Bwog doesn’t have the cash to “pimp your room,” and we certainly don’t want to raid it and then date you. So we bring you the semi-weekly feature, the “Cribs-esque” Room Hopping, continuing with…

It may be a brownstone on 114th street, but don’t walk into the sorority EAT (Sigma Delta Tau) expecting Animal-House-caliber mayhem. Don’t expect to hear the high pitched cooing of girls in pajamas having pillow fights.
And certainly don’t expect to smell that effluvia of sweat, beer, and vomit that always says “Go Greek!”

“It smells very much unlike the frats, which smell like death when you walk in,” said Rachael, one of the lucky fourteen residents of EAT’s brownstone. “We’re a clean bunch.”

Rachael (above, right) and her
roommate Maxie, both C’09, say they are so glad to live in a clean-smelling (boy, does it smell clean!), wood-panelled, wood-floored brownstone, complete with a large and comfy living room, big screen TV, full kitchens, dining rooms and fireplaces. The house also has its very own laundry room, but Bwog was forbidden to enter it, since it is used as the 61-member sorority’s “Chapter Room.” “Only sisters are allowed in,” Rachael says.

With such a nice house, the temptation to entertain and throw parties is great. But state brothel laws prohibit them from doing so. At least the law in New York defining women living together with alcohol as a brothel is not as prohibitive as brothel laws in in Winston-Salem, where Rachael says, “six women with their feet off the ground is considered a brothel.”

Maxie and Rachael get their own bathroom. They’re quite excited about it and have outfited it with a “man underwear” bath mat:

Their room is long and rectangular, but is a respectable size.

Rachael’s hung up the flags of her two “homelands,” North Carolina and Russia, and a map of Saudi Arabia, the mother-country of her foreign language of choice.

Arabic and Swahili (Maxie’s foreign language) words are
posted all over the room to help the girls study. Near Rachael’s bed, it says “tired”, near her bookshelf, it says books. And by her desk, the exclamatory and motivating:

Work!

The girls are also proud of their “wall of fame,” a shrine to randomness they’ve posted on the divide between the two sides of the room.

There’s something YouTube related on the wall about frying chickens and Ms. Peaches. It’s mostly inside jokes, but they said they will accept submissions for the wall of fame.

All in all, the girls like the sorority life. “We have great dance parties,” says Rachael (sans alcohol, of course).

“It’s the perfect location away from the craziness of McBain,” says Maxie. And after her first-year living situation, she says, “I will never ever share a hall bathroom ever again.”

–Photos by Justin Gonçalves

Have a tricked-out dorm, or wish to volunteer a friend/foe’s room? E-mail bwgossip@columbia.edu, and we’ll send a correspondent to scrutinize your living space for next week’s edition of room hopping!