. Due to the primacy of Policy debate at Wake Forest, the debate incorporated 3 minutes of cross-examination between speeches, which we really liked as part of the debate. Our opponents, both grad students and past Policy debate champions, were very good, and were able to adapt well to what for them was a new format of debating. After the debate, we headed to a great restaurant in Winston Salem with the debaters and some of the members of the department; we had some very exciting discussions about how great the Worlds format is, and hopefully we did enough to encourage them to continue it in some way... After dinner we continued our journey towards greater cultural understanding, with Beer Pong at the house of some of the grad students in the department. We had a great night, and Lewis almost managed to go undefeated (though largely due to having a good partner...). We're so lucky to continue to have such excellent hopsitality shown to us! The night ended with the continuation of Lewis's education, this time with the discovery of stars in the sky without light pollution. Good times!