Scotland & Prague - November 2002

Monday, November 4
As my good friend Mary Jayne said last week, "You know, our house is kinda like 'The Real World'... only with 40 people and a lot less sex." Ah yes, it was inevitable! We've all regressed back to the mental level of high schoolers and the petty drama is running full force. This last week had so much drama actually, it was the first time I've wanted to go home since I've been here. Well, first there was the major drama, that wasn't petty at all, which happened at room checks last Tuesday night. The RAs "randomly" searched certain people's desk drawers. Funny how the "randomly" searched desks all belonged to members of a specific group of friends. Yeah. So anyway, a tiny bit of Bacardi was found in Bree's desk drawer and she came THIS close to being kicked out of the program, which really really sucked. I don't think a lot of people really understand what a thread she was hanging on to. There are a lot of extenuating circumstances in her case that just barely saved her ass, and we are all very grateful for it. But it is way too much of a detailed story to get into here. Let's just say that a good third to half of the house strongly dislikes the RAs and the Program Director right now... I believe EJ called them "the gestapo." But whatever. It's over now, so that's good. Then of course, there's all the high school drama shit. But once again, there's so much of it and it's all so petty, it's not important. It's just, when you throw 40 people into this kind of living situation, you're bound to end up with problems. A lot of people in this house really don't like each other anymore. So yeah, drama abounds.



Anyway, what else happened this week? Last Tuesday, we had a group dinner at Bellini's, this Italian restaurant we've been frequenting. After a number of incidents involving 2-hour-long waits, wrong types of pasta, screwed-up orders, a waiter insulting our faculty member to his face, and a huge pillar of flame that somehow shot from one end of a table all the way to the ceiling, the administration decided we were never going there again. That night was also the infamous room checks. So Wednesday night, Josh and I went to Student Nite at Ministry of Sound to dance off our rage and frustration and when we tried to take the night bus home, we got on the right line but going in the wrong direction... We rode for 2 hours on buses until we finally got home. That was actually kinda fun though. It was an adventure. :)

Thursday night was Halloween, which isn't a huge deal out here. We had a party in the student center, with everyone all dressed up, and it was pretty fun. Me and Christine dressed up kinda hippie-ish (we were unoriginal) and told people we were "your parents from the 70's." After that, we went out to 3 different pubs and everyone got drunk and had a generally fun night. Friday night we went to Heaven, which is like the biggest gay club in London, but we went on a mixed night. Me, Josh, Daniel, Jason, and Rudabeh went, and we all agreed that the club easily played the best music that any of us had heard at a London club. Plus, the place was big and not so packed you couldn't move, so we all had a good time. I LOVE hard trance, I've decided. It's my favorite. At least for now.

Then Saturday night, we went out AGAIN, this time to Fabric, which is a pretty tight-ass club but for the first time, I really freaked out. The place made me feel really claustrophobic and there were so many people and the music was so loud and the bass line was just incessant... BOOMBOOMBOOMBOOM. So I ended up leaving really early with everyone else who was ready to go home. Then Sunday I slept in really late and was a bum all evening. I watched "Pitch Black", which wasn't as bad as I was for some reason expecting. I liked the way they filmed the movie, it was pretty cool. And today I got to sleep in till quarter to 1... I LOVE not having Monday classes. It's the best. Plus, I get to rub it in everyone else's face. :) Oh... and I've decided I'm doing the bare minimum amount of work for the rest of the year, cuz I hate my classes and I don't really care. I've gotten pretty good at knowing how to get decent grades without actually doing a damn thing... teachers are very predictable in their own ways. :)

Monday, November 18
So I went to Scotland this weekend and had a GREAT time, even though it decimated me financially... Scotland is both frickin freezing and expensive. On Thursday night, me, Kari, Rudabeh, Josh, Jason, EJ, and Summer left for Edinburgh, got to the hostel really late, and went right to sleep. Then Friday morning, we had to be at this place by 8:15 to sign in for the bus tour that we signed up for. The bus tour was hilarious, our tour guide, Ewan, was SO funny. Get him talking about certain celebrities or the British government or anyone with the last name of Campbell and he gets all venomous and spitting on the ground and swearing a lot. It was great. Friday we went to the William Wallace Monument (the guy from "Braveheart") and a whisky distillery. We spent the night on the Isle of Skye, which has NOTHING. I mean, there is nothing there at all, we stayed in the hostel's pub for hours on hours cuz that was all there was to do. You do have to cross the world's most expensive toll bridge to get on the island though, and it was ridiculous. For our bus of 30 people, Ewan had to pay 27.50, which is more than $40 American. To cross a bridge ONE WAY. Insane.

Then Saturday, we woke up real early and went to this stream, where I somehow got convinced to dunk my face in it, even though it was below freezing and raining. Ewan said there was a Scottish legend about how you would have a forever-clear face if you dip it in this stream or something like that, and that we weren't leaving till everyone did it, so I did it. Yeah, it was cold. Anyway, then we went to this thing called "The Clansmen's Corner" or something, where this older guy dressed in a kilt and all has a little re-created hut and does a little show about what life was like for the Scottish highlanders hundreds of years ago. I learned that a kilt is actually one ENORMOUS piece of fabric that's just folded and pleated so many times that it becomes wearable... the fabric unfolded though is something like 18 meters long and almost as tall as a doorway. It's 3 times bigger than most blankets, it was nuts. PLUS, I never thought I would think it was cool to learn how to kill people, but this guy had old Scottish weapons, like a claymoor (a sword), and a crazy shield with a spike in it, and a huge, fucking bad-ass battle-axe, and he was just so enthusiastic about it, and I sat there fascinated while he described in every gory detail how the highlanders fought and killed people with every weapon. It was SO cool. And seriously, the battle-axe... bad-ASS.

That night, we stayed next to the Loch Ness and it was one of the most random and funny nights I've ever had. First, we went to the hostel pub and I drank a LOT for me, but it was still just enough to get fun drunk; I think my tolerance is going up. Anyway, I had 3 shots of the Rocky Mountain Bear Fucker, which is basically 6 different types of alcohol mixed together with the tiniest bit of OJ. Those kicked my ass. Then 3 Messy Nessys which were these cocktails that tasted like lime Otter Pops. And then 2 pints of beer. And then someone decided to pull out Twister. And then drunk Jason decides he needs to play. One drunk game of Twister in the lobby evolved, until the lobby was completely full, with every single person from our tour bus all so so drunk and everyone was chilling together even though I never learned most of their names. We played Twister a lot and I was the champion since I won every time I played... We also played Limbo and Rudabeh won that one (she can seriously bend herself in half backwards, I haven't seen anyone that flexible in a long time) but the highlight was Summer going under the limbo stick and falling down exactly like one of those punching bag things that you hit and they pop back up. Me and Kari laughed for like 10 minutes non-stop bcuz it was so funny, although I can't describe it properly, you would have had to have seen it. The image is imprinted in my head forever though. THEN we played the most random game ever, that these 2 girls from Australia taught us, called "fuck that hairy coo." SO weird, and it had no point at all. Oh yeah, a hairy coo is this animal that you can find all over Scotland, and it's one of my new favorite animals of all time, it is so awesome. A hairy coo is basically a cow that's all covered in really shaggy fur and has huge horns growing out of its head. Looks like a hippie cow. It's the coolest animal.

Anyway, so yeah, Ewan was pleased bcuz our tour group had a fun night of "drunken debauchery." Seriously, the bus tour I went on is designed for college students to come and party, the tour guides frickin encourage it. We were allowede to drink on the bus and everything. Such a great time, for real. I would recommend it to anyone. Sunday was the last day of the tour and then I slept in the airport Sunday night (very uncomfortable) for a super-early 6:20 flight this morning back to London. I've been so tired today, and I have SO much work to do before I leave for Prague on Wednesday night. I'm royally screwed right now, both in the schoolwork department, and ESPECIALLY in the money department. I'm not quite sure how everything's gonna work itself out... I really have a LOT of work. Hopefully I can make it though. Still, it's hard to do so much work when you're leaving again in less than 48 hours. I am so freaking excited for Prague... THAT place should be fun.

Monday, November 25
Alright, I am putting forth my highest recommendation to all of you that if you ever get the chance to go to Prague, TAKE IT. It is a great city, we had a lot of fun there. The city is really beautiful, it has all this old Gothic architecture and cobblestone streets and castles and footbridges and stuff. Really eerie when you walk late at night, but peaceful too. I realized that Europe is full of some of the most beautiful places I've ever seen... Greece, Scotland, Prague, they're all amazing. Anyway, we got to Prague on Wednesday night and everyone was at the hostel by 10 PM. There were 13 people from the house who were at our hostel and 3 other girls at a hotel. Almost half our house was in Prague in one weekend. This also happened to be the weekend that the NATO summit was going on in Prague Castle, just by coincidence, so we got to see a few interesting things bcuz of that too.

That first night, we went up to the hostel bar and tried absinth for the first time. For anyone who doesn't know what it is, it's the stuff they drank in "Moulin Rouge" that made them start hallucinating and seeing the Green Fairy and stuff. We found out though, that the stuff that makes you hallucinate is something called thujone, which comes from wormwood, and they don't really put much thujone in it anymore, so really, today's absinth doesn't make you hallucinate or anything at all, it's just a REALLY powerful alcohol. 140 proof is a lot!!! That's 70% alcohol by volume. It smells and tastes HORRIBLE. To drink it, you get a spoonful of sugar, soak it in the absinth, then light it on fire and let it burn till the sugar kinda caramelizes, then you stir it back into the absinth and slam the shot. Nasty stuff. It's really cool though. It just makes you REALLY mellow and nice-drunk rather than belligerent-drunk. Don't take more than 3 shots though. After my fourth, I don't remember a single thing from the rest of the night, not one. The funny thing is, everyone told me the next day I was acting perfectly normal, just really calm, but I don't remember any of it. So yeah, 3 is enough.

Anyway, then on Thursday we woke up and walked around the city a lot. Old Town Square was right by our hostel, and they have an open-air market there where we did a lot of shopping. Prague is really cheap compared to anywhere else I've been. And their money is the coolest! The 1000 koruna bill has a huge phoenix on the back with all these sun rays coming off of it, and other cool pictures. I liked it. I think it was something like 30 koruna to a dollar, so when you can buy awesome souvenirs for 150 koruna, you're paying like 4 dollars. It was nice. We went and saw a medieval torture museum, and I saw some pretty messed-up stuff there. Did you know they used to hang people upside down with their legs spread apart tied to posts and they would saw them in half from the crotch down? And they hung em upside down so the constant flow of blood to the head would keep you conscious longer. It was pretty nasty. That night 5 of us saw a classical music concert while the rest of the group got to see an anti-globalization demonstration. There were like 40 demonstrations that weekend bcuz of the NATO thing. The only one I got to see was a fascist rally in Old Town Square on Friday that was really tiny. The cops didn't know how small it would be though, and so before the rally, there were literally 30-40 police vans all lined up at one end of the square, packed with military guys with shitloads of weapons. Pretty crazy. Thursday night we went to a club that was really fun and we somehow got all 13 of us to go, and we had so much fun together, it was great.

Friday, we walked around a lot more and I ate rabbit for dinner. Ok, rabbit is DAMN good. It was one of the best meats I've eaten in a long time. Sorry if it sounds gross, but wow, it was SO good. I was freaking Tina out by taking the leg bone, which is all bendy cuz, you know, rabbits jump and stuff, and bouncing it around my plate. Tina really didn't like that very much. :) That night, we went to the Roxy, which is Prague's biggest club and coincidentally right next door to our hostel. We went to some random house party before that, but that was nothing compared to the club. It was SO FUN. The Roxy is this old converted Jewish theater that is completely underground and they played the best techno music there and everyone had such a great time, some of us were there until 6 AM. Good times, good times.

Then I could do nothing but sleep all day Saturday, so I basically wasted my last day in Prague, but I really had no other option. I needed to recover real bad. We came home that night and since then, I've been freaking out over the insane amounts of work it feels like we have to do (even though I'm sure it's really not that much) before Xmas break starts NEXT THURSDAY. That trips me out! HOW do I have less than 2 weeks left in this semester? I just got here!!!! And that means Kari and Josh and Rudabeh and Rich will have to leave... oh, sadness. The next couple weeks are gonna be intense, with finals and people leaving for good and Thanksgiving and the end-of-year banquet and everything... oh well. It'll all be worth it for 5 weeks of traveling with Tina and Adam (and Bree too, for a little bit). I am so freaking excited!!!