The Truth About Spring Break

At the Independent UK, "The rite stuff: good times, self-discovery and lots of booze":

This is the Nirvana moment: the precise picture they envisioned when they boarded their planes back in still-frigid Boston, Chicago or New York.

As Dutch DJ Afrojack raises a fist and the first beats pulse through their bones they too let fly, barefoot on the sand, pressed together in a miasma of sun-pinked flesh and swim-suits. Above, against a postcard Caribbean sky, black MTV cameras swoop and curve, a passing parasail adds a dash of yellow.

Call it their right, or their rite of passage, the special – and occasionally perilous – week called Spring Break when tens of thousands of young Americans flee university campuses to shed the usual rules, parental expectations and inhibitions and go a bit bonkers in the sun. It is a time for a different kind of learning, pushing the limits of their livers, testing the looser sides of their young libidos and navigating the unfamiliar far from home.

Not a national holiday as such and certainly not a religious one, the annual student migration south is in fact a rolling affair that runs from late February to early April. Different colleges and universities pick different weeks in the late-winter calendar when teaching stops and their wards are released. Some may just linger, others will seek virtue, perhaps building houses for the poor. But this is what they are meant to do: get drunk, laid and sunburned...

Well, as they say on Twitter: #YOLO!

It's pretty dangerous, though, apparently (yeah, we all drank too much when we were young, and all that). So, keep reading at the link.