 "Photo: Photo by Josh O'Bright")
On Saturday, 14 Main Street bars participated in the fall Pub Crawl.
The event was put together by UW College Life, which is not affiliated with UW-Oshkosh. Satori Imports sold shirts that listed the 14 participating bars in a way that they could be checked off as people went to the bar.
The official event started at 5 p.m., but both participants and nonparticipants were there long before that.
If participants went alone, they had to complete a task involving taking photos of different activities as part of a game.
For individuals, there were 10 tasks, some of which were a make-out picture, a picture with a police officer, a picture with a bar owner and a picture where the participant is drinking upside-down.
For teams, there were only five tasks, also involving pictures. These tasks included a team picture, a pyramid picture, a picture of a girl’s cleavage, a picture of a guy’s butt cleavage and a picture with the team in the cage at O’Brians.
For this Pub Crawl, Satori Imports sold around 800 shirts for $10 each, which is the largest number yet.
It was very busy according to Nathan Poeppel, a junior. Poeppel wasn’t a participant in the Pub Crawl, but was at the Main Street bars for a friend’s birthday.
When asked if he’d be interested in participating in future Pub Crawls he said, “I think it would be fun. I would try and get a group of friends together for it.”
Katlin Reyniers, a senior who did participate, said this was the most fun she’s had at a group activity in Oshkosh and that she was surprised by how much kissing there was because of the make-out photo task. She said that she got a group of friends together to go with, and she’s glad she did.
“Completing the tasks made it a mission,” she said.
Although a lot of participants and nonparticipants got a lot of fun and enjoyment out of the event, not everyone feels the same way.
“The Pub Crawl scares me,” Rob Clancy, a graduate student, said. “Too many people that can’t hold their liquor.”
Vice Chancellor for Student Affairs Petra Roter also disapproved of the event. She said that the University doesn’t sponsor or condone events like this.
“These events are high-risk drinking,” Roter said. She wanted to make it clear that UW-Oshkosh is not affiliated with the Pub Crawl, and that the responsibility is on the tavern owners.
“We are not creating that environment,” Roter said.
In the 2007 fall Pub Crawl, when the event was put on by a group called the Goat Pack, the bars offered to donate money to the school to help restore the University’s Multicultural Education Center. The school declined the money and said, “The University will not accept funds raised in this manner.”
Other organizations that were to receive money from the Pub Crawl were also encouraged to consider, “1) the message to its constituencies by accepting money raised during an event that promotes and encourages alcohol abuse and misuse; 2) the inference that the organization might also support activities that raise the likelihood of drunk driving, sexual assault, unsafe sex, personal injury or property damage; and 3) the question of who is going to pay for the cost of extra police and security during the event.”
Though the University does not condone pub crawls, students seem to enjoy them and the events will probably go on for some time to come.
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