Excerpt: Yep! In Portugal, hazing is completely normal, in fact it is a part of everyday life for the freshmen at the University of Aveiro. Imagine a huge bucket of ketchup, eggs, mustard, mayonnaise, grass, jelly, pudding, garlic puree, and yogurt all mixed together and then smeared on your head..now that is what I call a freshmen hair mask. But, this type of behavior is totally accepted…
If you are a first year student (“fresh”) at the University of Aveiro in Portugal, get ready for an annual ritual that will make you sing and dance as if you were a child again. The Portuguese Universities have a long-standing tradition of allowing older students to haze the first year students, it’s the freshmen experience. The students are split up in their individual departments and on Wednesday afternoons the older students wear black capes (that makes you think you are in Harry Potter land) and the “fresh” prepare themselves for fun, ridicule, joking, and even humiliation. Last Wednesday, I stumbled upon many groups of students that were performing, under the direction of the Harry Potter capes, numerous push-ups, dancing like fairies, feeding each other yogurt (with blindfolds), cleaning the bottom of the canal (with clothes on), blowing an egg across the sidewalk as the older students poured ketshup on their heads, and smashing eggs on each other’s heads. It is quite a sight.
This Wednesday was the “baptism” of the “fresh” where the students parade from the campus to the center of Aveiro wearing diapers on their heads and condoms, filled with stuff from that bucket I mentioned earlier, dangle around their neck, as the police escorts close down the streets. Once they arrive in the park in the center of Aveiro, the “fresh” sit together chanting, singing and cheering for about 2 hours as each department get’s baptised (the older students in black capes pour water and salt on the heads of the “fresh”.) Here is a video highlighting the explicit student life here in Aveiro.
