So I like to think of my day-to-day life as the personification of the outline of my future memoir. Don’t think much into it, I’m an English major so I have an excuse to be like this. I am studying in England with my best friend Catherine, and each time we gain some sort of life experience or have an amazing time or live a lifelong dream we instantly add a story to our memoirs. We have been in Europe for 4 weeks as of Saturday, and thus far we’ve added many a chapter. There are two specific chapters that I am going to go ahead and outline in this blog post.
Chapter 1 – From Paris, With Luton.
Our first trip out of London was to Paris, France. How could it not be right? We had everything all planned out. We’re actually very responsible young adults, Catherine and I, it’s a fact we take a lot of pride in. This is not a story about our strong common sense though, unfortunately. We had our Airbnb booked, our plane tickets purchased. Everything was set. The Friday of our flight out came around and we left Queen Mary around noon to get to the airport at 1:00pm so that we could be at there two hours early for our 3:20pm flight. Needless to say, getting around in London is pretty difficult if one was not raised a Londoner. Long story short – we got on the wrong train and ended up at the wrong station, setting us back, well, a lot. We ended up missing our flight (cheers to you EasyJet! We’re not bitter about you closing our gate a half an hour early or anything…). In due part of this severe mishap, we ended up sitting at the airport for another two hours until we could get onto another flight early the next morning (shout out to Ken at the EasyJet help desk, you’re the man). We calculated it out and it turned out that traveling back to our flat at our University would cost more than if we just stayed the night at a cheap hotel in Luton, UK, home of the Luton Airport. Luton is also best known for it’s position as Britain’s Worst City 2016. So we walked for about a half an hour with our over-stuffed carry-on bags until we found a hotel within our budget, ordered a large Papa Johns pizza and called it a night. We made it to Paris the next morning safe and sound. S’est la vie.
Chapter 2 – Confounded in the Cotswolds.
This past weekend, after being in classes for three weeks, we decided it was time for a getaway. We bought bus ticket to the Cotswolds in the countryside and spent our weekend walking around, drinking tea and enjoying the slowness of the days. We arrived in a flurry of beautiful trees burnt orange by autumn’s touch. We spent the day exploring and then got on a bus to our Airbnb, a beautiful house a couple miles from the Middle of Nowhere, UK. After exploring a bit more we went back to our home-away-from-home-away-from-home to figure out what to do for dinner. We figured if we caught a bus we could make it back to town for a bite to eat. So we got on Google Maps, as any experienced millennials would, and found a bus route. But, Google Maps failed us and we ended up missing our bus, and it just so happens to get dark at around seven o’clock here. And that is how Catherine and I ended up trecking for an hour in the middle of the English Countryside until we got a taxi to pick us up (step up your countryside game Uber, seriously, we need you out there – the world is a tough place). The end of our weekend get-away story is a happy one. We made it to dinner, we had some chocolate mousse. We spent the entire next day exploring amidst a symphony of birds chirping and wandering sheep and horses, we almost entirely forgot about the chaos of the night before. But we won’t forget, because obviously, now it’s in our memoirs.