I've been meaning to post an entry about this year's toga parade for a week or so, but we've been so busy moving house I never got around to it until now. It's things like this that made us want to move out of the city and go north to Port Chalmers. Every year the new University of Otago students dress in togas for the annual toga parade through the city streets. In the past, alumni and locals have lined George Street to watch the parade. Friends have told me that even just 5-years ago it was a very fun event.
This year was different. We didn't even know about the parade before we found we were driving through it, with Max in the back of the car in his car seat. On one side of the road, we saw a column of hundreds of fresh-faced youngsters in togas and sandals. Then, on the other side of the road, we saw these thugs, carrying trays of eggs. Very Clockwork Orange. A right bunch of droogs.
A second or two later, a wall of eggs rained down, thrown from the roofs and balconies of the buildings along the other side of the street from the students. It was like the Norman Invasion. Thus began a few hours of chaos, violence and stupidity. Violence breeds violence, and alcohol is a great catalyst for the reaction. There was pitched battle in the streets for a while. City police stood and tried to maintain order and had traffic cones and bottles thrown at them. Students were throwing around buckets filled with vomit and feces.
No, you read it right: vomit and feces. Oh, future captains of industry! You come to Dunedin from the farms and little drowsy two-street towns of the south and you're barely evolved enough to cross the street.
By the end of the night, students had rampaged through the city, in a drunken riot, breaking store windows, even stopping a car that was being driven down George Street in the city center and breaking one of its windows. What if that had been our car? With a two-and-a-half-month-old baby in the back? The streets were filthy. The buildings were covered with egg yolk.
I must admit though, I do like the headline on the web edition of the Otago Daily Times: "I came, I saw, I chundered -- toga parade turns into drunken rampage."
The next morning, the building I work in was being cleaned with high-velocity water jets to remove the egg stains from the walls, and the whole street had a gross thick eggy smell hanging above it. Pigeons sat lazily fussing on the balconies, full of eggs. The kids here are gross dirty nasty feral disrespectful cretinous poorly-raised drunken little criminals. I've said it before and people leap to their defense. No. They're nasty little things with no respect for other people and no sense of the value of anything that doesn't belong to them. You can say what you want about the US, but these kids would have been clubbed in the head and thrown in jail to bleed on the floor for the night. They'd have left university with a diploma in one hand and a criminal record to show their prospective employers in the other.
That's an education that means something.
This year was different. We didn't even know about the parade before we found we were driving through it, with Max in the back of the car in his car seat. On one side of the road, we saw a column of hundreds of fresh-faced youngsters in togas and sandals. Then, on the other side of the road, we saw these thugs, carrying trays of eggs. Very Clockwork Orange. A right bunch of droogs.
A second or two later, a wall of eggs rained down, thrown from the roofs and balconies of the buildings along the other side of the street from the students. It was like the Norman Invasion. Thus began a few hours of chaos, violence and stupidity. Violence breeds violence, and alcohol is a great catalyst for the reaction. There was pitched battle in the streets for a while. City police stood and tried to maintain order and had traffic cones and bottles thrown at them. Students were throwing around buckets filled with vomit and feces.No, you read it right: vomit and feces. Oh, future captains of industry! You come to Dunedin from the farms and little drowsy two-street towns of the south and you're barely evolved enough to cross the street.
By the end of the night, students had rampaged through the city, in a drunken riot, breaking store windows, even stopping a car that was being driven down George Street in the city center and breaking one of its windows. What if that had been our car? With a two-and-a-half-month-old baby in the back? The streets were filthy. The buildings were covered with egg yolk.I must admit though, I do like the headline on the web edition of the Otago Daily Times: "I came, I saw, I chundered -- toga parade turns into drunken rampage."
The next morning, the building I work in was being cleaned with high-velocity water jets to remove the egg stains from the walls, and the whole street had a gross thick eggy smell hanging above it. Pigeons sat lazily fussing on the balconies, full of eggs. The kids here are gross dirty nasty feral disrespectful cretinous poorly-raised drunken little criminals. I've said it before and people leap to their defense. No. They're nasty little things with no respect for other people and no sense of the value of anything that doesn't belong to them. You can say what you want about the US, but these kids would have been clubbed in the head and thrown in jail to bleed on the floor for the night. They'd have left university with a diploma in one hand and a criminal record to show their prospective employers in the other.That's an education that means something.
2 comments:
Horrible little bleeders !
We are not all like that!
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