So I used to be really good at documenting my travels in travel journals. Or, at least, I was really good at documenting the first half of each of my travels. Somewhere along the middle of the trip I would always get tired and cranky and I would stop documenting in protest, to teach travel a lesson.
As a result, I remember the first half of all of my travels really well, and not really much about how they ended. Which, I guess, is fine — I don’t really want to read entries full of whining about how much I miss toilet seat covers and normal Diet Coke. The end of my travels usually isn’t so pretty.
This past September, when I spent a month interning in Edinburgh, Scotland, I did not keep a travel journal — instead, I kept in touch with the boyf via Facebook messages, since I decided that spending three thousand dollars texting or calling him was about six thousand dollars over my budget.
Some are travel-journal-like: very informative and descriptive. Others are mushy: they will probably be used against me on perezhilton.com when/if/WHEN I’m famous. The ones at the end are, of course, whiny and mean, bemoaning my fifty blisters and lack of shampoo.
I am going to post the first message for you. It’s so optimistic and cheerful that it’s almost foreboding, kind of like the start of a horror film.
September 6, 2010, 2:38am
Scotland so far:
- 10 hr plane ride surrounded by really loud women who I later found out were Armenian (my accent-guessing could have been worse?) [Note: I think I guessed that they were Italian, originally. I'm not sure I have ever correctly guessed an accent; sad, but impressively consistent.]
- 2 hrs into said plane ride = very buzzed on two mini bottles of red wine
- going through security in Heathrow, when I was taking off my boots, one of my [sweaty, mismatched] socks flung off my foot and landed on the shoe of the man standing next to me. WHY
- almost didn’t get let into the UK. When I went up to the customs guy and gave him my passport and he was asking me why I was here and I was telling him about my program, he asked if I was getting paid, etc etc, and I then I said it was more like a class-type of thing than an internship, and all of a sudden he leaned in and said in a very low voice, “This is not an internship, because if it was, then you wouldn’t have the proper visa and I wouldn’t let you into the country. If anyone asks you, it’s an educational program. You’re continuing your education.” So I said thank you, almost peed my pants, and ran away.
- got picked up by a German guy and Scottish guy who are running the program and who look like twins, and they took me straight to the hostel which is, by the way, right on the beach and HUGE. It makes our Paris hostel look like nothing. There is a bar, a store, a giant dining room, a couple of lounges, a cinema room (mini movie theatre, awesome?). I wonder how much it costs people to stay here. [Note: Apparently it cost too much. They went out of business while we were staying there.]
- fell asleep at 530 pm. Woke up at 530 am.
I know this isn’t actually all that optimistic and cheerful. But trust me, in comparison to the rest of the messages…it’s basically a victory song.
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