Tag Archives: Raisin Weekend

Where In The World Has Maxx Been?

Hey everyone! Apologies for the hiatus, but last week led up to St. Andrews’ annual Raisin Weekend quickly followed by the this weeks Independent Learning Week, in which we, the students, have no class to attend and independently learn. Hypothetically. A lot of people take the week to go travelling, but I decided to stay put – I’ve already traveled this far! – and actually study. Russian is hard. So are German and Psychology, but they’re all really fun to learn.  So that’s been me this past week.

Now, onto the fun stuff!

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Dead Fish I Tripped Over In The Street, St. Andrews, Scotland. Taken by Maxx Borges, 16 October 2016

I’ll recap my Raisin Weekend as best I can without taking up 2,000 words of space and having a gazillion photographs. It started officially on Sunday in which our academic moms would invite us over in the morning to play some fun games and go on scavenger hunts. If you had an academic dad, well, let’s just say he did the same but at night. I was dad-less (thank heaven). I had friends who had to take ‘baths’ in the North Sea which is pretty much freezing at this time of year, all with their academic dads, but it was all in good fun.

Me, Spray Painted, St. Andrews, Scotland. Taken by Maxx Borges, 16 October 2016

My academic mom, a fourth year who adopted me and two other Americans, as well as a girl from Wales, was super sweet about it. We all met up in the morning and started to play trivia games and then little challenges. In the first challenge, I had to make a sundae on a cone held by my partner’s mouth, only I had to be fully standing while she was lying on the floor. Things got messy – but we won, so it was worth it in the end. Then again, I wasn’t the one who got whipped cream in their eyes. The next challenge was blindfolded baking. I was blindfolded and had to be the arms of my partner as we cracked eggs, measured flour, and stirred in butter to our poorly made cake for our academic mother. I did, however, manage to crack several eggs blindfolded into the pan without getting any eggshell into it, so that was a pretty amazing feat for me. The last challenge was to grab, without the use of our hands, gummy worms out of flour and rescue them (or eat them) onto a separate plate. That may have been my favorite as I spent all of my time eating the gummies. Suffice it to say, I did not win that challenge, but I did get to eat gummies, so maybe I really did win after all.

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Me and my Academic Mother, Beth after the Flour & Gummies Challenge, St. Andrews, Scotland. Taken by Maxx Borges 16 October 2016

The next part of our day was to go on a scavenger hunt of odd things around town, however, it started to rain right as we went and halfway through the challenge, we all decided that our academic mother would be more impressed with us buying a bunch of chips (fries) for us all to share than completing the scavenger hunt. We were correct and came back right on time to show her photos of the silly things we did do, like finding the ugliest sweater in H&M and trying it on, while we all sat around and ate chips. It was a really sweet afternoon and I got to go home by five and get a nap in before dinner, so it was a win/win situation for me.

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 Johnny (left) and Celia  (right) as Mad Hatter and Alice, St. Andrews, Scotland. Taken by Maxx Borges, 17 October 2016

Raisin Monday was up next and more fun than I could have anticipated. The infamous foam fight was going down that day. In the morning, me and my academic ‘siblings’ met up at our mother’s again and she dressed us in costumes. We were all Cards Against Humanity cards, with a black question card up front and a white answer card on our backs. Then, our mother duct taped extra shaving foam to our arms and legs and sent us out into the world to go battle the other students. Everyone was dressed up, some in Alice in Wonderland themes, others as a can of beans. Whatever their academic parents had found tickled their fancy, these people were dressed up as. It was amazing. What really got me was the actual foam fight. They basically had police patrolling the area with gates put up so the general public couldn’t get into the back of the quad where we were duking it out. Everyone was let loose in their quirky costumes and attacked each other with shaving cream until no one could see or hear and the place looked like a soapy battlefield. There was not enough hot water to go around that afternoon.

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After all of that, the relaxed week of sitting around and studying was honestly welcomed, at least by me. It gave me a time to regroup my thoughts, focus on my studies, and get ready for weeks 7-11, where one class ended and two more are getting picked up. Ahhhh, Cognition and Perception. This is going to be so much fun.

See you all next week and enjoy the photos!

(That’s me during the fight, by the way!)