homecoming

Homecoming weekend. I'll be honest, I wasn't expecting much from it, but maybe that's a good thing. Because it blew every expectation I had out of the stratosphere. For those who aren't familiar with the notion of Homecoming - it is basically a weekend where the University welcomes back Alumni to the school (it was actually started by Mizzou 99 years ago) - they have a bunch of events - all of the Greek houses have a big competition (house decorations, skits and floats for the parade) which they get judged on, there's a homecoming parade, the football game, all of downtown is decorated. It's basically a lot of fun - and since this will be my first (and last) homecoming, I wanted to take advantage of that.

First, I visited the house decs in Greek town. Once thing I have been meaning to do all semester is take photos of the Sorority houses in Greek town and the Frats out on Frat row because in general, they're just obscene. The theme this year was board games and groups of sorority's and frats had to come up with a scene and a skit around their board game. Here are a few of my favourites:

Look! My life is complete - standing next to a giant Life wheel haha.

Saturday was a huge day, not only were Mizzou playing #1 ranked Oklahoma, but ESPN had

chosen to Mizzou to host College Gameday, I don't really want to go into the details of what College Gameday is, so for those internationals who are actually interesting - google it :P

We got to campus about 7.30 in the morning and walked to Francis Quad where the Gameday crew were set up - we got a prime spot on the hill under the columns. It was a loooot of fun, people were just crazy excited - the band were playing, people had millions of signs, everyone is in gold and the quad was PACKED - we later found out we had broke Kansas' gameday record (which stood at around 14,500 people), around 18,000 turned up.

The night before - all is calm.

This was a funny sight - straight after I took this photo these guys from Fox got in trouble with ESPN because they didn't have media passes. heh.

After that was tailgating and football! Geoff cooked up some meat, I made cookies and

cupcakes and we headed off to the game.

I really enjoy football, so I was looking forward to what I expected to be a tight match - but this was just ridiculous. The tension in the air was incredible, and when we finally won - it was literally bedlam - strangers were hugging each other and people were going absolutely mental as soon as the final whistle blew all of us just charged at the field - event staff didn't stop us - I think they were expecting it (though I did later hear that around 30 people were arrested). As we just kind of swayed together on the field I looked to my right and saw people carrying the goalposts up the bleachers and out of the stadium!

Later on we headed to Harpo's where we found the goalposts - in tiny pieces. People had been cutting it up so they could take little pieces of history home with them.

It really was a sight to see.

I really honestly don't think I will ever experience anything like that ever again - it was an amazing experience and something I will treasure for a long time :)

rushing the field!

final score: 36-27