Vive L'Ecosse, Vive La France

Since the carefree days of spectator parkour that created my last post, things have gotten pretty busy here in the London Program. Last week, the whole "having actual schoolwork" thing came back to bite us all collectively, as the 130-person program got a combined 50 hours of sleep for the entire week. Even when studying abroad, giant papers and fiendish exams do apparently exist. To reward ourselves for finishing the week still breathing, many of us travelled this weekend to Edinburgh, Scotland - and to top off these crazy ten days or so, I went last night to see Les Mis on the West End, from whence I have drawn my post title.

I guess you could say I have a couple things to blog about.

After I visited Edinburgh last summer on Folk ChoIreland Tour, my grandmother asked me, upon seeing my pictures, "Is Edinburgh a dirty?" "It looks like a dirty," she said. Now, if she means, "Is Edinburgh a dirty trickster for hiding all those stupid, calf-killing hills in the middle of all its pretty stuff??!?!!," then, yes - as this trip confirmed once again - Edinburgh is a dirty. A dirty, indeed. My time in Edinburgh this time began with a pre-sun arrival on the overnight Megabus. After wandering off the bus, semi-comatose and barely able to walk after our attempts to sleep on bus seats for 10 hours, my travel companions set off for our hostel. It was, after all, something like 6:30 in the morning, so where else could we have gone?

The problem with this, of course, is that we knew only that our hostel was, like, close enough to the castle that you can just walk up to the castle and you'll see it, so no no no, you don't need a map. The castle, after all, is easy to find! All you have to do to get there is walk up a hill made of tears, cobblestones, and the withered calf muscles of those too weak to finish climbing it!

At just before 7 AM, giant backpacks on our backs, glasses on our faces, and pain in every square inch of our bodies, we made it to the castle.

Worth it.

We watched the sun rise over Edinburgh from one of its most perfect vantage points, snapping hundreds of pictures and eventually discovering that, sure enough, our hostel literally was right there. The hostel, as it turns out, was pretty darn awesome itself. When we rolled up at 8 AM, though our rooms wouldn't be ready for several more hours, they let us spend as much time as we wanted lounging around on their common-space couches. I, in fact, made myself so at home - half-sleeping on the couch, lying down, with a coat thrown over my face to block out the blinding rising sun - that one of the hostel staff made fun of me for being hungover.

Actually, sir, I am not hungover. I am this pathetic while stone-cold sober, after walking up a hill.

After regrouping for a while, my subset of the giant London Program group in Edinburgh that weekend headed back to the castle for an official tour. This was informative, entertaining, and mostly a good excuse for us to take yet more pictures. Did I mention my travel group this weekend included two fancy DSLR owners? I'll mention it now, just in case you aren't jealous enough of my life.

In our natural habitat

The remainder of our first day was spent walking around the city, window shopping on the Royal Mile, pretending we were native students at the University of Edinburgh Library Bar, and eventually, making the decision to spend our second day on a bus tour of the Scottish Highlands. 

That last decision was a very, very good one. The Wee Red Bus on which we took our tour held 17 people, including our driver and guide, (O) Danny (Boy). The rest of the group was as follows: a lone Asian man from San Francisco (or possibly Texas...close enough); a couple from Kerry, Ireland, the husband of which smoked at least one cigarette at every single one of our 10 or so stops; a couple from some unknown Francophone nation who refused to speak to anyone but themselves (all in French) or to answer the question, "So, where's everyone from today?"; and 16 kids from the Notre Dame London Program. Normally, I am the complete antithesis of this custom of "Domerbombing." I find it incredibly obnoxious when kids from the London program go places in huge groups, mostly because it is incredibly obnoxious. On this occasion, though, it was, admittedly, pretty awesome. If you're ever given the chance to Domerbomb the Highlands, as bad and vaguely terrorism-y as that sounds, do it. 

Our tour consisted of stops at various gorgeous photo ops throughout the countryside of the Highlands,

Meh

free time to climb around on the ruins of ancient castles, 

The angle from which ancient Scottish princesses would have taken their MySpace pics

and, most notably, an hour of roaming time at Loch Ness.

The above photo is not a random product of Google Images and is not of a Lego statue at DisneyWorld.

We learned that yelling "HARDCORE PARKOUR" is a thing among not just ourselves but among Scottish tour guides, too, and that bagpipes and house music occasionally combine to really, really weird effect. We created a million and one inside jokes, took a million and two pictures, and had an unbelievable day. 

Sunday took us back to Edinburgh, to a mass complete with Steve Warner-esque acoustic guitar improvisations and, of all things, "Though the Mountains May Fall," and to lunch at the Elephant House, where JK Rowling wrote the books that are everything. In all, this weekend was absolutely bonkers, and all of the amazing experiences of the weekend are totally worth the 25,000 calories' worth of peanut products and Pringles we ate on the train ride home. 

Les Mis, too, was incredible. It is safe to say that this production ranks worlds above my last West End experience on the scale from mind-numbingly awful to mind-blowingly awesome. The Enjolras we saw was even almost as good as Aaron Tveit! (Sorry I'm not sorry, crazy fangirls who will never rank a movie performance over a West End one. Aaron Tveit, much like Harry Potter, is everything.) I'm staying in London this weekend, and after the ten days I've had, I'm going to need it. Following next weekend, dear readers, you can look forward to the tales of my early-March exploits in Amsterdam, Netherlands, and Bruges, Belgium. A hint? They will involve chocolate. 

Parkuestions

While living on the ground floor of our building certainly has its advantages (*cough* stairs), the eye-level view of the street afforded to my roommates and I by our place on this floor most frequently provides us with one thing and one thing only: really weird encounters with people on the sidewalk. Directly outside our windows, you see, is a rather bustling stretch of pedestrian walkway. A few feet and some wrought-iron fencing separate us from the actual sidewalk, but the enormity of our windows ensure that we are always in close contact with the people walking by. This usually just entails some interesting people-watching. Thousands of British people walking past your window every day is bound to be entertaining, even when none of them do anything particularly out of the ordinary.

Occasionally, though, things happen on the sidewalk that are quite out of the ordinary - and it is these moments that make the extreme sketchiness and probable danger of having one's windows open to a busy metropolitan sidewalk all worth it. Arguably my favorite of these instances result from the varied reactions to the exterior of our building. The London Program dorm, as it happens, was once a hospital for women and children. And as far as you'd know from reading the signage on the outside of the building, it still is. Passersby have all sorts of interesting reactions to seeing the "Royal Hospital for Children and Women" sign for the first time, but the best of these came from the woman who saw both that sign and me and my roommate. As her gaze moved from the high-up sign back to the street in front of her, the woman naturally caught sight of my room. I don't know what the woman expected to see through the windows of a building marked "children's hospital," but, judging from her reaction, I'm pretty sure it wasn't a girl in pajamas Snapchatting someone from her loft bed at 3 PM while her roommate curled her hair at her window-ledge vanity. I kid you not when I say this woman jumped back a good four feet when she inadvertently made eye contact with me. Thinking, from the look of her disappointed and disgusted face, that this was some kind of sick joke of a hospital that gave its patients entirely too free of a rein concerning their leisure time, this woman continued to stare into our room for the entire rest of her way down the sidewalk. It was one of the funniest things I have ever seen.

The most popular activity that the people of London engage in to unwittingly entertain a flat full of American college students, however, is parkour. For those of you who don't know, parkour is a sort of extreme urban sport in which strikingly athletic idiots fling themselves off of stuff so as to impress passersby and each other and to flirt daily with death. The half-wall-, concrete platform-, and railing-filled stairway entrance situated a few feet outside our building is, apparently, the perfect location for practicing parkour. Almost every day, a group of people, usually male and usually uncomfortably young, will gather on the sidewalk outside and spend hours doing flips, twists, jumps, and other stupid stuff onto and off of the various hard surfaces found there, and, almost every day, we watch them. I always find myself thinking of dozens of questions for these mysterious practitioners of parkour, and, after watching today's especially peculiar bunch, I decided that it's time to ask them. Ask the questions, that is. On my blog. Where the parkour guys will never see them. Okay. Let's begin, shall we?

1. Where are these guys' parents?

2. Seriously, all of their tennis shoes are, like, really nice. You did not buy those yourselves. Are your parents okay with this? Do they know you do this? Do they know the 150 pound Nikes they just bought you are not for after-school sports teams but for jumping off of stairwell railings? I don't understand.

3. It is 2:00 on a Friday, don't you people have school or something?

4. Literally, do you ever do homework

5. WAIT HOW DO YOU DO THAT FLIP WITHOUT DYING?

6. Do you learn this stuff somewhere? The Internet?

7. Why aren't you guys Olympic gymnasts?

8. Wait, are you Olympic gymnasts?

8B. If yes, have you met Tom Daley? Okay sorry.

9. Are you going to be Olympic gymnasts the next time the Olympics roll around and you're legally old enough to compete?

10. Seriously how old are you

11. Where did you get that Chicago Blackhawks sweatshirt? Do you even know what the Chicago Blackhawks are? I feel like you don't!

12. Why is one of you seven years old??!?!

13. Okay where are THAT kid's parents, for real

14. Little kid, how did you get mixed up in this rough and tumble world of suburban kids jumpin' off stuff on the mean streets?

15. Little kid, why are you climbing that - WHY DID YOU JUST JUMP TWENTY FEET FROM A TREE

16. Should I call Child Protective Services?

17. Does Great Britain have Child Protective Services?

18. Have these guys seen Les Mis and do they know the horrid end they are omen-ing by making this kid their parkour Gavroche?

19. Why does this kid also remind me of Somebodys from West Side Story?

20. Why do all of my cultural references come from musical theatre?

21. Speaking of West Side Story, is there such a thing as parkour turf?

22. Are there parkour turf wars?

23. If there is parkour turf, why have I never seen the same group of guys parkouring in this spot twice?

23b. Is parkouring a word?

24. If rival parkour gangs have to fight each other in a turf war, are their battles more fistfight or dance-off?

25. Why do I feel like it's dance-off?

26. How come none of you guys have Beats precariously slung around your neck while you're jumping off stuff like the guys did who were here last week?

27. Exactly what kind of music makes for a parkour soundtrack anyway?

28. Does it involve West Side Story?

29. Why do none of you guys have girlfriends hanging around?

30. Do you people date? Are you old enough for that, even?

31. Do your girlfriends, assuming they exist, like that you do this? Do they date you because they think parkour is really sexy? Or are they more like protective girlfriends, like somebody Channing Tatum would date in a movie about drugs, who are like, "Baby I wish you'd walk away from the life of the street"

32. YOUR GIRLFRIEND WOULDN'T LIKE THAT MOVE, HOW ARE YOU ALIVE

33. Would you please stop doing that? You are going to give me a heart attack and this is not actually a hospital, that sign is false advertising

34. Have you noticed that I'm watching you?

35. Am I considered creepy for watching you and your friends just, like, bro'ing out for an hour? Or is it creepier if you notice me watching, since that means you were looking into my bedroom?

36. Do people do this in America?

37. Correction: do people do this in America other than when they're walking around college campuses in the middle of the night ironically yelling "HARDCORE PARKOUR" while they kick fire hydrants and jump over benches and stuff?

38. How do your pants stay on when they are so baggy and you are moving so fast?

39. How would your parents feel about your pants falling off in the middle of the street like this?

40. Oh yeah, we don't know, because no one has answered what remains the most important question, where are your parents?

41. Your mom was the woman who thought I was a hospital patient, wasn't she? This explains so much.

So, those are my questions for you, young parkourers of London. What, what, what are you doing. Look at your life. Look at your choices. Don't look in my windows. K thanx.

And Then I Went to the Spice Girls Musical

Last night, following days of excitement and anticipation, I headed out with my roommate to see my second West End show of the semester: the Spice Girls musical. This show, called Viva Forever on the posters but "the Spice Girls musical" by everyone else, follows essentially the same premise as Mamma Mia. It takes a soundtrack's worth of songs from the collected works of the band and tries to form them into some sort of follow-able plot. Obviously, no one goes to this show because they are expecting a high-quality, culturally enriching piece of musical theater. They go because it's a musical made out of "Spice Up Your Life." They go because LOOK AT THE PREMISE! Won't this be so much FUN?!

This, my friends, was not fun.

As I said, I was very clear on the fact that I was not going to this show because it was going to be good. I went to this show because it was going to be awesome, in ways completely unrelated to what would undoubtedly be massive amounts of camp and probably weird choices in set dressing and instrumentation. In the first five minutes or so, I thought that what I was seeing was merely a confirmation of what I had expected. "This is, like, so bad but so, so good, right?," I told myself on an endless loop throughout the opening number. As anyone who has ever heard of the Spice Girls can guess, the show's opener was "Wannabe." In this number, all of the under-40 members of the cast, bearing audition numbers on their chests, attempted to out-perform each other for the unseen judges. One by one, they put on disappointed faces and walked offstage until only four spunky-looking young ladies remained. "Ohhh," I and presumably everyone else thought at this point, "so this show is going to be a fictionalized account of the making of the Spice Girls!" As it turns out, they had been auditioning for an X Factor-like show called "Starmaker," whose production staff included one young red-headed girl who, thought everyone in the audience, was clearly going to become Ginger Spice, right?

Wrong.

The girls, in fact, were just some other girl group totally unrelated to but also startlingly similar-looking to the Spice Girls. The Spice Girls, to make it clear right here and right now, are never actually mentioned in this musical at all. Based on the tradition of musicals based on one artist's canon of work, this makes sense. Based on the show's premise, namely, the story of a dancing, pop-music singing, one-petite-blonde-and-one-Mel-B-lookalike-including, British girl group, this dearth of mentions of the Spice Girls themselves makes almost no sense.

As the girls' journey unfolds, the show's first big drama arises: the judges of the show decide to send only one of the group members on to the next round. With each new round of competition for this fledgling star - whose name, inexplicably but unavoidably, is Viva - the producers and judges try, with ever-increasing effort, to create a dramatic backstory for her or to make it seem to the audiences that she is, in some way, a victim of horrific emotional damage. Over and over again, Viva and those who love her are proven to be incorruptible. When the judges suggest to Viva's sexy Spanish vocal coach (of course he exists) that he start a relationship with her to increase ratings, he shuns their suggestions on the grounds of being a good person...but starts a relationship with Viva anyway, off-camera and in an endearing (?) way. When the judges try to surprise the adopted Viva with a dramatic meeting with her never-before-seen biological mother, Viva's loving adopted mom steps in to remind everyone that she does have a family after all. At the same time that all of this is happening, Viva's celebrity judge/coach (think a version of The Voice where Christina Aguilera is replaced by Marie Osmond) is forever flip-flopping between being a terrible person (think Miranda Priestly) and lamenting the sacrifices she has made in exchange for her fame and fortune, and Viva's mom is falling in love with some context-less old dude. [Note: Turns out there are a lot of spoilers in this. Whoops! Luckily, if you care even remotely about having the plot of the Spice Girls musical spoiled for you, you and I are not friends.] The ending is happy, filled with a "Wannabe" reprise, and leaves about 7 different story lines entirely unresolved.

All of this, however, is not what made the Spice Girls musical, without a doubt, the strangest experience of my almost twenty-one years of life. "What was it, then?," you ask. Was it the rendition of "Spice Up Your Life" that had the costumes of "Spooky Mormon Hell Dream," the set of Once on This Island, and the giant pinata-esque human head puppets of a Brazilian Carnaval and/or your worst nightmares? Nope, wasn't that! Was it the actors' awkward reactions to prolonged audience laughter that you've seen high school students handle better? No, sirree, wasn't that either. Surely, then, it was the very existence of a middle-aged love scene to the tune of "2 Become 1," right? No, friends, the weirdest part wasn't even that.

The weirdest part of the Spice Girls musical experience, with no question whatsoever, was the audience interaction. Now, before you jump to rational conclusions, understand that Viva Forever is not concocted as some weird singalong show. It is not a children's musical where the actors occasionally gesture to the audience that it's their turn to sing with them. No, Viva Forever is simply a place where hundreds of incredibly drunk British women in an age range just north of "way too effing old for this," sing and dance in their seats for three hours to the music that clearly had far too large of an impact on their childhoods and their lives. As the curtain rose and the show began, the house was filled with the screaming and clapping one would expect from the midnight premiere of a Twilight movie. This was unexpected, but it is the Spice Girls, so I half-heartedly went along with it for the first few moments. Then the music started, and, from all corners of the theatre, there was singing. Whenever the score came to one of the true "greatest hits," the singing was unceasing and deafening. During "Stop," a safe estimate of the percentage of the audience dancing in unison is probably 80%. As my roommate and I agreed after the show, we would've been mad that the audience so thoroughly drowned out the cast in these moments, were it not for the cast that the cast members were rarely better singers than the audience at large. The post-curtain call actual singalong of the three or four most enormous Spice Girls mega-hits made sense, but from the entire rest of the evening, nothing else did. I am not sad that I spent 20 pounds on my ticket for this show, because it was so strange that telling people about it has quickly become my new favorite pastime. So thanks for the memories, the audience-provided entertainment, and the new hobby, Viva Forever, but I beg you: stop right now. Thank you very much.