Weekend Preview

This weekend Kaleigh and Chelsea will be attending an exclusive preview concert for Yoav while Michelle meets up with a family friend who is in London this weekend for business. Then Lindsey, Michelle and Kaleigh will travel to Wales to site-see and  go horseback riding on Saturday and Sunday. We’ll update you on how it all went when we get back!

Shit My Friends Say: London Edition

The roommates

So anyone who has a Twitter has likely heard of the “Shitmydadsays” phenomena caused by some random dude who posts a funny quote from his aging father every day.  Well, he hasn’t been posting anything recently actually because he got a deal for a sitcom on CBS that will star Will Shatner as the aforementioned paternal funny man.

I’ve never been one to miss out on jumping on a band wagon, so I posted a Mizzou version of “ShitMyFriendsSay” last year on the ColumnVI blog.  However, I feel that a new continent should call for a new post!  And after the antics of last weekend, I couldn’t resist. I’ve refrained from using names to save my roommates (and myself) from embarrassment.

Here, in no particular order is some shit my friends say:

It’s childsize…(vibrating noise)…I hope it works as good as my big one!

If it’s broke…fix it…that’s how it goes right?

Yes, you totally resemble Alfalfa. No, that’s not mean!

Tonight, fun means ninja bands, people. Ninja bands.

I forget about my ass and then it pops out and I’m screwed (groan).

Jelly Baby man got a girl!

They’re up above like vultures! Like in Lion King!

This is like drunk magic.

I am not associated with that Happy Meal back there!

You can’t just throw it on the side of the road! You have to litter strategically.

Any boy who uses emoticons needs to go

My grandma won at bingo so she put money in my account…I’m buying lingerie!

I feel like I’m in the opening scene of “Taken II.”

They’re like “Jersey Shore: Arabia.”

He opened his mouth and I was like “Oh…Hi, Shrek!”

I’ve got to start showering.

Peeing and French fries sound great right now.

Warning: I’m about to be hilarious.

You guys, I can’t open my purse.  There’s a “Reserved” sign in there.

This is only a taste of the hilariousness that has occurred on this London adventure!

Friday night mayhem

“Watch out for the semis!” my flatmate Chelsea screams as Kaleigh races across three lanes of British highway. She stops at the median, determining how to climb the fence that separates her from the other side of the road.

Chelsea and I look right for traffic and then dash to the median to join her. We clammer over the low iron fence and then rush across three more lanes to reach our desire destination: the other side of a six-lane British highway.

So how did we come to be running across British highways at 2 o’clock in the morning this past Friday?

Well let me tell you.

It all started with our simple desire to go to a club called Egg near King’s Cross tube station. Our night started out quite nicely with lots of hairspray, jewelry, and the intelligent decision to wear flats and not heels.

The first part of our journey was successful. We boarded the southbound Bakerloo train to Baker Street where we set off to find a Metropolitan line to take us to King’s Cross. We found the desire line, but got on going the wrong direction. Fifteen minutes later we are standing on the platform of Finchley Road, wondering how we could have made such a horrible mistake. Four more mistaken tube rides and an hour of wasted time later, we arrived at King’s Cross.

As we are prancing out of the station with our coats wrapped tightly around us, we encounter a gang of British teenagers, drunk and disorderly. They were carrying large pints of Stella (which is not allowed on the tube) and yelling as they stumbled through the station. One red-headed young boy spotted my entourage and approached, whistling and sloshing his beer.

“You girls are so sexy! I want all of you at once,” he slurred as he threw his half full can of beer at the nearest wall.

“In your dreams,” we hissed in disgust, hurrying away from the scene.

By this point it is past 11:30 p.m. so we no longer want to pay the cover to get into Egg. Instead we decide to wonder the streets and hope we happen upon a worthwhile pub. Three failed attempts later, we arrived at The Rocket, a pub we had previously heard was a good time, especially for Americans. So we decided to try it out.

Girls sporting bunny ears and boys in surgical masks meandered the premise of the pub in honor of the pub’s Friday night “dress-up” theme. We quickly discovered that there was nothing American about this place, but we decided it was still a good location to experience a bit of British culture. And we were right! I have never encountered a better place for people watching.

A previously undiscovered source of amusement is watching people dance to techno music in a confined space. They all end up looking like they are having some type of epileptic attack on the middle of the dance floor. Combine that with drunken nerds playing pool and the awkward couples who embrace the British notion that PDA is perfectly acceptable, and you’ve got a truly humorous situation.

After a couple hours of free entertainment, we decided it was time to make our way home to the quiet residential street of Clifton Gardens. Of course we first had to find a water closet and fastfood, because those are the two most essential things after a night out on the town. We finally found a women’s toilet inside a portion of the tube station that was still open and paid 30 pence to use its services. Across the street we were rewarded with the £1 menu at McDonald’s where we promptly bought burgers and fries to keep us company on our bus ride home.

After a few wrong buses, we finally found one that would take us to Paddington tube station, which was only a 15 minute walk away from our flat. The problem was we didn’t know which way home was when we de-boarded the bus since we were new to the area. Like any seasoned traveler, we found a map and began walking.

Fifteen minutes later, we were desperately trying to fend off the advances of a gypsie cab driver and figure out where on earth we had gone wrong. We had come to a large British highway and had become completely disoriented, since we didn’t remember seeing one in the near vicinity of our neighborhood. After wandering along the side of the highway for awhile, we realized that our home lay only a few blocks away, on the other side of the highway. Logically, this realization led us to our next decision: let’s cross the British highway.

And with the highway successfully behind us, we drudged home to fall into bed and sleep away what was left of the night.

We will blog more, I promise!

I feel that I owe an apology to our dedicated readers (aka Mom, Dad, select friends, and the random people Google brings our way). We have seriously been lacking in our blogging. However, I do have an excuse. It’s called displacement and lack of internet access.

As mentioned in a previous blog by Kaleigh, we have had some issues with our housing situation which resulted in 3 different moves before we were finally settled in our permanent abode in Maida Vale this week. We were forced to live in the stone ages in our two temporary flats and exist without internet access, which meant no blogging.

All this to say, we make a promise to blog more frequently from here on out. So book mark this page! It’s about to have some exciting new posts on it!

A Eurotrip Dating Adventure

Our guest blogger and roommate Lindsey

Though we all have had our fair share of run ins and escapades with European boys of varying nations in our first month in London, none of them quite rivals our roommate’s romantic rendevouz with a Swiss dude this Monday. Here is the account (written to a friend back home stateside) of her evening out with the mystery man who could’ve stolen her heart, but really only made her wish Mace wasn’t illegal in England.

Thanks for the guest post roomie!

The Best Date Story You’ve Ever Heard

Alright friends, get ready for the best date story of your lives. You may just pee your pants. I would like to note that I am not making this up.

PART I:

So yesterday I show up at the spot where I am supposed to meet Swiss boy. Now I am running a few minutes late so obviously, being the polite American that I am, I send him a text message to let him know. However, my text bounces back. As well as another. Well, I think to myself, this foreigner doesn’t have a real phone.

Turns out there was a problem with his phone. 10 minutes later I see him, we meet up, he gives me a european hello kiss on the cheek, and all is well. We then traverse across the street to a pub to chat over Peronis.

The date is going well, I’m enjoying his company, and he is telling me all about his days of crew at Harvard and how his team won the Head of the Charles race one year. I’m thinking to myself–this is great, I’m going to marry a handsome Swiss boy with an ivy league education who is as preppy as they get. We can spend summers on Lake Geneva and ski in the Swiss Alps. Not to mention there will be Evian water at my every beck and call. Oh, and he probably must have a Swiss bank account.

However, halfway through his beer he recieves a call from a “friend” and starts speaking in some language that I do not understand. He says “we have to leave now” (we’re only halfway done with our beers) and we leave the pub because he has to stop by this friend’s house only a few blocks down to pick something up.

His friend lives off Oxford Street, which as you know is a main street, so I said “okay, I’ll walk with you there.” Fast forward 5 minutes and we’re at his friend’s place. He insists that I come upstairs. All I can think to myself is “wasn’t Natalee Hollway’s killer a Swiss or Dutch or something like that?” so I tell him that he can run upstairs and grab what he needs while I wait on the street. He looks puzzled, his friends come down (3, all male) and are puzzled and I say sorry but no thanks.

So Mr. Swiss then grabs what turns out to be his computer from upstairs, comes back down, and informs me that he is leaving town that night to go to oxford for the weekend. I then tell him that our beer was lovely and that I’ll be on my merry way.

PART II:

Upon hearing this, Mr. Swiss says “Oh, no, we are still going to dinner Lindsey.” I’m like oh, great. I’ve been almost gang banged by the ivy league mafia and now this kid wants to take me to dinner? I agree, thinking I’ll get a free meal out of it. So we hope on the tube to go to this dim sum restaurant.

While on the tube, Mr. Swiss informs me that he needs to go to his hotel, which is right by the restaurant, to get his luggage. Now his hotel is in Notting Hill Gate (an area in which I am familiar) so I say fine. I will walk with you to your hotel and wait in the lobby. We get off the tube, hotel is like right across the street, and he has the bellman bring his suitcase while we wait in the lobby.

We then walk across the street for dinner. Everything is fine–I mean, we’re carrying on a conversation—when all of a sudden Mr. Swiss asks me “Did you cut off all of your hair because of a bad break-up?”

No, sir, I didn’t chop off all my hair because of a boy. I have short hair because I have thin retarded hair that can’t grow long or it dies in a million pieces.

So, as if that isn’t awkward enough, the bill comes. I offer to pay, as I always politely do, expecting for him to say “No, of course not.” Oh, no, Mr. Swiss takes my money. You’ve got to be shitting me. So much for chivalry.

Then Mr. Swiss gets all panicking because he has to make his bus to Oxford. We walk down the street to his bus and sure enough it just pulls right up. The kid gives me a high five and then gets on the bus. And that was the end of the date.

PART III:

Is that not the most screwed up rendez-vous you’ve ever heard?

Mr. Swiss has now friended me on Facebook. No, sir, I will not go on another errand running night with you. You can take your Swiss pocket knife and shove it where the sun doesn’t shine.

Bonjour Paris!

At promptly 3:30 a.m. this past Saturday, my phone started vibrating and making loud rooster noises. I thought I might destroy that little electronic nightmare.

But then I remembered, I’m going to Paris today. And the world got a little bit brighter, even though the sun still wasn’t up.

A few hours later, hair curled and dressed in turquoise blue, I boarded the Eurostar for my first trip to Paris. Our tour guide, Charlotte, walked down the aisles of the train informing us that it would be a glorious day in La Ville-Lumière. I couldn’t have been more excited.

Until I was in a tour bus passing sites such as the Arc de Triomphe and Académie Nationale de Musique, which I had honestly never expected to see outside of photographs. And then the Eiffel Tower came into view. It was every tourist’s dream. The sun was glinting off the iron tower as it loomed before me in all its iconic majesty. Of course I’m seeing all of this through the lens of my Nikon camera, like any tourist worth her salt. But it was beautiful none the less and now I have pictures to prove it.

We spent the morning cruising the River Seine, gazing in awe at the Notre Dame Cathedral and the Musée d’Orsay. Then we ate lunch on the first floor of the Eiffel Tower, after escaping from the French gypsies that persisted in calling us Lady Gaga. After climbing far too many steps and avoiding looking down, we reached the second floor of the Eiffel tower, only to realize that the Paris skyline looks surprisingly bare without the presence of the Eiffel Tower. Our afternoon in the city was then concluded with a visit to the Mona Lisa and the Louvre Museum, which was simply stunning even with the artistic clash of the Pyramide du Louvre.

Tired, but anxious to return to Paris again, we hastily bought shot glasses, keychains, and postcards from a souvenir shop and boarded our Eurostar train back to London.

As I waved to the city from my train window, I promised this would not be the farewell, but simply see you later.

Saviour du

Ever seen that episode of “Sex and the City” where Carrie almost marries her gay best friend Stanford? The idea is that this way she will have a life filled not only with shoes, but also with love, and he will be able to inherit his family’s money…probably using it to buy more shoes. When I first watched the episode I thought it was kind of a weird idea. Very “My Best friend’s Wedding” of them…if your best friend was gay.

I never thought I could ever see myself doing something as crazy as that. But after I spent some quality time with Mr. John Wilkerson of the Missouri School of Journalism Study Abroad Office, I could totally see why a girl would consider marrying her gay best friend.

Not that John is my best friend. And certainly not that we’re getting married.
But he is literally my, and the rest of our London girlies, savior of the week. In a blog to be written later, Michelle or I will detail all of the wonderful aspects of our first home in London town. To sum up: It was not ok. And even when we were at our wit’s end and thinking there was no hope in sight for a safe and happy home in London, John swooped in and saved the day.

When a man shows up after a red eye transatlantic flight looking immaculate and wearing a deep purple pin striped suit, I automatically know I can put total trust in him and his abilities. And boy were my instincts right on again! John came in and helped us make a speedy move out of our seedy home and into a lovely new flat. We are staying there now, and there are even sunflowers in the window. Anyone who knows me knows I’ve been waiting for those friggen sunflowers to show up for a long time. If they came because of John then all the better.

He even took us out for dinner, where we ordered the same dish (fate I know!) and regaled us with stories of his abilities at speaking French, (“I know enough to get around and be suggestive”) the dangers of taking pictures on an iPhone, (“Gotta make sure all my pictures are G-rated!”) and how old he actually is (“I’m 33 but that’s 88 in gay years! I’m glad I have someone who’s obligated to love me”).

Basically, he won me over heart and sole – of my shoes that is And while I don’t think I’d trade a life of heterosexual happiness for a gay best friend/husband, I can see why Carrie was tempted. All that fabulousness makes me want a gay best friend of my own, and a super cute dress to match!

The Royal Standard

I think most Americans have this view of European people as being this ultimately glamorous group of individuals who lead a high-class lifestyle. I know I did before I began studying on the other side of the Atlantic. I was expecting a James Bond-esque feel of fast cars, strong coffee, and men who consistently sported three-piece suits from Hugo Boss. Maybe I watch too many movies…or maybe I just assume that everyone in Britain lives like royalty.

Some of them certainly do. We have drooled over more designer clothing stores than Rodeo Drive can boast about, and almost been hit by countless Jags and Porsches. Everything is more expensive, but we are told it’s worth it. This is how the real people live; a life we can only dream of. Unless we manage to go the way of Princess Grace. I saw an exhibit today in the Victoria & Albert Museum about the beautiful Grace Kelly. Though the exhibit was meant to highlight her fashion sense, all it really did was make me even more certain that I should’ve been born a princess. Kelly lived every little American girl’s dream when she became Princess of Monaco, and proceeded to set new standards of a jealousy-inspiring life thereafter. She lived the true “European” life.

My European lifestyle, on the other hand, can be summed up by the plumbing in our flat. Touch and go. Basically, sometimes it’s great (when our toilet flushes or the washer works) and sometimes it’s just not (when you flush the toilet 85 times and a spit-sized amount of water comes out). I certainly have not purchased a BMW since arriving in London a week ago, and the only clothing purchase I’ve made was from a vendor at Camden Market. But I’ve visited a lot of beautiful and historic sites, gone out to the pubs, and generally had a fab time.  It’s just not exactly a princess-level grand London adventure.

But I met a woman today that made me realize that maybe that’s the best kind of London experience there is. I had to go to the mall to do client research for my internship – it’s a tough job, I know, but someone’s got to do it. One of the clients I’ll be working for is Gc, a designer Swiss watch brand, and I visited their boutique. It was there that I met Abi, masters student and budding film producer.

Abi lives with her parents because she can’t afford her own place while still studying and trying to get her own film company off the ground. And though living at home isn’t the most glamorous of positions to be in, Abi does that so that she can attend film festivals, live in a neighborhood where she passes Kate Moss daily and shop at stores where she has fought Sienna Miller for a pair of earrings. She’s met Daniel Craig, Kiera Knightly and the like as part of her “networking” efforts for her company. But in her spare time she works at the mall and goes to school.

She is, in one way, living the lifestyle every American dreams of having in Europe, and in another, she is living the life we normal people live everyday. So while I might not be a princess (sad), I have to admit that my London life is pretty damn good. I’ve even got Abi’s email address and am going to get movie tips from her when the BFI film festival comes to town. Maybe I’ll even get to meet Madonna. Wouldn’t that be a princess moment?

London Lessons: So many things I didn’t know

I have now been living in London for about 5 days and I am slowly beginning to learn a few things about the culture and customs here. Here are things I’ve learned during the past few days, in no particular order.

Groceries on the tube. On my first trip to the grocery store, Sainsbury’s, I instinctively went to find a cart. Thankfully I realized my mistake before I filled it to the brim with bread, fruit, and Diet Coke. Since I have to walk from the grocery story to the tube and then walk from the tube to my flat, I can only buy what I can carry, and that is not very much. Also, reusable cloth shopping bags are the way to go here since grocery stores charge 6 pence per plastic bag.

Everything tastes different. Even the bare necessities like chocolate and Diet Coke don’t provide me with American flavor. The chocolate is more bitter and the Diet Coke has a strange after-taste. My Special K cereal is thick and full of multi-grain and my Doritos have hot chili on them. It’s practically a tragedy. I guess I’ll have to give up on eating and drinking my American food and drink staples.

Lack of ice. I never knew how much I could miss frozen water, but no drink tastes right without it. My roommates and I went on a quest to find ice cub trays and were given blank stares at the grocery store. Apparently its an overrated American commodity. At least the bartender at the pub put ice in my rum and coke.

McDonalds on every corner. Even across the Atlantic Ocean I can’t get away from Ronald McDonald. The golden yellow arch is only a block away from my flat and every where I go I manage to pass at least one McDonald’s, KFC, or Pizza Hut. Unfortunately Taco Bell, my favorite fourth meal location, has not yet made its debut here. The differences between American fast food and UK fast food? The McDonald’s here doesn’t have a drive-through, the Pizza Hut has full table service, and the KFC is at least two stories. Londoners know how to eat their fast food in style.

Dryer in the Washer. Europeans are all about conserving space, so why have a washer unit and a dryer unit when you could just combine them? Imagine my confusion when the maintenance man in my building told me that my clothes could be washed and dryed all in the same machine. Advanced technology or expert clothes shrinking device? Let’s just say, I’m scared to do laundry.

First floor is actually the second floor. It depends on who you ask, but I personally think the Brits are all confused. They refer to the main floor as the ground floor (translate American: first floor) and the floor above that is called the first floor (translate American: second floor). So when I say I live on the third floor in my building, I actually live on the fourth floor.

Mercedes is a middle class car. A lot of people in London don’t own cars and simply rely on public transportation via tube and bus, but those who do own cars, own nice ones. Walking down the street on the uneven sidewalks, I pass BMWs, Mercedes, and Audis will frequently. Gleaming cars are parked on the street with no worry of thievery. Maybe it has to something to do with the big brother cameras on every street corner or maybe it’s thanks to the fact that people with cars have nice cars (at least by American standards).

Anthrax laced heroin. Apparently some vindictive soul decided to spike some of the heroin supply in London with this acute disease. Now heroin users all over the city are dying of this disease. One more reason to thank DARE for teaching me to avoid drugs.

Tube strikes. Tonight tube workers across London will strike and the London Underground will be out of service for the next 48 hours. This means that I, along with the rest of London, will be required to depend on bus service to get to work, classes, etc. I’m all for employees protesting poor working conditions, but I wish they wouldn’t do it when I need to ride the tube.

Chemists do not work in laboratories. When a Londoner tells you to go see a chemist to get the medicine you need, don’t be confused. The Brits call a pharmacist, a chemist, and drug stores (like Walgreens) are called pharmacies. The best thing about pharmacies, though, is that they are a one-stop shop for nice make-up.

We have arrived!

Kaleigh and I arrived in London today, jet-lagged and ready for this semester’s adventures to begin!