As a small group of us lost looking foreigners stumbled out of our international student orientation at the Pontificia Universidad Católica in Puerto Madero, Buenos Aires, we came upon quite a harrowing scene. Three girls, standing on a concrete pad just outside one of the university’s buildings were at the mercy of a small crowd of people.
They circled around the three girls, ripping open bags of flour and yerba mate (a herb used in the ever popular drink mate) and pouring them all over the girls heads, shoulders, arms, legs, and face. Others either threw eggs or cracked them open on their heads and still more took bottles of ketchup and emptied their contents on their head and/or face.
*Gasp* Could this be what happens to students here when you fail an exam? Could us American s find ourselves in a similar plight if we ever broke the dress code at the school? What could these girls possibly have done to merit this?
Graduate.
Yep. Upon asking one of the smiling onlookers, we learned that the aforementioned scene is a long tradition in Argentina of celebrating one’s graduation from college. Friends and family members take the liberty of dousing you in flour, herbs, ketchup, eggs and whatever else might be in the fridge that day in a fun way of saying “Congratulations! You did it!”.
While choosing dinner with your family or a dousing in food stuffs might be quite the easy decision for most, the girls actually looked like they were enjoying it a little bit, peeling the egg yolk away from their mouths to laugh along with their torturers.
Upon sharing the story over dinner with my host family that night, I asked my host mom if she had received the same treatment with her graduation. Being pregnant with her first child at the time and not really feeling up to the ritual, she said that she luckily dodged the bullet by not telling her friends the actual date of her graduation. My host dad laughed, saying that her being pregnant was a good enough reason for him to escape the tradition as well. Luckily, for myself I plan on only spending a semester here and graduating back at Georgetown next spring. Though hopefully none of you friends and family reading this will get any ideas!
