In the continent that so many of my friends and I count as our temporary home this semester, the comfort level with couples showing their love in public is a tad higher than it is back in the land of the free/home of the brave. It's not unusual to see young - or sometimes even not-so-young - lovers goin' to town on park benches, in stairways, and in generally any place they feel like making out with each other. Shame, it seems, simply does not exist in this corner of the world, and it fascinates us Yankee visitors to no end.
Capturing Italian PDA vis-a-vis a "travel buddy solo shot"
Though I'll be the first to admit that, for someone who loves Chelsea Handler as much as I do, I'm pretty prudish, my main response to seeing all of this PDA is not horror, but confusion. Public makeout fiends of Europe, you positively confound me. Much like the Parkour kids outside my window, you and your antics make me wonder - do you have parents? Does anyone, in fact, have parents on this continent? Do they just not exist? Are they too busy also going on PDA tours of their home cities to pay any attention to what you're doing? Tell me, youth of Europe, because I truly am dying to know. Even more so than the question of parenting, though, all of these logic-defying public makeouts inspire in me some serious questions about the sheer logistics of the things I see going on here. Of all the European PDA hotspots, my favorite is the one that confuses me the most: escalators. You can hardly get on an escalator in London or in any of the places I've visited this semester, really, without seeing some couple, somewhere near you, engaging in some degree of very public snogging as they enjoy their leisurely ride up the moving stairs.
HOW DO YOU DO THIS, PEOPLE OF EUROPE? HOW? I suppose now would be the appropriate time to mention that my response to this trend is probably influenced by my extreme fear of escalators. Ever since hearing far too young about the horrible fate of a distant relative who once got a shoe caught in the mechanics of an escalator, I have been ceaselessly terrified of those devil-stairs. I don't like stepping onto them; I don't like stepping off of them - if they weren't so convenient for helping me avoid my even greater nemesis, actual stairs, I'm quite confident I would never use them. I hate escalators, and when I am on them, my one and only focus is on not dying. Face forward, hold railing, avoid all human contact, don't pass out from terror. And the people of this country make out while riding these things! Since the London Underground - the most vital center for escalator makeouts - has guidelines requiring you to keep to the right if you're not walking, this precarious arrangement generally forces one half of the couple to spend the duration of the ride facing completely backwards. How no one has died doing this is completely beyond me. The reach and the urgency of European PDA knows no bounds - not even those of the natural human desire to avoid death.
But surely, you say, the influence of European PDA must stop somewhere, right? It doesn't go so far as to affect Notre Dame students...does it?
Well, normally it doesn't, but it sure did this weekend! This weekend, as I've mentioned before, was centered around the London-hosted Booze Cruise. The Booze Cruise, which I am only now referring to by its actual name because my mother "still just really hates that title," is a four-hour cruise on the Thames for which students from any and all of ND and SMC's European study abroad programs descend upon London. It is the butt of endless jokes in the study abroad communities, but, chuckles aside, it really was a lot of fun. All 240 guests put on fancy clothes for the first time in months, congregated in and around Conway Hall, and headed to the river en masse for a night of dancing, singing, and casually floating past some of the world's most iconic landmarks. (Let me tell you, you have not lived until you've belted out the always dramatic "Here Come the Irish" while on a boat cruise with 10% of the junior class, passing by Big Ben.) Primarily, though, the Booze Cruise showed us all that it's not just native Europeans who can engage in PDA that would make all the adults they've ever met hang their heads in shame. (I don't include myself in this, Mother. I am among the few, the proud, the people who escaped hookup-free.) To give you some idea of the scale of the BC13 carnage, lunch in the London Centre basement today - usually home to at least half the program at any given time - was made up of a whopping ten people. Obviously, getting to basement lunch was my highest priority for this day. That basement should have been filled to the brim with all sorts of freshly reunited newfound "friends," and I was all too eager to see them interact. My disappointment at the complete lack of awkward reunions that this tiny lunch group provided was quickly eclipsed by the conversations about Saturday night that our relative privacy allowed us to have. Over the course of this day, I have learned ever more fully just what a raging success BC13 was at getting its participants to imitate the locals they've been living with all semester. There weren't any escalators to try out on this boat - though, as slippery as the stairs were and as challenged at navigating them as all of the cruisers were, "moving stairs" isn't too far from the truth - but from the dance floors to the observation deck to the flats of Conway Hall, the PDA on Saturday night was present and accounted for.
The next few days, I predict, will continue to be full of awkward encounters and fantastic things for me to observe and gossip about. A lot of people, as this week wears on, are finding themselves ashamed of what they did this weekend. But you know what? I say there's no need for shame at all - the Europeans sure wouldn't think so.
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