Oh The Places We’ll Go

My birthday is next Thursday and the preparations are already underway.  Most likely my birthday will be a bit of pub golfing (drinking games at 18 different pubs along the subway), which will inevitably bring hysterical drunkenness and dancing in the street.  I’ve started mapping out the 18 pubs we’re going to be stopping at on my birthday, thanks to the angels who created this website completely dedicated to pub crawling the underground here in Glasgow.  Nifty.

We went to Curlers the other night, which is the bar down the hill from my apartment building, and ran into a guy in a full on pig costume going around taking pictures with people.  And I got a picture, of course.  Wouldn’t you?  How often do you go into perfectly good bars seeing grown men dressed up as farm animals?  

My 2 essays are due next week and I have done absolutely nothing to prepare to write, research or anything for them.  I’ve got a few days to get those going and polished but I have to be pretty focused until next Wednesday in order to get them done and up to the standard that they need to be.  I think I’m especially nervous because I’ll be writing for British professors and I’m unsure as to whether or not my writing will be ‘up to snuff’ since I’ve never been judged on a level other than American writing, so it should be interesting.  Hopefully they don’t pick up my paper and laugh, calling me a stupid American and saying that I have no idea what I’m doing.  Let’s hope I’m not that terrible!

After I finish my next can of Coke, the last from a box that I purchased on Saturday, I’m going on a soft drink fast.  No soft drinks for as long as I can make it.  I’m going to try as hard as humanly possible, but I have a feeling it’s going to be terrible.  I don’t think I can emphasize to people enough how MUCH soda I drink.  It’s some ridiculous amount- at least 4 cans a day.  Pretty terrible when you think about it.  I mean, at least I’m addicted to something like soft drinks and not something worse (like cocaine or something), but that doesn’t mean it’s not bad for me.  Save my teeth while they’re still there, right?  And at least I don’t like alcoholic mixed drinks with any kind of soda in them.  Other than my Long Island Iced Teas, of course.  But even then, it’s 90% alcohol and a splash of Coke for coloring.  The good ones are made that way, at least.

I’ve been on a movie spree the last few days.  I’ve become a pro at finding any movie imaginable online to watch with everyone in the flat.  Illegal, it may be, but free… and for a poor college student that’s all I really care about.  I watched “Wanted” with Angelina Jolie yesterday and it blew me away, I thought it was absolutely fantastic.  That’s a buyer, right there.  Plus it doesn’t hurt that the wonderful James McAvoy is in the film, and he’s Scottish and beautiful so there’s TWO pretty people to look at the WHOLE time!  Haha.  Watched “The Notebook” today against my wishes.  I’m not good with sappy crying movies so the end was a little awkward, everyone else crying but me.  I guess I just have a heart of stone.  

Tomorrow I have to go to the library, force myself to read, and seriously research for my 2 papers due next week… or else I’m going to be in the weeds!  Procrastination will be the death of me one of these days, I’m sure of it.

-Catherine

I’m finally ready to get back into the game.  The traveling game, I mean.  I took a good amount of recovery time, a few weeks to give my brain a break before getting back into all of the old stuff that I need to do post-summer backpacking extravaganza, and now uploading pictures is in full force.  I’ve got all of them rotated and ready to go with a fresh, new website to go.  Now all I’ve got to do is get them all online!  I’m actually in the middle of uploading a lot of them, but it’ll take a while since there’s, well, hundreds of them and they each take time to get online.  However, I’ll let everyone know when they’re online as soon as they are since I want everyone to see everything that happened while we were backpacking.

Getting my party on with the Giants jersey

Now, on to Glasgow.  This weekend was my Beer Pong 101 class for the UK natives.  Now, to give a little background info, beer pong is a big deal back home.  9 red cups on each side of a table, throw a ping pong ball in the opposing team’s cups and get rid of their cups first.  Victory.  Easy enough, yes?  Apparently, English people don’t have the cool red cups over here, so I was stuck using crappy flimsy cups in my instructing.  They didn’t work out very well, so beer pong was kind of a bust, but the night turned from crappy beer pong to excellent Kings Cup playing!  Yes, King’s Cup.

... disgusting

Get a stack of cards, circle them around a big cup and make up a rule for every card.  2 is a bathroom pass, a 3 is everyone has to raise their hands in the air, 4 is touch your chin with your thumb.  The penalty for doing whatever the task is wrong, or last: drink all of your drink.  It’s called King’s cup since anytime someone gets a King, they have to fill up 1/4 of the BIG King’s Cup in the middle of the table with whatever they’re drinking.  Thus, if everyone is drinking something else, the cup in the middle can be…. a monstrous concoction.  After nearly all the cards were gone, it was time for me to pick my card and, of course, who got the 4th and final King?  Me.

I had the pleasure of drinking 1/2 a cup of beer mixed with rum and juice, and vodka and coke.  Yum?  I held my nose and took it all in.  King’s Cup and Beer Pong moved into the living room, which turned from King’s Cup round 2 to dance party, spin the bottle, and god knows what else.  I got to play DJ, which basically meant everyone got to make fun of my “weird American music” which is apparently “bollocks” since I don’t listen to strange electronic British indie music.  Think any kind of music you could possibly imagine with some kind of backbeat put on to it.  Terrible.  Everything sounds like it belongs in a disco and guess what folks.  I don’t disco.  After DJ’ing and trying (unsuccessfully) to get people to stop doing things they’d regret later (and did), I headed to bed.  The festivities ended at 5 in the morning, and everyone passed out in their beds.

I’ve finally gotten a hold of some of the photos from the debachery that I wrote about with the Pub Crawl with the University of Glasgow Tennis Club, since my roommate Laura was tagged in one of the photos on Facebook randomly.  There’s only three photos of the whole night that I’ve found, since none of us girls brought our cameras with us, but I think anyone who has read my story will see how the night got progressively drunker and drunker with every Underground stop.

I’ve booked my first traveling plane ticket since traveling to Europe in the beginning of August.  Guess who’s going back to Barcelona?  Yes, that would be me.  I’m going with all of the California girls since none of them have ever been before, and it’s the kind of city that you need to experience with a bunch of females rather than your brother.  Don’t get me wrong, it was still fun with Thomas.  Hopefully it will be even more fun with the girls with me to oogle at Spanish boys!  I can’t wait.  We’re going to be there at the end of November, so I’m really excited about it.  The Ramblas had better be ready for me, because I’m coming back!  Erica is coming with me and I can’t be more excited.  I know Erica from back home at UCSB and her and I are really good friends, so I’m stoked we’re going to be partying in Barcelona together since she just turned 21 and was sick on her birthday, which is always no good.  Other people coming are Shaun, who is also from UCSB, Megan from UCLA and Jodie is from UCSD.  Molly is Molly, from Rocklin High School just like me, but she’s a genius and goes to Dartmouth and she’s never been to Barcelona either, so it’ll be a good time.  Here’s some pictures of the UC girls (plus Molly) from the first few weeks.

at the QMU with Jodie and Erica

at QMU Cheesy Pop night

erica and i with nicola's bunny ears in the background

Other than going places, I opened up my UK bank account today, so I’m feeling pretty accomplished.  I’m excited I can finally set up paying for my apartment and not have to worry about it anymore.  One more thing off the check list, that’s for sure.  I got my care package today from the states, with tons of goodies including BUTTERED popcorn (which they don’t do here in movie theatres!), hot chocolate stuff, RED CUPS for BEER PONG!, macaroni and cheese, and some boots that I didn’t have before.  I even have my trusty old alarm clock from the states here with me now, so that’s good too!  There’s nothing like waking up to the same old annoying sound from back home, eh?  Nicola, the Irish one, didn’t know what mac and cheese is, so I told her I’d make it for her soon.  I told her it’s an American college food staple.  Just like hot dogs, but no one gets that here either.  Whatever, I don’t care.  I still love them.

I also made guacamole the other day, so I have done a lot in the last few days.  I found avocados and practically died, so I made guac.  Pretty good, I must say for not having the same ingredients that I usually have.  The salsa here is a lot more ketchup-y so that was a bit of a downer.  That and the tortilla chips suck.  Mexicans need to move en masse to Scotland so they can teach these people about delicious food already!  Taco Night is tomorrow night, so I’m making dinner for all the people.  I’ve got ground beef ready, with taco shells and all the toppings.  Now all I need is some tequila to go along with all of my damn limes!  I’ve got like, 10 limes in the fridge and no clue what to do with them.

To finish, my Giants season may be over, but the best part of the year is here: playoffs!  For the next week or so (5 games if they go all 5), I am going to be a HUGE Cubs fan.  You know why?  The DAMN Dodgers are back in the playoffs and my adopted Cubbies had better kick their asses out!  I’m confident in the Cubs, so they’d better bring home the W’s and send Manny and company packing so I don’t have to worry about the Dodgers making it past the first round.  I like the Cubs and the Brewers this year in the NL, especially since I love Prince Fielder and JJ Hardy and I want them to come to my team!  For the AL, I love love the Rays and I hope they make it far in the playoffs.  I can’t in good conscience cheer for the Angels (i’m still bitter), and there’s no way I could stand watching the Red Sox win 3 titles in the last 6 years.  Not necessarily because I hate the team, but moreso because I hate their fans.

I hope everyone enjoys the pictures and gets a good laugh out of them.  I’ll be sure to take more this weekend and get some of my apartment and housemates for everyone to see.

I’m staying up tomorrow to watch the VP Debates with a few people so I can’t wait for that.  I’m going to get no sleep.  Crap.  Oh well, at least Biden vs. Palin should be an entertaining matchup!

Until later…

-Catherine

Sorry for the delay on this post (Debra, that’s for you… haha).  This week has been exhausting, confusing, and interesting all rolled into one.

We started school on the 22nd, but as far as time is concerned my life is pretty easy.  I have lecture at 10, but not necessarily every day since the lecture theatre is allocated between 3 classes (two of which I am in).  In other words, anytime on my schedule it says it’s being used for GC 11 (Shakespeare), I don’t have to go since I’m not in that class.  Beautiful!  This week I didn’t have class on Wednesday or on Friday so I got to stay in and sleep, drink crack (otherwise known as Coke) and hang out with my friends in my apartment.

My two classes are both honors (or honours as they spell it here) English Literature classes, one on Reformation period writing and one on Renaissance period writing.  It’s a little differently done here since 75% of your overall grade is from your exam at the end of the year (even though lectures for the class only run through first semester, the exam is still in May).  Your reading is very selective, you can turn in one or two essays, and your selections of material to read are completely up to you.  I’m used to walking in, getting a list, and being told “read act 1 before Friday”.  Yeah, they don’t do that here.  It’s almost nice because you get to learn the material as you want to learn it.  If you hate Milton, you can focus less on him and go more for Dryden.  On the other hand, it almost sucks more because you aren’t being forced to read on pace, so you can get caught behind pretty easily.  Hopefully I don’t fall into that category, but then again I’m pretty good about staying focused and besides that I have Molly here to kick my ass along the way!

The biggest event of the week so far was going on a pub crawl with the Glasgow University Tennis Club (which mind you, I don’t play tennis at all, I was there for moral support for Molly).  We all got split into teams and Elizabeth (my flatmate from England), Molly and I were all split into the same team with a few Scots and a German.  We got an unlimited pass on the Underground, and basically the idea is to go to as many metro stops as you can, and get a drink at every one at the closest bar.  The rule is, however, that one person in your group gets to choose the drink for everyone in the group.  Oh, and you can’t sit on the metro.  You have to stand and not lean against anything- think “surfing” the subway.  At first it was all good- vodka and coke, tequila, whiskey, rum and coke.  And then, of course, Elizabeth being the English girl that she is… chooses for us to drink red wine at one pub.  Red wine.  We had to chug all of our drinks, so chugging the red wine definitely was the one that did me in.  Molly, being smaller than me, was a goner already.  More pints of beer, Guinness.  Then somehow getting to a dance club downtown with everyone else.  Getting a taxi back, falling out of it (literally), spilling chips everywhere (french fries), falling over again.  It was a pretty hilarious night, but such a bad bad bad morning.  I’m never drinking again (or at least not for a couple days.  Haha)

Other than that, most of the last few days have just been ‘bonding time’.  I’ve got a good crew of people here with me, so Glasgow has been amazingly awesome so far.  I’m having a good time making fun of how the English (and Scottish, Irish) say things, trying to let them know we Americans pronounce things correctly.  Haha.  I got a chance to stay up and watch the debates last night, so that was fun.  I won’t bore anyone with who I support (*cough* Obama *cough*), but it was fun watching it with everyone, non-Americans and all.  Makes me feel all patriotic inside.  

I think most likely I’m going to stay up on Sunday and watch the last Giants game of the season.  Let’s hope Tim Lincecum pitches well at gets the W so he’ll be 18-5 and get the Cy Young Award.  Woot!  I wore my Giants jersey around the other day, and no one had any idea what it meant but I just keep telling everyone “If anyone asks, this is the greatest team that ever was.  Period.”  Haha.  They’ll all soon be converts, I swear.

Oh, and through my GENIUS I got to watch the 49ers game via Skype, so I basically got to watch the 49ers beat the Lions on my brother’s TV.  Basically Thomas turned on my mom’s webcam on her laptop and faced it towards his TV so I could watch the 49ers game.  We won, I was excited… and none of my flatmates understand American football, but I don’t care.  I still love it.  

I’m going to try and get tickets to a Celtic game soon, so hopefully I can see a real, live football game in person!  Yay!  I can wear my green and white scarf and learn words to songs that I don’t know.  Sounds fun, right?  I have to learn them before the middle of October so I can cheer for Celtic against Manchester United (don’t judge me, Thomas) and sing the songs and everything.

I think we’re still trying to plan our trip to Barcelona that we’re taking with all the California girls, so I have to get on that.  Other than that, I’m making a turkey for Thanksgiving (YESSSS) and I’m going to try and make it out to Amsterdam sometime this semester.  I will find a way.  Oh, and I have to figure out what I’m going to do for Christmas.  That should be interesting.

I’ll be better about posting, I promise.  And I’ll get ALL the pictures organized one of these days! 

-Catherine

P.S. Oh, and if anyone has a microphone on their computer or a webcam and you want to call me for super super cheap, call me on Skype.  My skype name is beach3bum.  Costs you NOTHING.  And if you call internationally, I can give you my cell number so anyone can call me out here.

P.P.S. My birthday is October 30th.  Just putting it out there.

We made it safely and soundly here to Barcelona on Tuesday morning after an eventful and interesting train ride from Milan into Spain. We left Milan after killing our 6 hours of downtime reading, playing video games, updating our journals, and making random phone calls to places in the States to people whose phone numbers we had. The train we were on was a hotel train, so we each had our own beds even though we were in separate cabins since they separate men and women (obviously) so that it makes it more comfortable and secure. I had 2 people staying with me in my cabin; a Spanish girl who didn’t speak any English, and an Italian girl with Koolaid red hair who was traveling with her balding boyfriend.

The ride itself went by pretty quickly. I read my book, wrote in my journal some more, went to the drink car with Thomas and had a Carlsburg and some Doritos (yes, I was pretty happy about that). Bedtime was a lot more interesting though. Sure, the bed was fine for what it was: a board with a mattress on it and very uncomfortable blankets. The Spaniard, however, was the loudest female snorer I have ever met in my entire life. The wax earplugs my mom gave me have come in handy with Thomas, but they literally saved my life on that damn train.

We got into Barcelona around 9 in the morning and headed towards the subway station to get to our hostel here. Getting around Barcelona, turns out, is pretty easy. They have a very extensive Metro system so you can get everywhere and anywhere just by hopping on and off. Our hostel was off of the green line, Les Corts. The hostel, the Sant Jordi Hostel, is the best one we’ve stayed in yet. The rooms are fine, but the kitchen is what puts it over the top. We’ve finally been able to have some normal food, eggs for breakfast and toast to go with it. I think we’re going to make some normal food for dinner since we haven’t had ‘normal’ food since we left the States. The people here are absolutely awesome. We’ve had a good time with Jo and Leah, two Aussies from Melbourne who are backpacking around all of Europe separately but have met up a few times in random places, obviously one of them being Barcelona.

Spain definitely has a different feel to it than Italy does. Obviously being in California and being so close to Mexico has its perks when trying to understand Spanish. There are words that I know: please, thank you, what is your name, etc. Spanish in Spain, though, is a little different than Spanish they speak in Mexico. They pronouce the ‘c’ sound a lot differently, so it sounds like they have a lisp instead of pronouncing the sound. You have to hear it- it’s pretty funny. The food is a lot scarier than Italian food. Thomas and I aren’t the most adventurous eaters in the world, so all of the seafood on the food here is a little frightening. Spanish cuisine is all about the tapas, which are little snack foods that come with all different kinds of things on them, some scary like with octopus and some with normal things. I’m not brave enough to try any of them but we saw sardines on pizza the other day. Umm… gross.

Our first day in Barcelona on Tuesday was spent figuring out the Metro and going to the Picasso Museum near the Ramblas, which is the party central street here in Barcelona. During the day, the richies go there to shop at Chanel and Louis Vuitton, and at night the young crowd comes out to play going to bar after bar until 8 in the morning. The Picasso Museum is a pretty amazing museum featuring works from all across Picasso’s art career, beginning with his early portrait work and ending with his more experimental stuff, cubism and everything that came with it. It’s pretty amazing to see the progression of how he got from one style to the next, who influenced him and why things look the way that they do. I guess Picasso would donate works to the museum throughout his career, but never lived to see it in person as he vowed he would never set foot in Spain while it was under a Facist rule.

Yesterday was a much busier day. In the morning we made it over to the Gaudi cathedral, which is a Gothic cathedral Gaudi started building in the late 1800’s and is still being worked on today, 80 years after his death. I guess they believe it won’t be finished for another 50 years, so going to see it under construction still is absolutely amazing. It takes you by surprise, the location and everything. One minute you’re in awe they have KFC in Barcelona, and the next you’re looking at this absolutely amazing cathedral in the middle of the city.

We had quite the excursion last night wandering around the streets of Barcelona. It was one of the Kiwi’s birthdays, so we went out to celebrate. The first bar we went to, Travel Bar, was a bit of a shack of a bar, very very hot and sweaty with a lot of loud Irish and American travelers screaming while watching the replays of the England v. Czech Republic friendly earlier in the night. The beer was good, but most of the beer that doesn’t come from America tends to be pretty good so I have a lot of faith in the Europeans and their beer making abilities.

The Apollo, our next and turns out last stop on the journey, was the creepiest bar I have ever seen in my life. Hilarious, but creepy. We showed up because the Australians we were hanging out with said they heard it was a good place to go, but after paying ten euros just to get in, we were literally the only people in the place. 20 minutes later, the place was packed. Weird. After many many drinks and a couple of hours of listening to bad reggae music mixed in with Spanish hip hop, Thomas was drunk enough to be ‘dancing’, which if you know Thomas… he doesn’t dance. At all. Quite funny. Our whole group was having a good time, listening to bad music and trying to do Spanish dancing without much success. One of the girls who came with us was from Argentina, so she (with the English that she did know) was trying to show us all the different dance steps. Tried, failed. I’ll get over it someday.

Walking back, needing to use a bathroom at 4 in the morning after drinking a lot of beer and taking bad shots… not fun. 40 minutes of walking through the sleepy streets of Barcelona, we finally made it back to the hostel and fell asleep with our clothes on in our bunk beds, waking up today around 2 in the afternoon. Thomas, still half drunk this morning, got up to use the bathroom after snoring insanely loudly through half of the night. Quite the night, folks… quite the night.

We leave tomorrow for Paris after an awesome time here in Spain. It has definitely been the funnest part of our trip, going out with people and having a good time. Barcelona is a fun party town with too much to do and see in the amount of time we were here.

Hopefully I can make it back with some of the Scots while I’m at school out here.

I’ll update more when we get into France…

Adios

Thomas and I have had a great stay in Florence so far and we’re almost sad to be leaving tomorrow.  The city here is our kind of style- small and quaint, but still has a lot of heart and soul.  It may not be the biggest city in Italy, but to us Florence has a lot more of the Italian spectacle and magic than Rome ever had.

Yesterday, after we had a chance to sit down yesterday and just relax after our long walk and expedition trying to find out hostel, Thomas and I made it over to the Uffizi art gallery to check out the different works of art in Florence’s most famous Italian art gallery.  The most famous work at the Uffizi Gallery, ‘The Birth of Venus’, is an absolute spectacle and is absolutely breathtaking to see in person.  Besides that, though, we found the Uffizi gallery to be a bit of a disappointment.  Other than the ‘Birth of Venus’ most of the other art in the gallery is medieval religious art from around the 1400’s, which after a while all starts to blend together and can be a bit of a bore.

Our adventures today, however, were much more exciting.  After sleeping for what must have been 12 hours last night, we got on and walking around Florence around 10:30 this morning before making reservations on a train to Venice tomorrow.  After we took care of the reservations, we made our way to the Accademia, which is most famous for Michelangelo’s ‘David’.  The line, while it was long, moved pretty quickly and before we knew it we were inside the museum staring up at one of the most famous sculptures in the world.

‘David’ is absolutely breathtaking.  You would think you’d be prepared for it, but the sight of it exceeds all expectations.  The sculpture itself is absolutely humongous.  It is probably about twice of my own height, and is on a pedestal which makes it even taller.  The details to the sculpture are what make it so incredible.  All of the veins, the muscles, the details of the hair and the features are all perfectly done so that even though you know it isn’t real, the attention to detail almost makes it seem as though it is.

After seeing ‘David’ we made it back to the hostel, hung out for a little while, and headed over to a little bar called Friends to watch the Community Shield match between Manchester United and Portsmouth.  Manchester United won on penalties, of course, but the fun part of watching the match was being around other football fans watching the match instead of it being just us watching the match at 4 in the morning in our PJ’s in Rocklin.  After a pint of Guinness, we met a family of Portsmouth fans from England who were here on vacation in Florence, so they bought us a pint of Harp while talking about Las Vegas, what people in Scotland are like, and other random things.

Typing right now, post-bar, is a little difficult.  After a couple of pints of beer, and a Long Island Iced Tea (which I’m sure has been the death of me), I’m probably what you would call drunk, so while I’m having a pretty good time writing this, getting the right keys in order has been a lot more difficult than it usually would be.

Tomorrow the plan is to get in to Venice and explore, since we’ll be there until the morning of the 13th before we move on to Milan.  I think we’ll both miss how beautiful and quaint Florence is, but hopefully Venice will be just as amazing. 

I’ll write more when I have the chance to update how life is in Venice.  I probably, after tonight, need to remind myself to lay off of the Guinness post-Manchester United victory but you’re only in Italy once, right?  I’m sure it will be a lot worse once I get to Scotland.  I’ve been warned that the Scottish drink like tanks so I’m in for a rude awakening.

Until next time- Ciao