Science Froshercise

This is an account of the past three most insane days of my life.

Wednesday afternoon; 5:00; all the new science kids are lined up at the doors of the McGill athletics arena. We are let in about 50 at a time, where we are told to sprint. At the entrance we were met buy frosh leaders. Met is not quite the right word, we were hoarded and grabbed, pushed and pulled by these guys into their groups. They were loaded with water pistols and squirted shots into our mouths. Each group had a number and various chants associated with it. My first group was the burning loin’s. We had to chant – touch my inner thigh. After an hour of this chanting and craziness, we partied our way down to the beer tent. This was on the opposite end of the campus, so we had to walk down through some streets. The poor traffic and homeowners on those streets! We got to the beer tent. It took ages and ages to get our first beer. But after the first struggle and desperation of many to get a beer, it became easier. Then pizzas were distributed within the groups. This is when I moved groups with my friend, as our group did not have any pizza! Our new group was 99. We didn’t have quite as good a cheer as good old group 20. But we had much cooler leaders and people. We bopped around the beer tent for a couple of hours, and leant many a chant that would serve us well over the next couple of days. (Mum I wouldn’t let Gran read these).

Ok so here was the classic:

McGill once, McGill twice,
Holy f*cking Jesus Christ,
Wham, Bam, God-dam, son-of-a-bitch, SHIT!
Three cheers for McGill: f*ck, f*ck, f*ck!
Three cheers for f*cking: McGill, McGill, McGill!

And then the Concordia one:

I’d rather be a redman (McGill) than a f*cking bumblebee (Concordia – though I guess you would have worked that out).
I’d rather be a genius than a flip burgers at Mac D’s
I wouldn’t wipe my ass with a Concordia degree
So f*ck you bumblebee’s!

Both a popular choice, and both lead me to being hoarse at the end of this experience.

So, then we had a pre-party at our leaders house, before heading to Club Altitude 737. This is a really flash club; there are spotlights that flash over Montreal. These belong to that club. It is really high up, and you ride an elevator to floor 737 (although there are not that many floors, really). We partied the night away.

The next morning there was a breakfast at 9. So I rocked up to this, and met my beloved group. The beer tent opened at 10:00. But I wasn’t ready to beer tent quite yet. Some girls and I went and checked out the bouncing castles and the general festivities, as it was carnival day. When we were finally ready for beer at lunch, the beer tent had been closed down!! Some people had served minors, underage people. There was panic that the entire frosh would be shut down, but the beer tent was the only casualty. Our rivals the arts frosh were at our carnival too. And their beer tent was still open! There were lots of separate froshes. There was a music frosh, the one time I saw them was when they were singing some do-ray-mi song about beer in a conga line. There was an engineering frosh, and they were really nerdy. They all wore hard hats and spent their time building things – for real. They kept on making all these human formations spelling out engineering things. These guys were also our ultimate rivals. When you passed them on the street, they would scream and yell about how we were med-school rejects and how we are unemployed! There was nothing that could be done. They also had a space theme, and a little space ship on their shirts. Ours was – froshercise, so think tight and bright, and arts had the best theme ever – super Mario!

Then began my favourite event (I think, it was all pretty good) of the frosh. The pub-crawl. This started at 3:00! Which was amazing!! We were running a bit late, so we had to run across to the first pub, play a super quick game and then race off to the next pub. There were three games in total, and the games just alternated at every stop. All were races. So the first one, consisted of beer being poured into your mouth by the person next to you, when you finished your beer, you then poured beer into the mouth of the person next to you and so on. Then there was a boat race, and flip cup, which was very similar to the boat race. Although you had to put you cup over the edge of the table and flip it from its bottom onto its rim. Surprisingly hard, and VERY intense. When someone was struggling with the flip, the pressure was tangible. I must brag that I was a bit of a one flip wonder! These games were alternated as we made our way through the streets yelling about McGill and the like. We got in the way of traffic, of pedestrians, of families and small children. It must have been very unfortunate for them. On the other hand, some of the old locals were loving it. They honked their horns and hi-fived the masses. There was one guy, in our co-group 24 (who’s chant was: Two, Four - get f*cked up) who in fact was a local. He was 25, had graduated, and was still coming back to McGill to do frosh. That was a bit scary! This glorious bar crawl lasted until 7:00. We then all went back to our frosh leaders house to pre-drink (that’s right) before heading out the club. This was lots of fun. There was a live band who were awesome, and down stairs they played 90’s hits, they played Radiohead and I could have died of happiness. I think I was the only one though, eh! This was the best club ever as it was a 30 second walk home!

The final day began at 9:00. I met my group for alleged free breakfast – of which there was none. We trekked down to Tim Horton’s for some tasty bagel breakfast and coffee. Yes Tim does do a very nice fruity bagel. Then raced back up to real yellow school buses (I was so excited) to drive to the beach! When we were getting on the bus, the free breakfast (uncooked bagel) was offered around. The arts frosh was super lucky, they had TIMBITS for breakfast! TIMBITS! Oh man. So off to the beach – which was actually a dirty river. But a loveable and fun dirty river none-the-less. I am ashamed to admit that I started drinking at 10:30 that morning and didn’t stop until 2:00 that night. But it was lots of fun, we went paddle boating, and kayaking. There was a dance floor for times between sunbaking. There was beach volleyball and there was a trampoline on the water! The Canadians did a good job of recreating a beach type fun. I sunbaked a bit too, and got really badly sunburnt. The leaders scribble on everyone in permanent markers, and I have a bit of a science sunburn. Great! And I wore sandals, so I have awkward sandal burn! At about 4:00 we left the beach on our yellow school buses. I think most of us had a nap. Then our group was too owned to stick around for dinner, so we each went back to respective places, had some tea / another nap / showered dirty river off . Then we met back at the leaders house for final pre-drinks. This was really fun, lots of groups turned up to, and some cool people from arts frosh. So there were heaps of us all! We then went out to the club. It was great, it was many stories high, and we pretty much jived the night away.

I then slept until one the next day. I had some brekky, and wandered out to the kitchen to do some washing up, and there were people out there. I had managed to go a week only meeting one girl, and now I’ve met about half of them. But this was only a little bit unfortunate as I was really tired, so I had to be really motivated and work really hard to be happy and awake and sociable. But so far everyone seems really nice. I’ll have another blog about it, as I’m going to end this on with pics that I ripped off my friend’s facebook. I didn’t take my camera out, as I didn’t want to loose it, or get it wet or anything like that.