Worcester - the city of _______

Howdy folks. I've been in Worcester for about 3 weeks now, and it sure has been an interesting experience. I began my adventure with an apartment that was nowhere near ready to sustain life, so my landlord let me and my apart-mate Dan squat in another apartment that actually had electricity. The first night it was just my sleeping bag, which really sucked. After that I had a mattress on the floor. That was slightly better. I have a few pics of my little squat pad below.





I lived there for about a week, smoked a lot, read a lot (check out the unbearable lightness of being, an amazing book I finished here), threw an little party with some Marshfield friends, and all was good. Then on a Friday, the day electricity was finally available in our actual apartment, I moved in. I had tons of pictures from my cell (my digi cam is broken) of my room and the whole place, the parties I've been to since here, the volunteer work I've done, ect, but my phone got stolen. I will get to that later. I will try to take some pics of the place with my mac cam later and throw them up in case anyone is interested. The first night there we threw an epic party with Scott and friends coming up. The next night we also threw a party and witnessed some crazy shit. Me and some of my Marshfield friends were about to leave to visit another apartment when after stepping outside my place we witnessed 20-30 teens running down the street. They were yelling, throwing chairs at random cars in the road causing near accidents, and most had bats. They then turned off the main street onto my actual road, at which point we all retreated back into my room and watched from the window. What we witnessed was the two cars directly across from mine being smashed apart by bats and tires slit with knifes. These cars got FUCKED UP. It was one of the craziest things I had ever witnessed. Luckily, my car stood untouched, an innocent bystander to what was likely a gang related attack. The day after this, there was a shooting a clearly heard a street down from me, and the road was blocked off by the cops for the rest of the night.

Since that first week, I haven't witnessed anything quite as crazy as that, but things have been interesting nonetheless. I got pretty much blackout drunk at a party we threw that somehow ended in the brilliant idea of "strip beirut." I'll leave the rest of that night up to your imagination. Other than that, I've been doing volunteer work for two sects of mostly Clark student environmental group, Summer of Solutions. These are "Green Jobs", which is working to educate the Worcester public about green jobs, environmental and social justice, how this can help our economy, etc. The other is "Urban Gardening," which is really cool. I helped to turn a crappy little plot of land into a really nice looking garden, and most of the gardens we are creating and maintaining are open to the worcester public, so it's basically free organic food.

...so right now I'm sitting on a bench on the Clark campus and it's starting to rain, so I can't finish this update right now. Stay tuned for part 2, and some music!