Anna's

Two weekends ago was my first experience at football game and breakfast club, and I have to say it was crazier than I ever thought it was possible!

First I must explain breakfast club. This is when students dress up in crazy costumes and hit the bars from 6am until when the game starts at 1pm. Everything from a marshmallow to a turkey to a guy in diapers and a bib is done... it's a sight that needs to be seen to be believed. The bars are blacked out so one thinks it's the middle of the night until you go outside and the sun's shining in your eye! Great fun, but totally bizarre.

So about midday we headed over to the football match. I don't think I watched or followed much of it. Hollis was nice enough to try and explain it to me, but the sheer number of stop starts was much too confusing, then you have little people running around with two flags indicating where they are now and where they should go to... Aussie rules is so much more entertaining (GO EAGLES!). However the atmosphere was unbelievable. Cheerleaders were tossed up into the air like in 'Bring it on', the band danced and did their thing at every possible moment, flags were going off everywhere, and the people went crazy. The students had chants for when they had a touchdown, jingled their keys for another occassion, tooted on another... totally confusing. And nobody sat down, instead we all stood on the benches, waving and screaming like mad men.

This weekend's homecoming game, should be more interesting and crazy. Although I'm not sure if we'll make it to the football match since we're taking breakfast club seriously this time and hitting the bars at 7am.

Check out the website to vote for the Homecoming King or Queen... I thought this was only in highschool, apparently not, not with all their faces plastered all over the campus on every suface imaginable. Number Five king is an EE major, too bad I think he's up for some competition :P

http://www.union.purdue.edu/Homecoming/

Let me know SOON who I should vote for!

I'm loving it at Purdue! It's mostly great weather, nice lifestyle, fantastic people! But there are many strange phenomenons that I have observed that I will document eventually.

Fraternities and sororities are a HUGE thing here. Clothing is purely for the purpose of advertising Purdue and Sororities (fraternities usually undertake some other forms of advertising). The range of clothing ranges from 'Go Greek' which is to encourage people to join the Greek societies, to individual sorority names, usually in huge letters on a bright pink little t-shirt. As if you can't tell they were sorority girls by their bottled blonde hair that is tied up high on the crown, overload of makeup, one sized bodies and same blank look on their faces.

I believe there are nearly 60 fraternities and nearly 40 sororities, and you definitely notice their presence around campus! The side streets are dominated by grand looking frat and sorority houses, each displaying huge greek letters on the front. They held their 'rushing' campaign last week, where unsuspecting freshers visited all the sorority houses seeing which one they would like to join. The girls lure the poor souls in by singing and clapping and chanting for them... yes you heard right, they SING and CLAP and CHANT! I didn't witness this personally but people that did inform me it was most amusing. I actually considered signing up for the rushing until I decided two days of visiting all the sorority houses was much too painful of an experience to try and undertake... we went on a trip to the 'beach' in Lake Michigan instead. Nice place really... the lakes are absolutely massive that you could easily mistake it for the ocean. Nothing beats the ocean at home though.

Oh and the frat boys inform me that they just hold BBQ's and football games to entice the male race. Much more civilised I say. Despite all my comments the frat boys and sorority girls I've met so far are most pleasant if not overly preppy, but then again, what do you expect?