North Carolina, a round up! I love College!

Go Deacs! (3 days of posts)

I am a bit behind on the posts so I am doing a post of the whole of our North Carolina adventure. We begin on the 2^nd of September, Thursday. We had been catching up on some sleep and had an epic 11 hours. We departed from our Quality Inn motel before setting off on our long journey to Winston Salem. We quickly headed into Richmond to try meet up with my friend Tyler for lunch but he was ill so we just headed on to North Carolina.

The time was around 1pm and we were beginning to feel the hunger bug so we decided that we should drive until we see a proper truck stop, not one with major brands like Subway or Burger King. It wasn’t until about 2pm before we managed to find one en-route that looked like a genuine homegrown place.

We went in and it was quiet except for a few locals, it was a wooded cabin style building and all the locals in there were all massive, easily 3 or 4 times the size of me, and they were all like that! We took to looking at the menu keeping our eye’s down, we didn’t want to get eaten. Paolo had a turkey and bacon Panini while I had a country fried steak swimming in gravy. Paolo’s was a typical Panini but mine was a deep fried steak drowning in a thick pasty sickly looking liquid they call gravy, it wasn’t great, I felt like I deserved a heart attack after eating it.

We made our way across the Virginia/North Carolina border and just after we got pulled over again! Paolo speeding again! Luckily we managed to talk our way out of this ticket as well but so far Paolo has a 2-0 lead over me in terms of getting pulled over, he can keep that lead. This cop wouldn’t let us take a picture of his car though; he said we might put it onto Youtube.

We got to Winston Salem at about 4:30 but struggled to find Wake Forest University for about an hour, the city doesn’t make much sense and the university isn’t on their maps and nobody seemed to know where it was. We got there at 5:30 and Lauren was waiting for us to take us to the Demon Deacons American football came, their college team was playing. Lauren is my good friend whom I met at GYLC 4 years ago, and then she has visited me twice in London since then, also spending a whole semester there last year, so we have had a bunch of good times back home, now it was her chance to show off America to me!

She said we had to wear a shirt to the game though, so we had to quickly get changed, apparently over here people wear shirts and ties to the football games. We went for the full American experience, we went ‘tailgating’ which is something that they do before the game, everybody pulls up in their pick up trucks and blasts music and drinks from kegs in the parking lot of the football stadium. It was brilliant! We had red cups and standing around with a massive group of students, all the different frats were out representing themselves and people were playing drinking games and socialising. British universities should be like this.

The game was going to start so we headed into the 30,000-seater stadium, it was an incredible atmosphere, and practically the entire college was out! Cheerleaders, mascots and chants! It was brilliant, everybody seemed to know each other and everybody knew the chants. The Daemon Deacons (Deacs) were playing the Presbyterians; they are in the top division of the North Carolina league. Deacs were expecting an easy win. The Deacs went ahead by 21 in the first quarter then by half time it was 28-7, suddenly half the people left, its apparently normal behaviour to leave at half time, especially if your team is winning because it’s boring, we stayed to watch the half time performance by the marching band then also left after the 3^rd quarter, we grabbed a dominoes pizza from inside the stadium for dinner.

As for the actual game of American football, it’s extremely boring! They stop every other minute and change the teams, so many technicalities and faults and stops, its not what I would call entertaining, It’s the first game of American football I’ve ever watched and I’m very surprised that there was ever even an argument as to which type of football is best, apart from the quarterback I cant see where there is any skill requirement, unless you count catching as a skill.

We headed back to Lauren’s sorority apartments; Lauren was very tired so we were taking this night off, which was good enough for Paolo and me because we got to watch Knocked Up!

September 3^rd, College Campus, Frat party, beer pong!

Lauren gave us the full campus tour, it’s a beautiful campus with huge buildings, the majority of the students live on campus, and it’s even bigger when you consider that it only has about 4500 students! The tour reminded Paolo of Tom Green’s tour in the film Road Trip. The idea for breakfast was to hit up their cafeteria called ‘The Pit’ full American college style, it was an incredible canteen compared to what I had on offer back at Kings, there were several different section you could go to for meal and it was all you can eat yet everything was made for you in front of you, so you could get a bagel, a sub, pizza, kebabs, traditional breakfast’s and huge selections of salads and desserts! We just went for standard breakfast stuff, eggs and bacon.

Lauren had to get some stuff from Wal-Mart and we jumped at the opportunity to go to Wal-Mart! It was huge and had everything you could possible want, but I prefer Tesco’s, Wal-Mart did sell guns though.

For Lunch we hit up a local hot spot for college students, it was called Putter’s, a golf themed restaurant, famous for their chicken tenders, which were brilliant!

We headed back to the apartment and spent the rest of the afternoon planning and organising the rest of our trip, and catching up on correspondents.

For dinner we went to a Japanese restaurant that Lauren used to work at called Sakura with Lauren’s roommate Diane and her boyfriend Chris.

After dinner Chris told us that we need to try this drink called Four Loco, it was this hugely hyped up drink, it came in a litre sized can and in multiple flavours, it’s a combination of some kind of spirit with energy drink although it only cost $2.44 and was 12%, everybody was hyping about this drink and how it gets people messed up, but it just tasted like the Mojito’s you get in Oceana, it tasted fine and once again I think its something which came down to the fact that we are more used to drinking coming from England. We had the drinks around Lauren’s friends place, there people were getting ready to go to one of two frat parties, one of them was called Tour De Franzia, Franzia being a cheap wine in a bag. The second one was a Eurotrash party, which is why people were dressing up with European themes.

We played a game of Kings and then made our way over to our first frat party. The Tour De Franzia! It was like being dropped into a movie set, there was an insane amount of people in a small house, people walking around with massive bags of wine getting people to drink it, there was a keg in one corner that people were drinking from. We settled around the beer pong table, once a game was over a lad called Alex asked me if I wanted to join him in a game so I accepted. We played the people who won the previous game. Now let me tell you, when I say that this was an epic game, you have no idea! If it were in a film you would never believe it, but it was tense! I managed to sink a double redemption, that’s where they sunk our last cup and I had to sink all of their last cups in a row, they only had two left and I sunk both of them with sick style! We both had to rerack because I had redeemed us, we reracked to 3 cups and it went down to the final cup 3 times and all 3 times I managed to redeem us, although eventually we did loose, but it was incredible!

We had managed to build quite a group of people watching. Paolo and Lauren had left the party before my beer pong game had finished so I was there by myself but I was working the crowd well after my epic game of beer pong and I was having a blast! Suddenly I heard someone shout my name, I turned around and it was my friend Emily whom I had met 4 years ago also at GYLC, I couldn’t believe it! I had no idea she was at this university! Well I was quite lost and didn’t know where I was at this party so she looked after me and we moved onto the next frat party, Eurotrash at Sigma Nu! The Frat’s here have designated driver to take you to all to and from the parties, which was a brilliant idea. Although in order to not draw attention from the police they don’t let you leave until you get your ride so it was a crazy mass of confusion trying to get out of the first frat party, people were getting angry at the guys on the door, luckily Emily seem to know them and they let us straight out.

Now this second frat party was messy, the floors were sticky; it was hot and humid in there, so many people! But once again, so much fun! I met a couple German and French guys whom I had met earlier and seeing as it was a Eurotrash party it was appropriate that we were all European so people were loving the fact. Everybody you meet at these frat parties, if they didn’t recognise you then they would introduce themselves, it was incredibly social and I met a ton of new people, pretty much all of whom I’d forgotten their names.

September 4^th Frisbee house party! Dan’s Birthday!

We got up relatively early, around 10pm (considering I didn’t get home till about 4am) and Lauren, Paolo, Diane, Chris and I made our way to the local hangover food restaurant. It was a good casual meal that definitely helped in recovery, I had one of the best chicken soups I’ve ever had.

The original plan was to then make our way to the river to go floating and drinking on tubes, but none of us were feeling up to it. So we headed back to the apartment, it was hot! These past few days had been above 100 Fahrenheit, which is above the 30c’s. So I spent the afternoon sleeping, I needed it, I was so tired, I’m a beer pong athlete and I need my rest!

We went for dinner at the restaurant they have on campus called Shorty’s, we had dinner with Lauren and 4 of her guy friends. They were a hilarious bunch, we fitted right in, quotes left and right and we all shared the same sense of humour and had the same taste in movies and comedy, it was brilliant. Although dinner took 3 hours! We had a terrible waiter and the food just took ages to come out, even our check took 30 minutes to arrive! So we asked if we still had to tip and they said that they wouldn’t because service was so bad, but it was the first time they had not tipped. It was so bad that we all got free meals for our next visit, although me and Paolo would not be using them so we gave them to Lauren.

The next stop was another party! It was at the Frisbee house, it was a house where people who used to play Frisbee lived! I couldn’t believe there was a house for something so specific, but there was. It was a guy called Dan’s birthday and once again, it’s hard to put into words how much fun it was! But it was brilliant! The lads from dinner were there and they had made an ice statue/ice drinks luge for Dan to drink from; it was in the shape of a woman’s body, so much effort! But that’s America for you; they love to go all out!

There once again we drank from a keg and played beer pong, this time however we played a huge game of 21-cup beer pong which was insane! So much going on and it was constant firing of beer pong balls.

The night was a long night filled with socialising and different events. At one point I was in a room with a guy called JP playing guitar then at another time I was dancing to Michael Jackson with some people on the porch! At around midnight something ridiculous happened, the waiter we had at dinner turned up at the party! He wasn’t even a student and nobody could believe he was here, apparently he had been talking to some people at the restaurant and they had invited him to the party after work! The lads we had dinner with flipped out; they couldn’t believe that the one time they didn’t tip, the guy turns up at their party! It was very awkward! We tried to avoid him at all costs just because it was so embarrassing, firstly that we didn’t want to get into a conversation about how bad he was at his job and also to avoid the whole tipping thing.

By about 4am there was about 12 of us sitting in a room listening to a couple of the people playing guitar and drums, it was a good chilled out end to the night, (Paolo somewhere else by now and I was once again on my own) however in the room next door as I was leaving there was some heavy dub step being played and people dancing like raving loony’s! So much fun! I walked home with a couple of the girls from Laurens frat because they lived in the same building. I then crashed out around 5am.

QOTD:

Chris, when talking about hooters,

“Ye the food sucks but the concept’s great!”