EPTOur alarm clock rudely woke us up sharply at 5:30am. Update: we bought a bunch of adapters at the local Target the previous day so our Wii was working by now..shouldn't have stayed up that late playing Brawl. Anyways, today was going to be a unique day since it would be the first day of mass rehearsal. During the Gator Bowl halftime show, band from around the country- i think 14 this year- gather together and play a song together.
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After arriving at the rehearsal spot, we waited for the other bands to arrive. In the end, there were about 2000 band members total with a huge block consisting of around 200 drummers. Pretty sick.
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Once practice was over with, we boarded the buses once again and headed to downtown Jacksonville where we were to do a parade for the evening.
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some other band warming up prior to parade
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star wars nerds dressing up for parade :|
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Budweiser at the parade, reenacting their superbowl commerical
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Clemson College mascot fooling with our band (Gator Bowl was between Nebraska vs Clemson fyi)
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people gathering for the parade
The parade itself was pretty unique because I've never marched down the streets of downtown. It was certainly cool to march down the streets and be surrounded by skyscrapers and have transit trains cross overhead. Most of the people who watched the parade looked shocked at how many Asians there were in our band LOL.
After our parade, we frantically undressed out of our uniforms because there was going to be an awards ceremony (announcing the winners of the field show competition, parade competition, and who would do the pregame show at the gator bowl)in a short awhile.
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we we're all pretty tired..
We rushed back to the hotel and changed into formal clothes and boarded the buses again to head to some convention place. On the way to the awards/dance, we were joking at how many of the southern bands would be doing like line dances/square dancing since they were from the countryside. But we decided that that was stereotypical and racist so we didn't mention it again. However, once we got there, we were shocked to see the bands actually doing line dancing to modern hip hop songs...it was pretty whack.
Anyways, our band swept the street competition and the field competition earning the highest score in all 11(?) categories. We also got earned the opportunity to parade in the pre-game show at the Gator Bowl in front of 66,000 people :O
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