Debate 20: Portland State Univeristy, OR.

We drove north to Portland on Tuesday lunchtime, where we met Chris Richter who is the debate coach at Portland State. PSU is an urban university with a campus that occupies a corner of downtown Portland – it has around 25,000 students many of which are part time or older students. The debate team does exclusively British Parliamentary style debate and travels regularly to Canada and around the Northwest to compete in competitions – the team had just returned from Hawaii.

On the first afternoon we visited a waterfall and had some excellent sushi for lunch. The sushi made a nice change form the meat meat meat diet of Texas. After being checked into our hotel room we were given a free afternoon in Portland. It was fantastic to be in a city again were you could walk around and people in trams, buses and on foot seemed to out-number those in cars. We took the opportunity to visit Powells which is the worlds largest bookstore and has over five floors. Alex was able to buy several books about Gladstone for his dissertation that are not available in Britain. We then visited the Nike Store and the Apple store to take advantage of the 0% sales tax. We both came away with new Ipods – plus Alex now has shoes which talk to his Ipod in order to provide a synergy of music/running/motivating/statistic generating exercise.

The evening’s debate was ‘This house believes that media consolation harms democracy’. It was a BP debate with four teams and turned out to be very funny. After the debate we went drinking with the team, one of who was celebrating her 21st birthday. We visited a number of cool bars, including one in an underground tunnel and another on the 30th floor of a very swanky office building with panoramic views over Portland. The next morning (after breakfast at Starbucks) we took the tram to the Pearl District and both got our haircut, which in Alex’s case was slightly over due! That afternoon we took part in a radio debate about the British monarchy and a brief interview about our tour.

Click here to listen!

We then headed to a nearby restaurant where we sampled some fabulous Pacific seafood with a few glasses of the Oregon wine that we had learned to love. As it was Halloween (a MAJOR holiday in the USA) we donned some impromptu costumed – Alex was a Scottish Lobster, while Alistair pulled off a convincing James Bond – and headed to the debate team’s Halloween Party. A very enjoyable evening ensued and we sipped beer, listened to the live band and played the cult children’s game ‘Apples to Apples’ with a variety of zombies and one very convincing Twiggy…

Our post-modern interpretation of Halloween...