If you don’t know, no worries – I didn’t either. Sounds a little pervert to me so wasn’t thrilled that we are now a gamecock family. For all the foreigners – this is the mascot of Lucas’s university so we are now proud owners of lots of merchandise, clothing and bills from Columbia, South Carolina, the home of the University of South Carolina. I think you all recall we did our touring of Southeast and DC for this purpose – and he settled. Not an easy process that we unfortunately are set to repeat next year and then once more but at least we know how this works now.

To cut the anticipation – gamecock is basically a fighting rooster.

Move-in was approaching in August and we had a corner of living room full of Amazon packages to turn the anticipated jail cell alias dorm into a livable quarter. I was clearly too engaged per Lucas as he didn’t need all of this – he will be fine – the quintessential teenager response. Chill mom, chill.

In the marathon Sunday – when we had 2 hours to move him in – we did alright.

Month later, Brian is in Italy for a wedding and I am driving back in with Max and Mia for family weekend. On paper, this looked like lots of presentations and events for siblings and parents with your student – a picnic and then a highlight is a college football game with lots of tailgating (sitting around, eating and drinking). Since Columbia is a small town of barely 150K people, accommodations in hotels were gone the day they secured the date. Reality was a bit different – summary:

• None of the kids wanted to do anything in a classroom aka listening to old people talk about how amazing the school is, instead they were happy to hang out in the airbnb, get some food and spend time together – anywhere but school building. This was a bit disappointing for me as I was curious to see how the classrooms progressed since my college days and hear something ….not happening.
• Gamecock merchandise for the game – huge priority for what seemed like half of the town, you would be shocked what you can put a university logo on and sell it with a sweet margin.
• Food was key – Mia called Lucas homeless as he devoured every restaurant meal we took him for. All you can eat dorm food doesn’t make up for good restaurant or home cooked meal, as it turns out. So we took him to eat a lot.
• The football game – this is a religion in the south – I mean SEC (southeastern conference) and truly an experience like no other. These college teams in the south make tons of money from the TV rights, endorsements because the whole south and some parts of the country/alums live for college football on Saturdays in the fall. I mean – live and die. You will see a whole city in the color of their alma mater if they play and it’s insane – orange, red, garnet – and you absolutely have to wear it to the game so we all look alike. USC is no different. The schools sponsored a tailgate (barbecue like party a few hours before the game kick off by the stadium) where normal fans park their cars in the parking lot, open up the trunk, roll out a full grill with coolers and sit (in the hot parking lots!) for hours and drink/eat. Makes no sense to me but that’s the culture. So we got into it.

The atmosphere in the stadium is something quite amazing. Super loud, on for 3 hours with no stopping, everyone just going wild and crazy with constant techno music popping it all up. A bit of an overload for 3+ hours but I can see why the students and alums would be into it.

Our new freshman is doing just fine – pledging for frat is over and survived without harm (can’t even get into this for the Europeans) – weird, cult like group of selected people that hang out together and call themselves some greek letters. If you’ve seen Animal House movie, you are on the right path – that is all I knew and that is not the best selling point. I look at it as a quick way to find friends in a brand new environment. Likes his suitemates (3 kids in 2 rooms connected with a bathroom), goes to classes, realizes they are harder than high school and figuring out that growing up in the middle of a big city is nice and unique – maybe a little bit of appreciation for all the stuff he took for granted is sneaking in :-). Go cocks (ouch, it hurts me to say it)