Lower Dining Hall is full of tanned happy faces, far too tanned to be Boston in March. They all sit around chatting, swapping stories acting like they haven’t seen each other in years, or haven’t just been looking at their newest photo album on Facebook with some clever title. It’s all because they’ve been on Spring Break, the quintessential American college experience, as Hollywood would have us believe. What I’ve found is that students here seem to divide up their spring break into 3 main categories:
Trip type 1: This is the break that a lot of freshmen take. They go back to Mammy and Daddy, back to meals that aren’t one of the dining hall’s fistful of options and of course back to see high school friends to tell them stories of college and why it’s better than their friend’s college. It’s not only Freshmen that take this trip, most people in BC study abroad in their junior (3rd) year so a lot of sophomores (2nd years) will go home, or work for the break to save for their semester abroad. This usually leads to several bitter status updates and jealous comments on photo albums of people in sunnier climes.
Trip type 2: The service trip. Students in BC love to volunteer, especially if it’s in a warm place that has a drinking age of 18. For example my housemate, Juan, went to the Dominican Republi
c to teach in an orphanage there. Trips like this are so common in college that on campus the Dominican Republic is referred to as “The DR” It has to be said that students in BC really are the volunteering kind, not just seasonally and when it suits them. So many people have equal, if not more hours volunteering as they do in classes. Apparently doing volunteer work helps student’s application to graduate school, but there’s also a culture of volunteering at BC that I have never experienced before, and certainly makes me feel very inadequate among all these Boston College do-gooders, in the very best sense of the word.
Trip type 3: The oh-so-coll
ege trip to Mardi Gras/ Cancun/ West Coast. These are the trips that movies are made of, the kind that American students dream about and the kind parents don’t ever want to hear about. The traditional trip to Mardi gras trip is a road trip, leaving on the last day of classes and driving roughly 2,500 km to get to New Orleans for Mardi gras on Tuesday. Fun fact that I just learned; Mardi Gras means Fat Tuesday, which is the American equivalent of Pancake Tuesday, falling just before Ash Wednesday and encouraging people to eat far too much of something that is not good for you at all. That over there is a photo of some of the other International students that went to Mardi gras, they rented 2 RVs and drove the whole way there, can't say I'm not a little bit jealous!
But of course these are only the main categories of trip, for example, I did none of these things but instead went to an Ultimate Frisbee tournament in Georgia called High Tide. For those of you who may not know, I’ve been playing Ultimate since first year in Maynooth and going from that small team I’m now playing on the BC team which has an A and a B team with about 50 players over both teams. Our team, in keeping with the Boston College sports teams is called The Eagles and hence we have some pretty epic uniforms and training gear all in the maroon and gold of BC.
So anyway, High Tide is a tournament that Boston College men’s and women’s teams come to compete in… Kinda. See the tournament has a 4 day format beginning on the Monday with what’s called a ‘Hat Tournament’ basically everyone enters and gets assigned a team with total str
angers by having their name pulled out of a hat. It’s really laid back and nobody cares about getting too far in the competition, although the prize was a High Tide hat this year, so the stakes were high. I ended up injuring myself in the first game after getting a block on the disc, so I pretty much just sat on the sideline in the warmth of the Georgia sun watching my team play. The other three days of the tournament were played with the BC team, but because it was Spring Break, most teams weren’t too interested in playing high intensity Ultimate so the 
general unspoken rule of the competition was “Don’t be a prick” seeing as Ultimate is self refereed, this meant “don’t call every foul, let’s just play Ultimate” Which kind of harks back to the original idea of Ultimate that nobody intentionally fouls another player or knowingly breaks the rules. Yes, it’s all very hippyish, but it’s part of it. Against one team, we played a game that included upside down points, where every throw had to be one with the disc upside down, one shirtless Vs shortless point and finally a 20 on 20 full game.
Unfortunately not all of the teams got the memo 
about it being a “just for fun” tournament, and some teams came to win the tournament. This being American Ultimate, those games were full of bad spirit, travel calls and chants of “We’re on Spring Break, IT’S NOT THAT SERIOUS!” Because for our team, it was more about the 18 hour road trip down, the hanging out on the beach by our villas, eating southern food (like Chicken and Waffles, not separate, like in one bite. Seriously) and generally having a laugh and relaxing. I think this shows in my photos of the trip, which are all from the road trip, the beach and the villa, with none from the tournament whatsoever.
On our road trip dow
n the people who had been on the trip before were telling us about this place called South of the Border. They were talking about it as the most amazing place on the route and some even claimed that it was the only reason they came on the trip. It’s on the Border between North and South Carolina but the signs for it appe
aring on the highway pretty much the whole way through North Carolina. Needless to say I was unbelievably excited by the idea of this magical wonderland and when we arrived, I was honestly speechless. I have never been in a place where I felt equal measures of wonder and horror. Twenty-foot tall statues of Mexican giants stood beside strange luminous yellow gorillas and what looked like an abandoned amusement park. Because we had been driving through the night, we were there at 8am, so nothing was open and this gave the place an eeri
ly quiet and neglected look, which, I’m assured looks only slightly better at night under the shine of the millions of large light up signs. I can only imagine how terrifying the multitudes of animals look in the cover of darkness, seeing as stumbling upon pink rhinos, mutilated horses and buffalo-cheetah crosses was scary enough in the light of day.
There was so much in this trip that I’ve missed out on, so I’m going to try and give a brief list of things that we did on our way that I simply don’t have time to write about, but I really wish I did! * Ahem * Ate Philly Cheese Steaks in Philly, visited the car park in Columbia High school where the first official game of Ultimate was played, ate chicken and waffles with ranch dressing and maple syrup, asked locals directions while putting on the worst southern accent possible, the (failed) quest for me to get into my first Wal-Mart, twitter feeds about bros on spring break, me personally driving from Washington DC, through Philadelphia and on to New York, No beers Vassar, DARTY! (Day party, as Christine explained to me) bonfire on the beach, Four Loko (with caffeine), Waffle House, Dairy Queen, 5 hour energy and of course that great feeling basking in the sun. Good times.
