Hello, dear readers, happy Easter, and my apologies. Do I know that spring break has been over for well over two weeks now? Yes. Do I know it's been eleven days since I last wrote anything at all? Yes. But as today is Easter Monday - a classic Notre Dame holiday and, conveniently, a Bank one - my schedule for the day and my sleep schedule from last night has finally afforded me the time and energy to finish blogging about my SB2K13 adventures. So here we go!
If you'll think back to my last post about the events of spring break, you'll recall that I left off on my final day in Florence. I had finished Venice, I had had my requisite weird 21st birthday going out experience, and I was about three gelatos shy of leaving Italy behind for two and a half weeks. The rest of our time in Italy was eventful and, as always, food-filled. At my birthday dinner, our favorite little Florentine restaurant treated us to free-ish bruschetta, free champagne, free after-dinner shots of limoncello (because citrus-flavored hard alcohol is the new coffee), and - just when you thought you couldn't get better than the small cake of a few nights before - free medium-sized cake...with strawberries. The next day took us to Pisa for a few hours, where we took pictures of the surprisingly lean-y tower, met some Mormon missionaries, and even spent a solid hour and a half on an accidental, terrifying free bus tour of the Pisan countryside. The main portion of Spring Break Part 2, however, was spent in the city I've studied more frequently than any other in the world: Paris.
Our five-day stay in Paris was really the main thing that drew me to this trip, and Paris provided me with a wealth of experiences that I will not soon forget. Mostly, though, this portion of our spring break showed me that I seriously need to branch out in terms of the cities where my favorite movies are set.
Thanks to Moulin Rouge, Midnight in Paris, Les Mis, Passport to Paris (yes, that one), and even a significant portion of my all-time favorite film, The Devil Wears Prada, there were hardly more than five minutes at a time during our days in France when I wasn't quoting or talking about a movie that I basically have memorized. "I recently read a two-volume biography of Rodin." "Love is a many-splendored thing, love lifts us up where we belong, all you need is love!" "Don't be silly, Andrea, everybody wants this. Everybody wants to be us." "Bonjour! Bonjour! Bonjour - oh my God."
You think that's annoying in paragraph form? Imagine how much worse it was in person, for five straight days.
Despite the non-stop quote-fest, though, Paris was exactly as it should be: magnifique. For me, there were two main things that placed Paris in a league of its own among spring break destinations. The first is that it allowed me to use a bit of my rather rusty French. It's been a while since I've taken a class, but I did study the language for three years in high school and three semesters at ND, so I like to occasionally pretend I'm decent at speaking it. Paris gave me a great outlet for this semi-delusional belief. Trying to buy a box of macarons at the famous and heavenly Laduree in the middle of a miles-long rush hour line? Order in French! Need to explain that, as a US citizen studying in an EU member nation that's not the one you're travelling in, you should, in fact, qualify for a museum entry fee discount? Definitely don't use your native language for that! Lost on the entirely confusing Métro? French again! To my delight, though, the Parisians really were remarkably accepting of my desperate desire to speak their language. On one occasion, my French got me directions from a butcher shop to a patisserie around the corner where we could still buy baguettes at 6 PM. At Versailles, it allowed me to skip the crowds around the English signs and take in most of the info about each room while also being forced to use my brain. In my one big French mistake of the weekend, my French "skills" got me pure Brazilian chocolate macarons instead of plain chocolate - darn. My French knowledge also allowed me to play this really fun game all weekend where I would make my travel buddies try to read things in French and then laugh at their horribly mangled pronunciations. It was great!
The second half of the beauty of Paris (besides the actual, physical beauty of the city itself and all of its sights, sounds, tastes, and smells) is that, for any 18-25-year-old studying in the European Union, almost every attraction is totally free. By simply flashing my UK visa, I got in free to nearly every major site of the city: the Louvre, Versailles, the Musée de l'Orangerie (home of the incredible Monet water lilies), Les Invalides (home of Napoleon's tomb), the observation deck of the Arc de Triomphe, and the Rodin Museum (home of The Thinker and of a whole lot of Midnight in Paris references), to name a few. We saw these things, the Cathedrale de Notre Dame and the Basilique Sacre-Coeur, the artists' village of Montmartre and the site of the Moulin Rouge, almost every from-the-ground angle of the Eiffel Tower, and, on the first day, two of my dearest friends from Vision 2012 - all for free.
From walking the streets of the Latin Quarter at sunset sharing baguettes and gossip with my favorite Flute Fairy on day one to watching the entire Mary-Kate & Ashley Paris classic in our apartment on our rainy last night, Paris made for a fantastic second half of spring break.
None of our experiences on break, of course, would have been possible without our absolutely insane accommodations. Between the 4-star hotel in Venice and the varying degrees of luxury flats in Florence and Paris, our digs on this trip were nothing short of insane. Each one also has its own crazy story to go with it, usually involving us standing in the rain fearing homelessness. So, now that I've written, at long last, spring break blog part 2, stay tuned for the final SB2K13 entry: Spring Break Cribs. And once that's written, I'll move on to more recent events - Easter in Rome, known also as The Best Weekend of My Life. Thanks for the memories, Paris, and readers, keep reading to see which city wins in the battle between European travel-movie titans that is Passport to Paris vs. The Lizzie McGuire Movie.
Monday, April 1, 2013
Thursday, March 21, 2013
Spring Break: The Playlist
For a couple of years now, I have made it a habit to buy myself a new album of some kind before embarking on any trip. For LCC New Orleans tour, it was Lady Gaga's Born This Way; for Folk ChoIreland, it was Ingrid Michaelson's Human Again; for Edinburgh last month, Fleetwood Mac's Rumours. When I went to buy myself a new album to accompany me on spring break, though, I found that my iTunes money supply had mysteriously dwindled to a dollar and some change. I went to my purchase history, knowing that I share an iTunes account with my sister, and prepared for the damage. Twenty country and pop songs. My interest in country music ranks consistently just below my interest in how Citigroup stock is doing, so I skipped over those to peruse the Top 40 fare. Finding some Bieber on the list, I decided to download the most promising selections from the sibling's new purchases and make them my spring break playlist. Despite having no initial interest in any of the songs, I ended up listening to the playlist on an endless loop for the entirety of break. I have so many thoughts on the songs, in fact, that I decided I needed to break them down in a blog post.
Do any of you particularly care what I listened to on spring break? Probably not. But do you or should you have a burning desire to learn as much about me as possible to most effectively model your lives on my own? Yes. So here it is, folks, the official Domerberry playlist of SB2K13.
"Stay" - Rihanna (featuring some person I don't care about called Mikky Ekko). I'm sometimes embarrassed to admit that I would still call myself a pretty big Rihanna fan, but this song reminds me that that is exactly what I am. This song is catchy. It's a very angsty, emotional kind of song, which makes it fun to sing along to when I'm alone in my flat (sorry, neighbors). Mostly, though, this song makes me wonder why on earth iTunes has it labeled as "Explicit." This song seems pretty squeaky-clean by Rihanna standards. If we're handing out explicit labels for seriously far-fetched innuendos nowadays, I've got a long list of new additions for your "explicit" stock, iTunes: it's called every song ever.
When I Was Your Man - Bruno Mars. Pretty much the guy version of "Stay." Admittedly, the subjects don't really have that much in common. But they're both sad, they both pretty much only require a vocal range that stretches from three notes below middle C to five or six notes above it, and when you're half asleep while listening to them, they literally sound like one, seven-minute-long breakup ballad. Thanks, Ri-Ri and B.Mars, for making the start of my playlist really, really depressing.
Suit & Tie (featuring the inexplicably caps-locked JAY Z) - Justin Timberlake. Oh, JT, I love you so. This song is so catchy, and so deeply inappropriate. I had this stuck in my head for the entirety of break, and now that I'm writing about it, it's stuck in my head again. And do I care? No. No I do not.
Carry On - Fun.. This song has got to stop doing what it's doing to me. Considering how many inside-joke-y references to "Some Nights" I've made since last summer all over my blog and my everyday conversations, it should come as a surprise to no one that I fell immediately in love with this song. Though I have still yet to venture particularly far into the world of Fun. beyond their soaring, literary, and Billboard Hot 100-approved singles, I have adored Fun. in the contexts where I've experienced them. I loved "We Are Young" as soon as that started happening, I have based my entire life around "Some Nights," and now, I have "Carry On" to keep the Fun.-induced tears tradition alive. "But I like to think I can cheat it all to make up for the times I've been cheated on"? Are you kidding me? STOP BEING PERFECT, FUN.. JUST STOP.
Troublemaker - Olly Murs. Last summer, my eleven-year-old host sister in Edinburgh told me, in a game of music-swapping we were all playing, that Olly Murs was, like, the best thing ever. If I liked One Direction, she said (which, of course, I unabashedly do), I would loooove him. Cut to ten months later, this song finds its way onto my iPod, and we are shown once again that the tastes of eleven-year-olds are and will always be an accurate reflection of my own. Also, in listening to it so many times, I have discovered that the chorus of this song overlaps almost perfectly with the chorus of Britney Spears' "Crazy." If I liked this song before making this realization, I now like it enough to make it the first dance at my wedding.
Okay I'm kidding. Sort of.
Mirrors - JT again. I don't understand what this song means. I don't even remotely understand. I thought it might have been a really dirty but cleverly coded innuendo that was just flying over my head, but then he dedicated the video to his grandparents. Mostly, I choose to ignore the confusing words to this one and just focus on what it's really good for: a taste of what N*SYNC would sound like if they made a record in 2013. Seriously, everyone, go listen to this song again. Post-modern boy band. Right on down to the "Is this secretly dirty?" lyrics, that is all it is. And again...I am not complaining.
C'Mon - Ke$ha. Ke$ha is my girl, and I have no shame in owning up to that fact. Like all of Ke$ha's music, this song simultaneously makes me want to dance and makes me sit back and ponder for hours how anyone could even invent such a life for themselves as Ke$ha's bottle-of-Jack-toothbrushing self manages to do. Furthermore, the full verse of rhymes on the syllable "rrr," set in motion by the mind-blowing line "Feelin' like a sabertooth ti-grr," has actually changed my life. I almost applauded from my seat on the Stansted Airport bus when I heard these rhymes for the first time. You've done it again, Ke$ha. Go buy yourself some soap.
Beauty and a Beat - Justin Bieber. I love Justin Bieber and everything that he does. This is not news.
My Songs Know What You Did in the Dark (Light It Up) - Fall Out Boy. Quite honestly, I am not sure how this song made it onto my sister's list of recent purchases. There is only one person in this family who identifies as faux-edgy enough to listen to Fall Out Boy back in the time when listening to Fall Out Boy was a thing, and that person is me. This song has also shown me that, unsurprisingly, I am entirely out of touch with what the young kids are and aren't listening to these days. I assumed that new Fall Out Boy music was the kind of thing that the young folks - like the college-junior folks - could really only embrace through a deeply refined sense of irony. Fall Out Boy? Sewww retro - and yet so recent. Given the complete lack of irony that characterizes the rest of this playlist, though, it seems that this is not the case. Meanwhile, as I dissected the layers of context and meaning that surrounded my sister's purchase of this song, I also came inadvertently to discover that I really, really like this song. Pete Wentz, there may still be a place for you hiding somewhere in my heart, even after all these years.
Those nine songs - and pretty much just those nine songs - were the soundtrack to my spring break. They accompanied me through two countries, four cities, two flights, three trains, and a bus ride, and they have done me well. I can now answer the question, "What's the cool jams?", and I know that not only can one feel like a sabertooth tiger, but one can rap about that feeling in such a way that it rhymes with kosher. Thanks, SB2K13 playlist. You've set the bar pretty darn high for Easter.
Do any of you particularly care what I listened to on spring break? Probably not. But do you or should you have a burning desire to learn as much about me as possible to most effectively model your lives on my own? Yes. So here it is, folks, the official Domerberry playlist of SB2K13.
"Stay" - Rihanna (featuring some person I don't care about called Mikky Ekko). I'm sometimes embarrassed to admit that I would still call myself a pretty big Rihanna fan, but this song reminds me that that is exactly what I am. This song is catchy. It's a very angsty, emotional kind of song, which makes it fun to sing along to when I'm alone in my flat (sorry, neighbors). Mostly, though, this song makes me wonder why on earth iTunes has it labeled as "Explicit." This song seems pretty squeaky-clean by Rihanna standards. If we're handing out explicit labels for seriously far-fetched innuendos nowadays, I've got a long list of new additions for your "explicit" stock, iTunes: it's called every song ever.
When I Was Your Man - Bruno Mars. Pretty much the guy version of "Stay." Admittedly, the subjects don't really have that much in common. But they're both sad, they both pretty much only require a vocal range that stretches from three notes below middle C to five or six notes above it, and when you're half asleep while listening to them, they literally sound like one, seven-minute-long breakup ballad. Thanks, Ri-Ri and B.Mars, for making the start of my playlist really, really depressing.
Suit & Tie (featuring the inexplicably caps-locked JAY Z) - Justin Timberlake. Oh, JT, I love you so. This song is so catchy, and so deeply inappropriate. I had this stuck in my head for the entirety of break, and now that I'm writing about it, it's stuck in my head again. And do I care? No. No I do not.
Carry On - Fun.. This song has got to stop doing what it's doing to me. Considering how many inside-joke-y references to "Some Nights" I've made since last summer all over my blog and my everyday conversations, it should come as a surprise to no one that I fell immediately in love with this song. Though I have still yet to venture particularly far into the world of Fun. beyond their soaring, literary, and Billboard Hot 100-approved singles, I have adored Fun. in the contexts where I've experienced them. I loved "We Are Young" as soon as that started happening, I have based my entire life around "Some Nights," and now, I have "Carry On" to keep the Fun.-induced tears tradition alive. "But I like to think I can cheat it all to make up for the times I've been cheated on"? Are you kidding me? STOP BEING PERFECT, FUN.. JUST STOP.
Troublemaker - Olly Murs. Last summer, my eleven-year-old host sister in Edinburgh told me, in a game of music-swapping we were all playing, that Olly Murs was, like, the best thing ever. If I liked One Direction, she said (which, of course, I unabashedly do), I would loooove him. Cut to ten months later, this song finds its way onto my iPod, and we are shown once again that the tastes of eleven-year-olds are and will always be an accurate reflection of my own. Also, in listening to it so many times, I have discovered that the chorus of this song overlaps almost perfectly with the chorus of Britney Spears' "Crazy." If I liked this song before making this realization, I now like it enough to make it the first dance at my wedding.
Okay I'm kidding. Sort of.
Mirrors - JT again. I don't understand what this song means. I don't even remotely understand. I thought it might have been a really dirty but cleverly coded innuendo that was just flying over my head, but then he dedicated the video to his grandparents. Mostly, I choose to ignore the confusing words to this one and just focus on what it's really good for: a taste of what N*SYNC would sound like if they made a record in 2013. Seriously, everyone, go listen to this song again. Post-modern boy band. Right on down to the "Is this secretly dirty?" lyrics, that is all it is. And again...I am not complaining.
C'Mon - Ke$ha. Ke$ha is my girl, and I have no shame in owning up to that fact. Like all of Ke$ha's music, this song simultaneously makes me want to dance and makes me sit back and ponder for hours how anyone could even invent such a life for themselves as Ke$ha's bottle-of-Jack-toothbrushing self manages to do. Furthermore, the full verse of rhymes on the syllable "rrr," set in motion by the mind-blowing line "Feelin' like a sabertooth ti-grr," has actually changed my life. I almost applauded from my seat on the Stansted Airport bus when I heard these rhymes for the first time. You've done it again, Ke$ha. Go buy yourself some soap.
Beauty and a Beat - Justin Bieber. I love Justin Bieber and everything that he does. This is not news.
My Songs Know What You Did in the Dark (Light It Up) - Fall Out Boy. Quite honestly, I am not sure how this song made it onto my sister's list of recent purchases. There is only one person in this family who identifies as faux-edgy enough to listen to Fall Out Boy back in the time when listening to Fall Out Boy was a thing, and that person is me. This song has also shown me that, unsurprisingly, I am entirely out of touch with what the young kids are and aren't listening to these days. I assumed that new Fall Out Boy music was the kind of thing that the young folks - like the college-junior folks - could really only embrace through a deeply refined sense of irony. Fall Out Boy? Sewww retro - and yet so recent. Given the complete lack of irony that characterizes the rest of this playlist, though, it seems that this is not the case. Meanwhile, as I dissected the layers of context and meaning that surrounded my sister's purchase of this song, I also came inadvertently to discover that I really, really like this song. Pete Wentz, there may still be a place for you hiding somewhere in my heart, even after all these years.
Those nine songs - and pretty much just those nine songs - were the soundtrack to my spring break. They accompanied me through two countries, four cities, two flights, three trains, and a bus ride, and they have done me well. I can now answer the question, "What's the cool jams?", and I know that not only can one feel like a sabertooth tiger, but one can rap about that feeling in such a way that it rhymes with kosher. Thanks, SB2K13 playlist. You've set the bar pretty darn high for Easter.
Tuesday, March 12, 2013
It's My Birthday And I'll Eat What I Want To: Spring Break Part 1
(Sorry if the formatting on this is messed up - I don't understand this iPad!)
Hello, everyone! As most of you probably know if you've read this blog before, I am currently smack in the middle of spring break. Over this ten-day vacation, my friends and I are visiting Venice, Florence, and Paris. Having done Venice early in the weekend and Florence for the past few days, today is our final day before heading to la France. As it happens, today is also my twenty-first birthday. I guess you could say things are pretty good.
Hello, everyone! As most of you probably know if you've read this blog before, I am currently smack in the middle of spring break. Over this ten-day vacation, my friends and I are visiting Venice, Florence, and Paris. Having done Venice early in the weekend and Florence for the past few days, today is our final day before heading to la France. As it happens, today is also my twenty-first birthday. I guess you could say things are pretty good.
It is from this place of pretty-good-ness that I bring you the first installment of my spring break blogging. There's a lot of ground to cover regarding our trip so far, so settle in with your computers, I'll settle in to my chair on our terrace watching the sun begin to set over the bell tower, and we'll get started.
My trip began on Friday morning with a solo flight to Venice. Thus was slightly terrifying, but thanks to the always-comforting efforts of Ryanair, the happy discovery of a group of London Program guys on my flight, and copious amounts of Justin Timberlake music, I survived. Our time in Venice was short - just over 24 hours in my case - but filled with excellent things...most of them food-related. I had a surprisingly delicious broccoli pasta Friday night (happy meatless Friday!) at a restaurant where the menus were handwritten each day in Italian and the rest of the clientele was about 4/5ths Italian men named Benito and Giovanni aged 70 and above. On Saturday, we got pasta in takeout boxes - I'm talking straight China Lane here, people - at a somewhat more touristy but no less awesome little place called Alfredo's. My "cinque fromaggio" gnocchi was, you know, a couple notches better than 4-cheese pasta at the dining hall - a rating I give quite literally, as I think 4CP is closer to God than anything on campus short of Fr. Hesburgh himself - but the main thing I took away from this restaurant was the music. Authentic Italian crooning, you ask? Jazzy instrumentals? No. When we first got in line, they were playing "Dirrrty" by Christina Aguilera. This was followed up by, in no particular order, Pink, Gnarls Barkley, post-Y2K Madonna, and, I kid you not, Eiffel 65. Terrible American pop music is, indeed the universal language.
To follow this meal up, we grabbed our second gelato of the trip. I paired a strawberry flavor that looked promising with something whose name I could not translate but which had large dollops of chocolate scattered throughout that I felt couldn't fail to please. When I took my first bite, I realized just how accurate that evaluation was. Friends, this gelato tasted exactly like a cup of chocolate ice cream from Sycamore. If you don't know what Sycamore is, I am sorry for your loss. It is a frozen custard stand in Logansport, open only seasonally, that serves up the best frozen goodies east of the Mississippi. And this gelato tasted just like it. I cannot adequately describe the joy I felt in consuming this gelato, but I can approach it by sharing the following fact: the dollops of chocolate scattered through the gelato? Yeah...those were Nutella.
We headed to Florence by train on Saturday night, and our time here has continued the trend of life-changing nomz. On Saturday night, I had ricotta-spinach ravioli and a "small cake" of chocolate and pairs to which I remain fondly attached to this very day. Sunday brought with it a focaccia-bread sandwich the size of a basketball, which convinced me that I will in fact starve upon my return to London and my subsequent refusal to eat the peanut butter and Tesco bread monstrosities I call "sandwiches" ever again. For dinner, I had a lasagna that might just keep me away from the pasta line at SDH for the rest of my life. Oh, and throughout each of these days, you can just assume with total accuracy that gelato is a near-constant.
Yesterday, in the only proper manner for the eve of my twenty-first birthday, the gastronomical focus of the day was more balanced between food and wine. After a quick lunch (and gelato) near the leather markets where I had spent the morning buying a purse from an Italian woman in negotiations performed entirely in the only language we both spoke, French, a few members of my group and I headed out on a bus tour of the Chianti wine region. The bulk of this tour was spent at an ancient castle turned modern vineyard for a tour, wine tasting, and what I like to call "classy snacktime." I'm largely indifferent at best towards wine that isn't white/pink and sparkly, but I was surprised to find that the fairly intense reds we were tasting were nowhere near as disgusting as I expected them to be. The snacks, however - a sheep cheese, Italian salami, bruschetta with painfully expensive olive oil, biscotti, and the highlight, cheese-salami-bruschetta crostinis - were 100% on point. Nom.
After dinner last night, we had to figure out what, if anything, we wanted to do by way of going out for my birthday. Our hip young tour guide for the day, Irene (a name that sounds much cooler in Italian than in English), gave us recommendations for a few clubs, but as most sounded far out of my price range and one had a most recent review on Trip Advisor entitled "SEXUAL ASSAULT," I was more than happy to just enjoy my dinner with an extra glass of wine of my choosing and to call it a night. As we were leaving the restaurant, though, we happened by total chance upon a group of Notre Dame guys from the London and Oxford programs. They were headed, funnily enough, to one of the clubs Irene had suggested (not the sexual assault one, to our delight). They were also already fairly intoxicated and, thus, very enthusiastic about us all going out. I figured if everyone was so excited about it, I could manage a short time at a club for my 21st. We headed back to our apartment - yes, apartment; the post regarding our insane accommodations on this trip will come later - to change, and we heard from the guys that the intended club was apparently closed on Mondays. We found a much tamer bar to replace the closed club and headed over there. After some initial mishaps involving mismatched drinks and some surprise €7 charges for the boys, the night actually turned out to be really entertaining and fun. As I mentioned,the guys were pretty hammered - hence the "entertaining" - and, to my great and pleasant surprise, the least intoxicated of the bunch even picked up the tab for my very first legal-in-all-countries drink. After two months living in the UK, I may not have had the fun of walking into a bar for the very first time as a newly-minted legal drinker that would normally accompany a 21st birthday, but celebrating in an English pub in Florence, Italy, full exclusively of American college students (the only people out on a Monday night) wasn't half bad.
Anyway, after an afternoon filled with viewing Botticellis at the Uffizi and blogging on terraces, I'm off to get ready for the repeat visit to the small-cake ricotta ravioli place that will serve as my birthday dinner. Check out Instagram for a small preview of spring break photos, and look forward to more blog posts and photo albums once we're in and back from Paris. Ciao, everyone! It's time for more gelato.
Monday, March 4, 2013
Brugesterdam: It Was...Warm
(Disclaimer: As you can deduce from the outfits in our photos, this trip was not, in fact, warm. It is an inside joke that brings the eight of us great joy. Sorry, all 6,999,999,992 people of earth on the outside.)
This weekend, I went with seven new and old friends on my most exotic trip scheduled for this semester: Bruges and Amsterdam. Though I certainly know plenty of people who have gone to these cities while studying abroad, they are a bit further off the beaten path than your standard Italy/France/Ireland fare, so I'll start with a bit of geographical explanation.
Bruges, for those of you who may not know (cough Laura cough), is located in the Flanders region of northwestern Belgium. Right here:
This weekend, I went with seven new and old friends on my most exotic trip scheduled for this semester: Bruges and Amsterdam. Though I certainly know plenty of people who have gone to these cities while studying abroad, they are a bit further off the beaten path than your standard Italy/France/Ireland fare, so I'll start with a bit of geographical explanation.
Bruges, for those of you who may not know (cough Laura cough), is located in the Flanders region of northwestern Belgium. Right here:
In Bruges, as in all of Flanders, they speak a few different languages. The city technically falls within the German-speaking portion of Belgium, so there is plenty of German. As French is the other main language of Belgium, many people in Bruges also speak French. The region of Flanders also has its own dialectical language, Flemish, which is roughly a hybrid of French and German with a little Dutch mixed in sometimes, and which is pretty much total nonsense. Finally, since Bruges's main industry is catering to tourists who, as is so often the case with tourists, speak English with some significant frequency, almost everyone in Bruges speaks English, too.
The linguistic situation in Bruges can be pretty much summed up by an exchange I witnessed on Friday afternoon in a chocolate shop between a saleswoman and the French family that was in line behind me. After hearing the saleswoman bid my friends and I goodbye in nearly accent-less English, the père of the family behind us approached the counter and apologetically said to the woman, "I need French." In response, the saleswoman laughed and said, in nearly accent-less French, "Je parle les tous, Monsieur."
Roughly translated, this means, "Homeboy, I speak errythang." Given my fluent English, very shaky grasp of French, and desperate desire to be worldly and speak twenty languages, it's safe to say that I hate everyone in Belgium.
Things in the Netherlands - where, for the record, Amsterdam is located - aren't much better. Their official language is Dutch, which is yet another nonsense-looking Germanic language. It sounds vaguely like what German probably sounds like when spoken by goofy clowns, and it looks like English as typed out by someone with a first-grade-level grasp of spelling and a keyboard that sticks on every vowel. ("Noord" means north, "friis" means fries, etc.)
Luckily for the 95% of the world's tourist population that doesn't speak Dutch, Dutch appears in Amsterdam about as often as Latin appears in a post-Vatican II Catholic church. It's there, but you don't really need to bother learning anything but your native language to get by. Everything in Amsterdam is labeled and announced in English, and if your preferred language is something else - French, Italian, German - you can probably find extra handouts printed in that language, too.
By way of general information about the country, the weirdest part about the Netherlands is how close it ultimately is to the UK. Amsterdam is located at (A) in the picture below, and London is (B).
Though that map shows the lengthier driving route, the straight-line distance from Amsterdam to London is only 223 miles. To put that in perspective, the distance from South Bend to Detroit is just about 220 miles. Amsterdam is in a country my sister had barely heard of, it speaks a language that sounds like it should come from the other end of the world, and it is as far away from London as Detroit is from Notre Dame. Riddle me that, Batman.
Anyway, now that I've blown your minds with my astounding linguistic and geographical knowledge, I suppose I should talk about some things that I actually did this weekend.
The trip began bright and early Friday morning with the Eurostar train from London to Brussels, a train ride whose uneventfulness is paralleled only by the uneventfulness of Brussels itself. We didn't make an actual stop there in Belgium's capital city because, as the popular phrase has gone among the London program kids, Brussels is the Philadelphia of Europe. (Catchphrase credit goes to Cee-lo Green; sorry-I'm-not-sorries go to my favorite PA-born Howard RA, the artist formerly known as ladysasalol.) From the city that dad says brussels sprouts are from, we hopped on another train over to Bruges.
Bruges had three main events: the bell tower, the chocolate, and the waffles. The bell tower, located in the center of town at the edge of the Markt, or main square, consisted of 366 increasingly narrow steps leading to a bell-filled room from which you could see various incredible views of the whole city.
Hallo!
The bell tower also contained stopping points pretending to be museum exhibits every 50 steps or so, which is how I managed to get to the top of it without dying.
After summiting the bell tower, we decided to reward ourselves in the only appropriate Belgian way: chocolate. You may recall from an earlier post of mine that chocolate is my entire life. Bruges, then, is a great place for me. There are chocolate shops not only on every corner, but in every other storefront. Did I spend 40 euros on chocolate in something like an hour and a half? I don't know. Maybe. Yes.
When not eating and buying straight-up chocolate, Bruges also offers another Belgian dessert specialty: waffles. Reading this from America, you may think you already know what a Belgian waffle is. It's, like, a thing. Everyone knows. Right?
Wrong. In Bruges, a Belgian waffle is a magical thing made approximately as follows: 1) Roll huge quantity of perfect-looking dough into a giant ball; 2) toss said ball into glorified panini maker; 3) remove your newly-made, rough-around-the-edges, golden-brown waffle; 4) humor your gluttonous American customers by covering it in chocolate sauce, a heaping scoop of Ferrero Rocher ice cream, more, insta-hardening chocolate sauce, and powdered sugar. If I could marry this waffle, I would do it. And we would live a long and happy life together.
Please note the bag of chocolate hanging off the wrist with which I am about to shovel an ice cream-covered waffle into my mouth
While Bruges was great, though, it was a fairly short stop, and on Saturday morning, we headed on to Amsterdam. For those of you wondering, no, I did not smoke, eat, or otherwise ingest any cannabis-based products during my time in the highest of the Low Countries. My friends and I did, however, do a variety of other, tamer Amsterdam-y things. These included:
- Walking (briskly) through the Red Light District, so that we could say we did. Here, we concluded that the Red Light District made us all really uncomfortable and also vaguely sad, and I decided that the writers of Les Mis could make, like, so much money if they could somehow sell the rights to "Lovely Ladies" to the RLD to be played there on an endless loop (as it was the entire time in my head and the heads of anyone who matters).
- Eating more delicious breakfast food at non-breakfast times, specifically, pancakes for lunch.
Nom.
- Narrowly avoiding death at the hands of totally reckless bicyclists approximately 80 times each. Giving them their own lanes of traffic: good idea. Giving them free reign to use those lanes irrespective of traffic patterns, stoplights, and pedestrians: REALLY BAD IDEA. Especially since most of them are probably high half the time anyway. #stereotypez
- Visiting the house where Anne Frank and family made their hiding place during the Second World War, which has since been turned into a very tasteful, powerful, and excellent museum that I would very highly recommend.
- Seeing a windmill.
Cue "Man of La Mancha" references
- Seeing a giraffe.
In case you thought I was kidding
- And finally (and most importantly), staying on a boat hotel called the Gandalf, owned and operated by a bearded, friendly Dutch hippie man named Hans. For those of you reading this who were a part of or a visitor to my group in Miami back in January, imagine the European Guesthouse floating on a canal, actually in Europe, with a landlord whose name was actually Hans, and without the stray cats, and you have the Gandalf. It is just as incredible as you think.
In all, this trip, too, was pretty great. It had chocolate. It had waffles. It had canals. It had Hans. As my tripmates and I would say, on a scale of ugly to prutty kewt, it was definitely, uh...prutty kewt. Next on the schedule for all of us in the London Program is spring break, which starts at the end of this week. Keep checking back here on da blog for my tales of adventure and intrigue (read: probably just more chocolate) - and my 21st birthday - in Venice, Florence, and Par-ee!
Tuesday, February 19, 2013
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.
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.
Friday, February 8, 2013
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.
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.
Saturday, February 2, 2013
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.
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.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)