spring break 2010

I spent my spring break with a guy from our program because we both wanted to go to London and Dublin and figured we should just travel together. We flew Ryan Air which is the Wal-Mart of airlines (copyright, Andrea, I think). They have strict baggage restrictions, pack you on the planes like sardines, and have flights at really weird times of day. BUT they get you where you need to go cheaply.
London was a very cool, very enormous city. In order to get from the Stanstead airport to London central, you need to do your research and we hadn’t. It cost us 19 pounds each for the train but it could have been 26 for a 2-way ticket, 10 for a regular bus, or 2 for ezbus, but we didn’t know about any of those other options. Once we got to London central and found out that the underground is 4£ each way too, we decided to try and walk to our hostel. After getting lunch, getting lost, and finally arriving to the Steam Engine Pub (the hostel was the 2nd floor) we got our stuff organized and picked some things we wanted to do while we were here in London. The first thing that caught our attention was a ‘grip reaper’s’ tour and we decided to go to the next tour offered that day. We made it, but barely and were just in time to hear about the spot of executions and where we get the phrase ‘laughing your head off.’ The simplified version is that there was a guy about to be executed and because this was a spectator-friendly event, risers had been set up all around to watch this poor man’s death. Just as the axe was about to fall, one of the risers collapsed, killing 20 people. Now, death and destruction are not generally all that funny to me, but I can see the irony in the situation. The prisoner found it rather hilarious and laughed until the axe man finally did his job and cut his head right off. Thus the phrase. We also went to the tower of London and listened to ghost stories from outside, followed the path of Jack the Ripper and heard lots of gruesome details about those murders, and got to stand over the corpses of 80,000 plague victims. That was probably the grossest part, but we ended with Jack the Rippers last and most mutilated victim and by this point we were in the East End of London at night and had to get back to the hostel. So we bit the bullet and took the underground.
The next day we did a free city tour with a girl in our hostel room and one of her friends from her Milan study abroad program. We saw Green Park, Buckingham palace, St. James’s Palace, Trafalgar square, number ten downing street, Horse Guards Road, Westminster Abbey, Big Ben, and the houses of Parliament. A few of the notable things that I learned were:
There was a drunken Irishman who broke into Buckingham palace and managed to sit on the throne, eat from the kitchens, wander through the halls, and have a full conversation with the queen before getting caught.
There used to be so many pigeons in Trafalgar square that the government had to do something about it. You can exactly slaughter pigeons in a public square, or make people stop feeding them (especially when people don’t even mean to feed them) so instead they made a special type of bread with a contraceptive in it and fed it to them. I guess it worked sort of…there were pigeons but not a ton.
The sand volleyball matches in the next Olympics will be held at the big area in Horse Guards Road. Where the changing of the guard will take place, I don’t know.
The word ‘stiff drink’ comes from a rather morbid event involving a pompus naval captain. He was giving a speech or something and got himself shot and killed. His crew had to bring his body back to shore but they were weeks away and decided to put the corpse in a barrel of rum to pickle it and keep it from stinking. The rest of the rum on the ship ran out during the journey, and when they got back to shore and opened the corpse barrel, they found a good portion of the rum mission. I’ll let you fill in the rest, but let’s just say I didn’t realize how serious the Brits are about their rum.
After the tour and lunch, James, Mila (girl from the hostel) and I went to Harrods. Wow. I don’t think I’ve ever seen so much crazy-expensive stuff in my life, not to mention stuff in general. 5 floors of everything from designer clothes, to tea, to food, to sporting goods, to books, to toys, to chocolate. I bought the 3rd HP book in British English (my regular one is missing 20 pages anyway) but that was it. The man who rang me up was named Dean T. I kept the receipt  After dinner we crossed Vauxhall Bridge Road, (hint: forget the bridge part and think TM Riddle), then went back to the hostel and spent the night watching karaoke with a Brazilian guy who was a rather good singer. I learned that cider mixed with black currant is delicious, and that cider mixed with beer is called a ‘snake bite.’
The next day we went to King’s Cross to see Platform 9 ¾ and take pictures pushing the trolley into the wall. I was rather disappointed when we asked the man at the train station where platform 9 ¾ was and he told us. Seriously. If you work there, you should really know that the proper response is to deny knowing anything about the platform, ask the lost traveller where he/she is going, then tell said passenger to stop bothering him/her since said passenger doesn’t even know where Hogwarts is. But I digress…
After pictures, we went to the British Museum and spent the rest of the day there. There were 5 floors of incredible stuff like an Easter Island head, Cleopatra’s mummy, a massive sculpted beetle (I’d like to see Brendan Frasier tackle one of those, the real Rosetta stone and a copy of it to take pictures with, sculptures from the Pantheon, and part of the code of Hammurabi. We skipped the Roman and Greek art part, since we’ve seen enough of that in Italy, but saw the rest. Souvenir shopping. Cream egg McFlurry from McD’s. Piccadilly Circus. Oxford St. Dinner. Then we went out on the town. Be @ 1 was a cool bar with mixed drink specials, good music, and fun people. We met some nice London girls who were really fun, and they took us to a club after the bar shut down. It was a BLAST. We danced, met cool British and Irish people, danced some more, then got a ride back to the hostel from a friend of Lucy and Henrietta’s around 3 am. Good night.
Next day I finally got a shower (the water wouldn’t get hot until that day, so I had been washing my hair in the sink. Good thing it was cold outside most of the time), then we headed to the globe theatre. We decided it was too expensive to go in, so we crossed the Millennium Bridge (the one that gets destroyed in HP6) and went to St. Pauls. Also too expensive to go inside, so we walked around it, then had lunch and wandered around in the general direction of Liverpool station to find out about getting a bus to the airport the next night. On the way we found a cool egg-shaped building we had seen coming into the city and checked it out up close. There was another weird building nearby which reminded me of the Exterminator at Kennywood, and a sign for a planned building that looks super cool. After finding out at the station that buses run all night and you can buy your tickets when you get there, we just picked a general direction and followed it. Good decision. We found a group of cool buildings on the Jubilee Walkway and then the Museum of London. I need to come back there someday with my future children. There was a ton of hands-on stuff and you could try on hats and clothes from different periods, and they are adding a whole new section within the next year about life in London after the Great Fire of London (which is where the tour ended). The Great Fire is a very interesting topic and I was shocked by the fat that it destroyed 4/5 of the city, left 100,000 people homeless, and had to be stopped by blowing up buildings so there was nowhere for the fire to spread. The Museum closed, so we walked around, had dinner, and headed back to the hostel.
I took a nap, then came down to the bar and chatted with Rodrigo) from Brazil, then with 3 guys from Colorado who James had met earlier and introduced me to. They were on a 3 week European adventure and had already seen Roma, Florence, Barcelona, Prague, and a few other cities. How do three college kids pay for such an adventure? By selling weed, that’s how. Sure makes you want to spend hours applying for scholarships, doesn’t it?
Our final morning in London was spent at the National Gallery where I got to see a bunch of the paintings I had studied this semester in real life. Afterwards, w checked for cheap theatre tickets but Wicked was sold out, Avenue Q only had really really bad cheap-seats left, and SOMEONE didn’t want to see Jersey Boys because they had never heard of Franki Valli and the Four Seasons. (Enter: Parker’s wrath unleashed) In hindsight, I really should have gone by myself. Ugh. Hopefully it comes to Pittsburgh when I get back.
. Lunch was a big, juicy, delicious hamburger with barbeque sauce on it. Mmmm. I waited a little bit, then got my coffee liqueur which I had been wanting to try since day one. Shopping next…Regent Street, Oxford Street, and hours in Top Shop. I bought a purse (which I actually needed since my green bag was being used as my suitcase back at the hostel) and a pair of key-earrings. I sat and waited for awhile, then went to find James who needed me to say ‘no’ to a pair of hideous sunglasses, and didn’t wait for me before buying 3 pairs of…well…let’s just say…ok, I’ll say it…ugly…shoes. Let’s also bear in mind here that we were flying Ryan Air, which has a very strict luggage policy. (ahem, foreshadowing). Next stop was Abercrombie and Fitch, where some of the most beautiful-looking people I have ever seen were “working” there, standing in the entrance and dancing on the balcony.
We got to Westminster Abbey right on time to attend Evensong and get into the church for free. This was a pretty cool service where the choir sang hymns and I tried to follow along but couldn’t help staring at all of the cool architecture and stained glass around me and James fell asleep. We were running out of money so we went to Chinatown for dinner and had delicious Thai food (second lunch in Oakland after Chipotle=Thai vendor on Bigelow). Back to the hostel slowly because I had massive blisters and we had a lot of time to kill. On our way we ran into a filming of Law and Order UK and stopped to watch for awhile. At the hostel we watched Barcelona beat Arsenal, then played Presidents and Assholes with our Colorado dealers…I mean acquaintances (sto scherzando!) At midnight, we got our stuff and walked to Liverpool station. Missed the 12:40 bus and had to catch the 1:10 one. At the airport we found a lot more people than expected already camped out and sleeping. Needless to say, we had to pull up a patch of tile and try our best to get some zzzs.
I managed to sleep a bit and wake up decently rested. Despite being at the airport 6 hours early for our flight, James nearly missed the plane. I’ll just say it had something to do with overweight baggage and the incompetent Ryan Air personnel who didn’t know where to send someone who has to check a bag unexpectedly. I slept all the way through take-off and woke up right before we landed. It was really cool in the airport seeing everything in both English and Gaelic. Took a train to Dublin central and walked to our hostel. It was a million and one times better than the one in London--not only was there a kitchen, a hang-out room with a TV, and a perfect location along the river, but the guys working the front desk were very friendly and VERY attractive. Abigal’s hostel, I’ll be back.
It was still pretty early in the morning, so we ate breakfast at the hostel, stored our stuff, and picked out some pamphlets about what to do in London. First thing on the agenda was Trinity College because it was close and simple to see. Being on a campus was the closest to feeling at home that I have since coming to Italy…there were big patches of grass, student dorms, a quad, and a that general, wonderful feeling that comes from being on a college campus. Plus there were blue skies and cherry blossoms. Essentially I was in heaven.
We decided to move on once we had both had our fill of student bliss, heading to Temple Bar and the Dublin Caslte area. Then back to the hostel to put our stuff in our rooms and have a quick lunch of pasta and marinara. The shower in my room was also a little slice of heaven—spacious, clean, had shelf space, and above all, HOT WATER. I may have taken an hour long shower there. But it was necessary.
I chatted with a nice Irish girl in my room then took a much-needed nap. When I woke up, there was another girl in the room who I tried to talk to in English but then found out she was Italian and we talked in Italian for the rest of the time. I didn’t realize how much I had missed Italian until that moment, or how much more fluid my speech was compared to the beginning of the semester. I went downstairs and we made dinner again (Dublin isn’t really known for its cuisine and it was all expensive), then I signed up for a day-trip to the Cliffs of Moher for the next day. I also asked the extremely cute Irish guy at the desk (whose name is Andrew) about what there is to do at night and he pointed out some places on the map and then we chatted for awhile before he jumped over the counter, swept me off my feet and took me to the most beautiful place in the city to watch the sunset and we cuddled there until the stars came out. OK…that story may only be true until the chatting part. But a girl can dream, right?
Finding a place to go out was a complete FAIL, but being exhausted and blistered didn’t make me try very hard. Back at the hostel, James introduced me to two American girls from his room (Danielle and Kristi) who were teaching English in France and we talked with them until about midnight when we were all falling asleep and decided to call it a night.
The next day I took the bus to the Cliffs of Moher and we stopped along the way at an Abbey, a Druid burial site, and an Irish pub for lunch. I met a girl from GA studying in Dublin and we talked most of the way. When we got to the cliffs, I met another lone travelling girl and we ended up hanging for the rest of the time there. The Cliff of Moher were simultaneously breathtakingly beautiful, terrifying, and amazing. We hopped the fence to the part that was off-limits and took a ton of pictures and talked a lot. Svetya is from Germany, but is an au père in London and was on vacation in Ireland for awhile. We also met a few girls from Salt Lake City and had fun taking jumping pictures with them. I learned later that some scenes from HP6 were also filmed there…
Back at the hostel, I crashed immediately. Danielle woke me up the next morning to go on another tour, but we found out at the tourist office that we had to pre-book. So we pre-booked for the next day and spent the day in Dublin. We checked out some souvenir shops, took a tour of Trinity College (with a good-looking and entertaining tour-guide), saw the book of Kells (the real one!!!), had lunch, got invited to have a coffee with French rugby-nuts but declined, went to St. Patrick’s cathedral, then finally to Kilmainhal Gail (Jail) where we learned a ton about Irish history and the issues between Northern and Southern Ireland and England. After dinner in the hostel, we went to an Irish singing and dancing show and spoke in French almost the whole time. The show was REALLY good and I loved the music and all of the cool jumps and spins and stepping.
The next day was somewhat of a disaster. Danielle, Kristi, and I were ready to leave by 8:30, but they went to the tourist center while I waited for James. While I was waiting, I went to put my stuff in the luggage room and got locked in. I got out then decided to go to the bathroom quickly but also got locked in there. When I got to the front desk, James was waiting. We got lost on the way to the tourist center trying to take a short cut and should have arrived on time, but couldn’t find the bus. We asked the next driver with the same tour company about our bus and he said they had waited for us for 20 mins then left. He let us on his bus though, and we got to see Sally Gap, Glendalaugh, and have a phenomenal lunch of Irish stew. We got back to the hostel and found Danielle and Kristi there, and they told us they were waiting…around the corner from the tour center where we would have come if not for that stupid “short-cut.” UGH. I looked at their pictures and was glad we got to go on our tour instead because I had really enjoyed the nature…though their company would have been nice. They had to leave for their plane to Scotland, but we exchanged facebook names and I plan on meeting up with Danielle in France. We hung out at the hostel until it was time to catch the bus to the airport, then there we were able to secure seats to sleep on instead of the floor. I didn’t get much sleep, but it was ok because the next day I spent the entire day reading HP3 and sleeping in the London airport while James went into town on his own. It was much needed because I was starting to feel sick and I was able to reserve enough bench space for us to both sleep semi-comfortably that night.
The next day I got back to Ferrara and it was a wonderful feeling to be “home” and I ate lunch with my host family, then had to get down to business with my presentation due the next day. Phew…more later, but I swear it will be more concise. I want to finish this Italy blog before I leave for France.