Incidents of hazing are rampant in Brazil and (according to this blogger) in evidence in Portugal, but since I don’t speak the language it is hard to track news incidents.
http://blog.travelpod.com/travel-blog-entries/worldtravelist/1/1285508715/tpod.html
Excerpt
So these freshmen, frosh, freshers or whatever you wanna call em have been doing some silly things all of last week. They move around in groups according to their courses, so I saw a group of the Aerospace students walking around in an ordered arrangement that looked like an army group of three lines, except something was different. On further inspection, I saw two of the guys in front had windscreen wipers in their hands, the guy in the middle front had a joystick in his hand. Two guys half-way down the length had cardboard shapes sticking out to the sides and everyone else was walking with their arms forming rectangles to the sides….yes they were collectively an airplane.
At other random times kids would randomly sprint through the campus screaming stuff in Portuguese with capes on their backs….entertaining.
It’s weird why they do all of this though, apparently it’s to have access to special parties and group events in the future. I also passed some college parties in the middle of the city with huge groups of college kids, all universities had this hazing thing around the same time. Additionally, all the upperclassmen telling them what to do were required to wear these thick black suits with heavy jackets, they were suffering too. Most of the time they would have the jackets over their shoulders since Lisbon is pretty hot during the day (dropping to chilly at night).
Note that these guys went off campus to do some of this stuff like the entire city was their campus. They were on the subway announcing the station stops to all confused passengers.
All the new kids in the Civil Engineering Program were wearing white hard hats. I got a photo or two of them.
