Remember, Young Lady

When I studied abroad in the English city of Leeds I was assigned to live in a flat that was as far as could be from my university, and, of course, this seemed the worst thing that could possibly happen.

I would have to figure out how to travel to school in a foreign city. The prospect of traversing along stranger sidewalks was daunting- the most I’d ever had to figure out was the campus layout of my home university, UMass Amherst. And while UMass was big enough on it’s own, I’d always lived right on campus, no messy buses or streets to figure out.

I sucked it up, of course, moved into that flat, and learned the English bus system. The differences from US buses were minor, yet more than enough to make me look like a dumb foreigner if I didn’t have the help of my British flatmate at first.  I went and got a bus pass along with my fellow American flatmate and slowly, after several rides, and one or two particularly troublesome journeys on very snowy nights that turned every landmark identical and unidentifiable, I slowly learned how to do the whole English bus thing.

(T)hello there

Okay. Hello. So listen. I’m really bad at introductions so I’m going to tell you about the time I took a fourteen hour overnight train ride from Paris to Venice.

Or maybe it thirteen hours. Sixteen? Do I truly care to remember? The only thing I recall having to do with numbers was that the train ride cost 55 euros (I think? I might be completely wrong?)(OKAY, maybe I don’t remember anything having to do with numbers about this trip) for the each of us. Each us being myself, Jen, and Sarah, two of my best friends I’d met in during college. This was our Grand European Adventure, a trip that had been in the works since about two years before, when Sarah had begun thinking of applying to grad schools in the UK. While Sarah had shipped herself off to Scotland to study at the University of Edinburgh the summer after we graduated UMass Amherst, Jen and I worked our tiny hearts out to save up money to get ourselves over to Europe. While Sarah, of course, worked her tiny heart out studying (and believe me, that girl studies hard, I witnessed her slave over her dissertation on trains and planes and hostel beds in every city we visited. That thing probably got a free ride to the top of the Eiffel Tower with us).

Anyway, it was the three of us, the Greenough Girls against Europe (Greenough being the dorm the three of us lived in together during our senior year at UMass), and truly, it was us against Europe. Or, perhaps more accurately, Europe against us.