Leaving home

I know what you're thinking right now. "Kelly has a month of life to catch up on. She takes about two pages a day normally, and now she has to do the same thing for thirty days? How am I going to pretend like I read this when really I kind of gave up halfway through?" I promise I will try to be brief, even though I was doing something new every 24 hours. But I might as well try. Lost causes are the only ones worth fighting for!

York has a five-week spring break. I know. I KNOW. Isn't that craziness? Supposedly it's so that it will be the same length as the Christmas break, but it seems a bit much! They all call it "Easter" here, though. Everyone thinks it's so funny when I say spring break... "just like the drunk American kids in the movies!" What can I say, I just love living up to their American stereotypes.

My friend Genevieve from Oxy and Francie and I decided we would travel around Europe for four weeks, considering it would take 10 hours each way to go home and jetlag would eat up two of the weeks of our break if we decided to go back to California. Plus, it would cost money and what would we do there? We will never again be this close to Europe and wanted to take advantage of it.

Genevieve and I started out in London. We had both gotten less than five hours of sleep each the night before we left (me because I was freaking out over the phone with my parents, her because her flatmate had experienced a minor mental breakdown) and we passed out on the train. When we got the train station, I was surprised by my friend Kyna from Oxy. I knew that she was in London and wanted to meet up with me, but I had no idea she would meet me at the station! Needless to say, I was stoked.

She was there with her ex-boyfriend Morgan who was studying there. Morgan had once visited Oxy for Kyna's 21st birthday, so it was fun to see another familiar face. They took us out to lunch at possibly the best creperie I have ever been to and to cookies for Ben's cookies. They also helped us figure out the subway sytem (I mean, the TYUUUBE), which I was so grateful for because I used the knowledge for the rest of the trip (Paris, Madrid, Rome, etc.)

We met up with another Oxy person Justin that night (St. Patrick's Day) at a place called the Troubadour (where Paul Simon and Joni Mitchell have played!) We ordered a pitcher of really bad sangria and heard about his adventures in Amsterdam. We then moved onto a pub to get pints of Guinness (what else?) and saw all of the drunk English people dancing around (to "Sweet Home Alabama"... they are all inexplicably IN LOVE with this song) with their special Guinness hats on. If you bought four pints, you got a free felt hat with four-leaf clovers on it and they were ALL wearing theirs.

That's one of the things I love about English people. They get so into celebrating. When they go to themed parties, they all dress up. When a really cheesy old song is played at clubs, they all dance to it with enthusiasm comparable to mine. When they get free felt hats, they wear them instead of jamming them into their bags. It's refreshing that they aren't always trying to look "cool" like Americans would.

The next day, we went to Camden where they have a HUUUGE street market. We wandered around for a few hours before finding our mecca: about 10 vintage stores, all in a row. Genevieve and I could only stand there and gape at the true beauty of the place before diving in. By the end, I was almost sick of vintage dresses, which I never thought I could say! I ended up buying an old Rolling Stones concert shirt. It started raining (a freezing rain) and Genevieve and I warmed up in Starbucks with tea... I'm English! (It was only mint tea, though, which my English friend Toby says "isn't real tea," but I think of it as almost the gateway drug into real tea.)

On Monday, we went to the Victoria and Albert Museum, a rather eclectic one with bronze replicas of famous statues (Michelangelo's David, Trajan's column, etc.), the largest collection of miniature portraits (most smaller than a credit card) and an incredibley cool photography room with awesome photos (everything from bears to awkward teenagers to John Lennon). We walked to Hyde Park and I got to see Albert Hall ("now they know how many holes it takes to fill the Albert HALLLL..."). We returned to the same creperie (the crepes must have cocaine sprinkled in them) and caught the late afternoon train to Paris.