Showing posts with label uk. Show all posts
Why you should fly British Airways
1. The stewardesses are classy. They wear red pumps.
2. I'm pretty sure the plane that took me from Boston to Heathrow was double-decker.
2b. And even though you probably have to pay an astronomical sum to sit on the top deck, it's still effing cool that there's a top deck.
3. You can watch The Hunger Games on demand! (Along with How I Met Your Mother, New Girl, Love Actually, documentaries on the Olympics, and a million other things.)
4. The in-flight meal was actually not awful.
4b. The in-flight muffin was even better.
4c. The in-flight muffin was from a brand called "Me, Myself, & My Muffin," which is either charmingly British or just really really awesome or both.
5. The blanket they give you for overnight flights is soft, not itchy and gross like on American.
6. Everyone has a cool accent.
7. If you're not a broke college student, you can sit in the class above economy and get "club seating," which is basically your own little cubicle. And you get to face backwards if you pick the right seat.
In all seriousness, though, I've been on a lot of planes in my life, and this was one of my favorite flying experiences. I was sitting next to a fifteen year-old boy with fire engine hair who mostly mumbled in a British accent. I think he was probably a Weasley.
But the best part of the trip by far was that I serendipitously wound up with a window seat on an overnight flight where we were literally traveling through the night. When we took off I watched Massachusetts disappear, and soon my home state was replaced by endless ocean. It’s always cool for me to come back to New England and realize that the body of water I’m looking at is a real ocean, not just a massive lake pretending to be one (ily Lake Michigan, but you're a poser. A really, really beautiful poser). I blinked, and we were so high up that I couldn’t tell if the currents beneath us were the Atlantic or clouds being waves, and the next thing I knew we were flying over a sunset. The length of 21 Jump Street later and dawn was breaking in the distance, and the next thing I knew, we were over the British Isles and it was morning.
The Weasley gave me a weird look whenever I took a picture out the airplane window, but whatever.
Then I was at customs, falling asleep in line as the rest of London was waking up. Also, I'm pretty sure the guy who checked me in at the UK border thought I was, like, 14:
Me: Hi! Here's my passport.
Him: Where did you come from?
Me: Boston.
Him: You’re on your own?
Me: Yes.
Him: No family or friends with you?
Me: No. (Seeing he was perplexed.) I’m a student visitor – here, I have a letter –
Him: That’ll help. How old are you?
Me: 20.
It was obviously not the answer he was expecting. He actually read my whole BADA letter in detail, and then took a long time impressing his stamp into my passport. The entire thing felt very climactic.
Then, as he handed it back to me, he said, “So you’re studying drama?”
“Um, yeah.”
“So you’re going to be in films, then?”
“I mean, that’s the goal.”
He took a long look at my landing card, then my face. Finally, he smiled. “I’ll try to remember your name, then.”
And even though I found this hilarious, I went, "Thanks."
A couple of hours later and I finally reached Oxford. Tonight I'm staying with the daughter of a woman my dad works with - random, I know, but she's very nice and it's free - and I passed out for about five hours before I decided to go into the center of the city and buy a phone. Then I made a series of bad decisions.
Bad decisions, part 1 of 2
1. Not changing out of my skirt and sandals, even though I knew it was sixty degrees and drizzling.
2. Not eating anything before I left.
3. Not caffeinating before I left.
4. Not paying close attention to the location of the bus stop in relation to the house where I'm staying.
5. Getting off the bus early so I could walk all the way to the phone place and get what I thought would be the real Oxford experience.
6. Attempting to buy an actual phone for my UK phone (luckily, the phone guy heard my accent, looked at me, looked at my sandals, realized I was broke, and told me to buy the cheap one. Thank God).
7. Sitting on the ground in the mall, attempting to figure out how to work my UK phone (pro tip: mall cops here yell at you for this).
It was somewhere around the mall cop - constable? - yelling at me that I realized the rain outside had escalated into a full-on downpour. So I went to Primark, which is a sort of Forever 21-type place, and bought three pairs of tights and, grudgingly, a pair of jeans. Since I of course didn't pack any. I have no need for pants at home!
Then, even though it was pouring, I made yet more bad decisions:
Bad decisions, part 2 of 2
1. Not changing into my pants.
2. Deciding to take the scenic route back to the faraway bus stop YET AGAIN, despite the fact that it was FREEZING and RAINING.
FREEZING. RAINING.
I managed to get myself on the bus and back to the correct stop, and it was only after deboarding that I realized I had no idea how to get back to the house. The woman I'm staying with lives on this very tiny street off a fairly major road - the problem is, no one knows where the very tiny street is. I realized that after walking at least two miles in the wrong direction and asking several strangers for help. By this point, the paper bag holding my pants had completely disintegrated, so I was standing on a street corner in God-knows-where, Oxford, drenched, shaking, hopelessly lost, using a pair of pants as an umbrella.
But the adage that it's always darkest before dawn held true, because it was then that I made my first good decision of the day:
Good decisions, part 1 of 1
1. Walking back the other way.
So I dragged myself back two miles to the bus stop, saw a place called Nicholson Road, and thought I like Jack Nicholson, maybe the very tiny street is this way.
And it was.
And it was.
And now I'm wrapped in a blanket, drinking tea, enjoying the free wi-fi, and about to go the f#@% to sleep. See? It does get better.
BADA tomorrow and I can't wait!
So I leave for Britain tomorrow.
Sitting in my living room in Massachusetts, it feels inconceivable. This time tomorrow, I'll be over the Atlantic Ocean. My theatre board is meeting tomorrow night, and I had to be like, "Sorry, I will literally be over the ocean at that time," and that's when it hit me. Catch you later, Western Hemisphere, I'm setting sail for the streets of London.
I'm not a transcontinental virgin or anything. The last time I was in Europe was junior year of high school, and the first and most recent time I visited England was a full decade ago. That was a magical experience. I say that because there's something inherently magical about getting on a plane, falling asleep, and waking up on another continent, and because there's something even more inherently magical about seeing landmarks from books gloriously life-size before your eyes, and that all of this magic is magnified when you're ten. But it was also magical because I decided to make the entire trip my own informal Harry Potter Experience. I visited Platforms Nine and Ten at King's Cross Station before there was a sign there and I saw Oxford's Great Hall. There's also picture of me jumping up and down on the lawn of Alnwick Castle, site of the Quidditch Pitch in the films (the caption reads "I fell off my broom"). So if you told ten year-old me that I'd be returning to this enchanted country someday to study acting at Oxford - practically Hogwarts itself - well. Ten year-old me would flip a shit.
Which is pretty much what twenty year-old me is doing right now.
Anyway, the whole thing still feels a million years away, so today I concentrated on making my last hours in the US as awesome as possible. My dad, stepmom, and I spent most of the day in Boston. It was a perfect, picturesque New England afternoon, mid-eighties and sunny, with just the right amount of breeze off the harbor.
See? Perfect.
And downtown was packed with people - upstairs in Quincy Market it was almost impossible to find a seat, and you could pick out seven different languages easily. Street performers were out in full force. A guy on a corner gave my dad and I an impromptu lecture on the finer historical details of a nearby church. And I thought about how I would miss New England, but then I remembered that I can transport its beauty with me anywhere via Instagram, and I felt better.
Things I can't transport via Instagram: burritos. I figured they're not quite the hottest commodity in England, so we grabbed lunch at Boloco (which, for all you Midwesterners in the dark, is like Chipotle but a thousand times better). I also used the last-day-in-America thing as an excuse to get fro-yo for the second day in a row, although I have a feeling that'll be easier to come by than burritos.
I felt good about making the most out of my favorite American delectables until I was talking to my friend Erin, who did her undergrad in Ireland and as such has spent way more time in the UK than I have. "Be prepared, there is a lack of Reese's Peanut Butter cups in LND because they just don't eat peanut butter the way we do," she said.
Which may not be a big deal to some people, but
Pro tip: If you drop these, they bounce.
But that's stupid because they I couldn't get it through customs anyway, right? ...Right?
This is almost as bad as when I found out that baby carrots inexplicably do not exist in the Commonwealth.
Annnnd now I'm stereotyping myself.
And this is way longer than I intended it to be.
So goodnight for now, blog. Brb gotta vacate the US. Catch you on (the way to) the flip side.
