Breaking: Sarah Likes a Sport

In a move that is somehow both timely and outdated, I have decided this week to tell you all about my new favorite sport, hurling. This topic is timely, fresh, hip, and relevant insofar as the all-Ireland hurling final is slated for this Sunday. It is outdated and sad in that my sole encounter with hurling – the original all-Ireland final before they decided to end in a tie and require a stupid rematch – was (whoops) two and a half weeks ago. In either case, though, hurling is awesome. Allow me to enlighten you.

Despite the fact that no other country on earth plays or understands this sport, hurling is enormously popular here in its country of origin. Weird, right?

…Oh.

Going into the Match Formerly Known as Final earlier this month, I knew nothing about hurling. I’d heard it was fast-paced.  I’d heard it was violent. I knew who was playing, vaguely. All I knew for sure was that it was a sport – and, as we all know, “sport” in Latin, roughly translated, means “Sarah’s gonna hate every second of this.”

My dear friends and readers, when I thought of hurling, I thought wrong. Hurling is the greatest sport that has ever been. As advertised, the violence is completely senseless and relentlessly entertaining. Pretty much no maneuver is illegal in this sport, including, from what I gather, beating your opponent to a pulp with your hurling wand in the interest of stealing the ball from them. These guys go out there in shiny shirts, tiny shorts, and literally no padding anywhere and just destroy each other for seventy-five minutes…without stopping. There is a halftime built in to the game, but outside of those blessed fifteen minutes, the action literally never stopped. No time-outs. No stopping of the clock. No halt in the action to deal with injuries, because injuries are for far weaker men than hurlers. On two occasions during the game, a player was so badly injured that he could not stand back up. In these instances, paramedics simply ran through the field of play to the player in question, formed a human wall to keep the guy’s own teammates from landing an errant stomp on his concussed head, and basically smacked him around a bit until he could get up and walk it off. I think I saw three substitutions the whole time.

Hurling. Is. Insane.

As the match went on, I eventually realized that hurling reminded me of a lot of other sports I’ve seen through the years. In fact, thought I, hurling might be better called by modified names of several of these sports. What might those be, you ask? Well, well, well.

-       On-the-ground Quidditch with only Beaters

-       Public school lacrosse

-       Soccer at that tense moment right before people stop playing and start just punching each other, plus sticks you can hit people with, minus rules

-       American football back in the Rockne-ish era where your death on the field was not just an occupational hazard but in fact pretty much a guarantee

-       Attempted Murder: The Game

If you can find a way to watch the all-Ireland hurling final (Round Two) this Sunday, I would highly encourage you to do so. The teams in play are underdog Tipperary, whose colors are blue and gold, which is the home county of my ancestors, and who you should clearly be rooting for, and win factory Kilkenny, whom one guy on Tinder described as “the Miami Heat to your Indianapolis Pacers.” Oh, and how do you spell those teams in Irish, you ask? Thiobraid Arann and Cill Chainnigh.

Nothing in this country makes sense. I love it all.

So Hello, I Live in Ireland

This is probably unlikely for anyone who has found their way to this blog, but if you do not know this already, I have recently moved to Ireland. Surprise! I'm doing a year of service here in the employ of my alma mater and will be living right in the center of Dublin from last Thursday until the end of next June. Since I am A) once again international and B) only abroad for a finite period of time, it seemed an appropriate choice to return to the blog I made when I studied abroad. Welcome and/or welcome back, then, to The Domerberry International!

Anyway, with that out of the way, let us commence with the first Ireland blog post: Lessons I've Learned In Five Days As an Irish Poser.

1. Driving in this country is absolutely, certifiably insane. Somehow, I've already ridden in about seven cars since arriving here. The first was a cab ride from the airport. I have no memory of it. Was I conscious? Was I even technically there? Unknown. The second car was a van that was shuttling people from one end of Trinity College to another. It was driven by two students who were blasting the radio, making jokes about our imaginary boyfriends when they should probably have been watching the road, flying around corners, hurtling down alleys about an inch wider than their van, and altogether endangering everyone's lives. This was, while a bit of an adventure primarily because the guys were hot, mostly terrifying. But they were young! They weren't on real streets! This insane style of driving isn't normal, is it?

WRONG. Every car I've been in since arriving here has produced nonstop insanity. You can legally pass cars on the highway in this country by simply waiting for them to slide onto the shoulder a little bit and sneaking past them while a car speeds toward you in the other lane. Nearly all cars here seem to have automatic transmission and nearly zero drivers seem to know how to operate them. Our bus driver for the two-hour drive back from Wexford wore headphones for the duration of the trip. He ran two red lights. Between Irish driving habits and my complete lack of driving ability, let us all thoroughly hope that I never end up behind the wheel of a car in this country, because no one will get out alive.

2. You can't buy alcohol after 10 PM. This is just a fact. Apparently. Learned this the hard way. Thanks, Ireland.

3. If you're pale enough, you can convince Irish people you are one of them. Tonight on my bus home, a pair of men in Stetson hats and a state of general confusion about the Euro stepped on and began to make a big ol' touristy ruckus. In case literally everything else about them failed to give it away, I noticed when they started talking to each other/everyone that they were American. Eventually, after listening for three stops to their spirited discussion with an Irish businessman about why Irish fellers don't wear hats, I spoke up and asked where they were from. To the surprise of no one, they said they were from Texas. I explained that I'd asked because I, too, am American, from Indiana. "Oh!" said the Irish businessman. "I'd have guessed you were Irish!" Just as I was celebrating my successfully European street style and independent city-girl-ing, he added, "...With your complexion." So, lesson learned, y'all. Irish people may laugh at Americans with 1/256th Irish ancestry referring to themselves as Irish, but if you've kept your fair Irish skin and you can keep your mouth shut, you can totally trick them into thinking you're legit.

4. "What's the craic" is actually one of the few conversation starters on Tinder that isn't off-color. I obviously had come across the word "craic" before deciding to move to Ireland for ten months. It means a lot of things, including but not limited to fun, food, possibly alcohol (?), and a whole bunch of other stuff, all of them harmless as far as I know. But I must say, I was still a bit thrown off when a match on Tinder started a conversation with me with simply, "What's the craic?" After all, this is the app that I myself have publicly called a hookup app. Turns out the guy literally just meant, "what's up." Go ahead, dude. Say "craic" again.

5. There is a British equivalent of the Jersey Shore on which the cast is somehow even less intelligible than its American counterparts, and there is an Irish cooking show literally called "Two Fat Ladies." In pretty much every other way, Irish TV is American TV. In case anyone was worried that my productivity would triple in Ireland since I couldn't watch SVU marathons for hours on end anymore, worry not - I totally still can.

Keep checking back for more on my adventures abroad 2.0!

From One L-Town to Another

As most of you probably know by now from my obnoxious Facebook posts about Partying in the USA and being back on Notre Dame's non-UK campus, I have, for a few days now, been officially done with study abroad. The people of the London Program executed our final Domer-bomb last Saturday (in the category of sentences I should not speak aloud to the general public), taking over a solid half of one of the giant waiting lounges at Heathrow Airport before boarding our group flights back to the US of A. The past seven days have been crazy - with 2 days in London, 2.5 days in South Bend, and 2.5 days in Logansport - and now that the London laundry hanging up to dry in my shower has left me unable to get anything done, it seemed that now is the perfect time to finally write about my final days in London and my transition back from one L-Town to another.

Since the penultimate week in London brought Parkour Greg climbing through our window, I can't really say that the final week in London brought anything to top my last blog post in terms of excitement. Mostly, it brought a lot of nostalgic lasts. There was the Thursday before the final week, when my Playing Shakespeare classmates and I put on a Macbeth performance for the entire, tipsy London Program. This was fun, nerve-wracking, and extremely weird all at the same time. Mostly, I'm just happy that the audience, which laughed uproariously at such unintentionally innuendo-laden lines as "I have done the deed," did not laugh at my famous but unfortunate line, "Unsex me here."

(If it seems obvious to you that an audience of college students would not laugh at a dramatic Shakespeare monologue, first of all, you completely misunderstand the ethos of the London Program, and second of all, you are clearly not aware that the apartment next to mine - the residents of which took up the entire first row at our performance - was referred to by themselves and others as "Douche Flat.")

The final week brought lots more lasts. The last time I could go out for drinks on a Monday night and not be considered an alcoholic (note: this was also actually the first Monday on which I went out for drinks, but who's counting). The last time I would exchange casual hellos with my friends on our daily commute through Trafalgar Square. The last time I could drop in to the National Gallery after class instead of the Art Department display hallway in O'Shag. The last time I would take an exam as a college junior. Perhaps most heartbreakingly, the last time for at least quite a while that I would shop at Primark.

On Thursday, my last walk home from class across the Hungerford Bridge brought me what is probably my favorite commute of the entire semester. The sun was shining and the temperatures hovering above the 60-degrees-Fahrenheit mark for once, and the people I encountered on my final walk across the now-familiar bridge seemed to be actively trying to make my commute one for the ages. First, there was the twenty-something American girl swearing at her boyfriend in an almost unintelligible Boston accent. As soon as I had passed the two lovebirds and could do so without looking like a psychopath, I broke into one of the biggest grins I think I have ever formed my mouth into. Sure, they were yelling at each other, but they were yelling in the voice of a country I was headed back to in 48 short hours. Weird as this may be, that Boston girl's anger brought me a whole lot of joy.

A few yards later, the joy was multiplied by the simple action of a steel-drum player on one side of the bridge. Seemingly completely at random, the man paused in the middle of his song to shout out one simple word: "happiness." The fact that I kept myself from pulling an Enchanted and breaking into song with these guys is nothing short of a miracle.

On Friday - my last full day in London - I kept the Enchanted trend alive with an impromptu walk through St. James' Park and one last stroll through Parliament Square, past all of the city's most Instagrammable sights. The roommates and I headed out to dinner for one last night of GT'z with G-02, and, before we knew it, it was time to return to the Land of the Free and Home of the Cars That Drive on the Right Side of the Road. We bid a hearty xoxo to an incredible city and semester and headed home.

If you think the story ends there, of course, you are sorely mistaken. My family surprised me at the airport with not only a welcome home poster bearing the shining American visages of both Barack Obama and Honey Boo-Boo Child, but also with a real-life ambush from my two best friends. They took the three of us back to campus, where I spent my first days back in America on the constant brink of tears over how perfect my life is. From multiple meals in the glorious South Dining Hall to a sunset stroll past the Dome en route to the grotto, a lazy afternoon of gossiping on the futons of Howard Hall,  and a Sunday bookended by singing in the loft of the Basilica and the choir corner of a full-to-bursting Keough Hall Chapel, it was exactly like I had never left - and it was the perfect transition back into life in the USA.

After one last SDH lunch on Monday afternoon, I finally returned to Logansport. I've been to a potluck dinner/banquet in the LHS cafeteria, made a midday trip to Kokomo, and had generous helpings of Sycamore, B&K, and El Arriero, so I think it's safe to say I'm pretty fully back into the swing of Logansport life already, too.

It was an unbelievable semester in London, but oh, is it great to be back. This afternoon, I'm headed back to campus for a few more days as a homeless but happy rising senior (insert a "WHAT?!" a la G-02 here). From Miami to London to Edinburgh to Amsterdam to Venice to Florence to Paris to Rome to Logansport and back to Notre Dame, it's been a pretty awesome four months.

Thanks for reading the study abroad blog, everybody. From here on out, it'll be back to The Domerberry. If you're on campus, dear readers, I will see you tonight. If you need me, I'll be the one finally sipping on the Reckers smoothie I've been pining for all semester and talking about how I've been 21 for two months and still haven't been to the Backer. Good luck on the rest of your finals, my friends - and see you soon.

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He's Climbin' in Yo Windows

After nearly four months of living in a giant-window-filled room on the ground floor of a building facing out onto a busy London intersection and regular parkour playground, I experienced today, surprisingly, the first moment of my semester that has ever been both legitimately strange and also notably disconcerting. Before you all get worried, this is not a sad or a scary story - just a really, really weird one. In my eighteen months of blogging, I have become all too familiar with the "I cannot wait to blog about this" feeling, and the feeling accompanying tonight's events was the granddaddy of them all.

Early this evening, my flatmates and I were hanging out in my room and our common room, reveling in various states of dinner and debating our options for a night out, when we heard screeching tires, followed by the yells of what sounded like several grown men. Thinking that the time had finally and inevitably come when we would have to witness the gruesome death of one of the free-running daredevils of the Conway Front Yard Parkour Club, the three of us ran to my room's comfortably open windows to see what had happened. The casual mood of the evening went temporarily and abruptly out the window (pun both unintentional and distressing, but I can't think of a better turn of phrase) when we saw that a flashy white sports car had just collided with a bicyclist. After a few brief moments that left us, the bikers and drivers, and the small crowd of parkour guys who had seen the accident standing around in stunned silence, it became clear that the biker was shaken, but okay. He stood up and walked back to the sidewalk unaided, and all of us unwitting spectators began to return to what we were doing.

Still reeling somewhat from the shock of watching an accident unfold outside our door, though, my roommates and I lingered for a moment at the windows. (Windows which, to remind you, were a solid ten or twelve inches open. Keep this in mind.) As the people on the street returned to their business, one of the parkour guys noticed us watching the scene.

"Hey ladies!" he yelled.

Uh...is he talking to us? People from the outside can talk to us? I thought this was like a two-way zoo kind of thing, what is going on?

As the above thoughts raced through our heads and out of our mouths, our new friend continued talking.

"You wanna give me your number?"

Ya know, my gut says no on this one, but - "We don't have phones! Sorry!"

Unsatisfied with this answer, though, parkour guy decided to take our conversation to a new level: face to face.

"Eh, screw it," I'm assuming he more or less said somewhere in his barely audible mumblings, "I'm comin' over there."

I've described this before, but my roommates and I have always taken felt confident and safe in our disconnect from the street thanks to the tall, spike-tipped fence and sizable fire-escape-esque pit that separates our windows from the actual sidewalk. These obstacles proved no match, however, for parkour guy. Before we could even make sense of what was going on, our parkour friend had hopped up to and over the top of the fence and was making his way, monkey bars style, across the metal bar that connected the fence base to our building. He reached the end of the bar, and in classic "it's easier to ask forgiveness than permission" style, reached out for the windowsill as he asked if he could come up.

The next thing we knew, this random man from the parkour troupe on the street was literally hanging from our windowsill chatting us up.

This is probably a good moment to reiterate to you all that I WISH that I could invent a story like this, people. I am 100%, positively not making this up. This is, unbelievably, my actual life.

Satisfied with our proximity at this point, parkour guy tried again. "So, you wanna give me that number?"

Like the safety-trained little darlings that we are, we repeated our insistence that we don't have phones. After all, that's, like...half true. Seeing that his initial plan was unsuccessful, our new friend moved on to a new tactic: settling in for a chat. "Do you mind if I just open this a bit more?" he asked. Before we could answer, he had pushed the window up another foot or so and STUCK HIS HEAD, SHOULDERS, AND UPPER TORSO THROUGH OUR WINDOW.

To clarify one more time, there is, at this point, a random guy from the parkour crew dangling from our windowsill, half of his body in our room, talking to us about our evening plans. He started with the standard "where are you from," spouting off the few random fun facts he knew about our various home states and trying to make sense of where we went to college before getting to the good stuff: what we were doing tonight. After small-talking and avoiding the subject for a while, we eventually dropped the name of a club some people were considering, earning a "that's a fun place on Wednesdays actually" from our new buddy Greg. We snapped an entirely necessary picture with our breaking-and-entering friend and sent him on his way with a half-hearted, "Yeah, see you at the club! Maybe!" As Greg returned to his parkour, we went back to our normal lives, shaking our heads at what is, without a doubt, the weirdest thing that has ever happened to us here in Conway Hall.

Obviously, as I'm writing and posting this new blog post at 11 PM, I decided not to go out tonight. (Surprise! I'll go out tomorrow?) But a couple of my roommates did, in fact, just head out the door in pursuit of the very club we name-dropped to Greg. So maybe this weird story will have a happy ending against all odds. Perhaps the tale of the parkour practitioner who's climbin' in yo windows, snatchin' yo people up, will even end in love!

Because oh yeah - did I forget to mention this part? Theoretically-creepy Greg here was actually really hot.

Just makin' some local friends! 

I think we can all learn a few valuable lessons from this crazily improbable story. First, it can teach us all that, on occasion, you gotta open your hearts and your windows to the charming, attractive parkour guy from the street who so desperately wants in. And secondly? It shows us that my friends and I will go for pretty much anything if the involved parties are good-looking enough. Breaking and entering? I mean, only technically. We'll be shutting our windows before going to bed tonight, but Parkour Greg, we'll be dreaming of you. 

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Maggie, Christine, and the Sun

You know that feeling of freedom you get when you finish and turn in a big paper? Well, this Wednesday, I took that feeling and turned it into an entire day's worth of out-of-the-ordinary London-y exploring. In describing it, the day wasn't all that exciting or special, but whether because of the endorphins from handing in my paper or the fact that the sun was shining for what seemed like the first time since I was about fourteen years old, I had a really great and very British day - and I thought I'd tell you about it.

From the start, this Wednesday was bound to be more interesting than the average one, for this Wednesday was the day of Margaret Thatcher's funeral. Honestly, I think that, in the days preceding it, this event scared many of us more than it excited us. Tensions are high when it comes to the British public's feelings on the Iron Lady and, in particular, her expensive Ceremonial funeral, and after the events in Boston on Monday and the extensive safety warnings and guidelines our program sent to us on Tuesday night, we were a little nervous about going about our day in these places that would be so caught up in the proceedings of the controversial day. We were advised to take an alternate route to school on Wednesday, as our usual path takes us straight across the Strand and through Trafalgar Square - two of the most high-profile areas of the path of the funeral procession that would come through at almost the same time we would. I, however, have a particular taste for adventure (read: had a paper due so was obviously running horribly late in leaving the dorm), so I decided to (read: had to to avoid being late and lost) throw caution to the wind and go about my walk to school just as I usually would.

This, as it turns out, was exactly the proper thing to do. (Sorry, program directors.) All the things that made Wednesday's festivities nerve-wracking in our heads actually made it extremely safe in practice. With riot and even terror fears at an uneasy high, the police presence was massive. Trust me, parents and Notre Dame administrators - nothing bad was going to happen to any of us with that many cops lining about half of our daily commute. Similarly, since the funeral-affected areas of our path had to, of course, be cleared for the procession, not only was there no imminent danger; there weren't even cars to avoid as we crossed the street. All the roads were closed, and the barricades and police force around the square meant that it was almost completely free of people who weren't walking to work or starting to form the small crowds that lined the procession route. Many of us were joking in class that, really, that set-up would be the perfect way to walk to school every single day. Cross the street without even checking the traffic or heeding the lights? Waltz through Trafalgar Square without dodging screaming children or creepy street performance? If you ask us, Great Britain needs to hold ceremonial and state funerals more often.

About halfway through my first class of the morning, my classmates convinced our professor to let us out into the square to see if we could catch the procession driving past. We missed it by about five pathetic minutes, but hey, we can still say we were in Trafalgar Square on the morning that Maggie Thatcher's funeral drove past it. Have I mentioned lately, for good measure, that my life is still entirely not real?

By the end of my last class of the day, the traffic patterns made weird by the funeral had gone back to normal, and to the surprise, delight, and relative confusion of everyone in the ND London Program, the sun had come out.  With the sun out, the temperature in the sixties, and my fifteen-page paper officially out of my hands, I decided I would take a detour on my way home and do some shopping in the Covent Garden area that I so often walked past.

THE BEST IDEA. I discovered a whole new treasure trove of shopping that will probably destroy what remains of my bank account here in my last two weeks, I bought a khaki pencil skirt because by God it's April, I navigated a new neighborhood successfully, and I found this:

Thanks for the photo, interwebz 

This insane-looking, brightly-colored little mini-neighborhood is Neal's Yard. It's filled with small health food cafes and other various hippie shops. As I already had my khaki pencil skirt-filled Banana Republic in hand by the time I found this place, the death stares from the flower children ensured that I didn't stick around too long - but I had a great time for those few minutes looking around at all the pink windows and yellow bricks and flower boxes lit up by this weird thing called the sun. If you ever doubt that foggy London town can be sunny and colorful, I entreat you to look no further than the extremely cool Neal's Yard. 

Even with my lovely impromptu shopping spree, though, the uncontested highlight of my Great Day in London was my evening activity: going to see Phantom of the Opera on the West End. As we had both been wanting to see the show all semester without ever actually planning a night of it, one of my spring break buds and I decided last week to buy tickets for this Wednesday to reward ourselves for finishing that aforementioned paper. Obviously, I knew that Phantom was a great show and I loved its soundtrack - after all, I had technically seen a professional production of it before, in Toronto when I was seven years old and totally capable of remembering everything about it - but, people. It. Was. Incredible. 

From the very first notes of "Think of Me" to the final thrilling moments down in that labyrinth where night is blind, I was geeking out like a weirdo at Comic Con (sorry not sorry, anyone reading this who's into Comic Con). I pretty much had my hands at the level of my eyes for most of the second act, out of sheer excitement and a tendency for excited jazz hand that eventually reached the point of medically diagnosable tic. The girl playing Christine had an unidentifiable and strange accent that was occasionally distracting, but even with her occasionally off-kilter vowels, the talent of this cast was off the charts. Every time Carlotta opened her mouth, I wanted to just yell out, "How do you do this eight times a week? Are you a human?!" When "Masquerade" started, I, for obvious reasons, thought I had died and gone to costume-loving heaven. So many rhinestones. So many colors. So much yes. As uncreative as it may be to see and love Phantom in London, this production was absolutely amazing. It's had me reprising my old voice recital performances of Christine's big numbers in the shower all week, and it is threatening to unseat Matilda as my favorite of the shows I've seen this semester. As of right now, at least, I have only one show left to finish off my semester-long tour of the West End, and it's one that, knowing me, could take them all: Wicked. My roommate and I are seeing it on Monday, and as it is something like my seventh time seeing the show, I have a feeling I'm going to like it. 

It may have been a day of state-sponsored mourning for the UK, but Wednesday in this long-term visitor's book was one of the best days of the semester. Here's hoping the next fifteen are all like that one. See you in two weeks, Stateside readers! 

European PDA: No One is Safe

For a few weeks now, I have been under the strict instruction that I need to write a post on that most peculiar of features of life in Europe, public displays of affection. Now that I am finished with international travel for the semester and have little left to entertain me but my icky schoolwork, it seemed that the time was finally nigh for this long-awaited post. Here in the UK and around the continent, over-the-top, squirm-inducing PDA is around every corner - and this weekend, we learned that, when it comes to this trend, no one is immune.

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.

Operation Be God's Dinner Party

Ever since visiting the apartment of my Roman friends last weekend for their classy, friendship-filled dinner party, I thought to myself, "Self, that was nice. That was fun! Self, you oughta do that again." Conveniently, it so happened that this weekend - the very first after our Easter get-together - is the one during which abroad friends from all corners of Europe descend upon London for the "boat cruise" that I am contractually obligated to remind you "is neither sponsored nor endorsed by the University of Notre Dame's London Undergraduate Program." Seeing as I do live here in London and possess a full kitchen, if limited capacities for cooking with it, it seemed simple enough for me to host this second round of classy dinner party reunion-ing. And seeing as this weekend back in South Bend coincides with major reunions and parties for both Folk Choir and Vision - two groups from which I draw an embarrassing percentage of my friends - it seemed like simple fate that I do so.

It was thus that Operation Be God's Dinner Party came to be. I neglected to mention this to anyone before now, but "Be God's Dinner Party" is the name by which I have secretly been referring to this shindig for a good six days. "Be God's," you see, is the rousing final song sung at each week of ND Vision, and it's a phrase I like to frequently apply in situations where it does not belong. "Be God's Natty Champ" was a major theme of my journey to Miami for the BCS Championship, "Be God's Shamrock Series" was the cry of the Chicago game...apparently, I mostly like it for use in football games. It also seemed entirely appropriate, however, for this mid-Booze Cruise Weekend gathering of people who choose to spend their free time in extra-curriculars and summer jobs where they sing and teach kids about Jesus.

After spending the week talking about Be God's Dinner Party, looking up recipes for Be God's Dinner Party, and having nightmares about the food poisoning that could potentially result from Be God's Dinner Party, the preparations went into full swing yesterday morning.

I decided to do my shopping at the Whole Foods in Piccadilly Circus, which was both a great idea and a terrible idea. It's a great idea in that Whole Foods is all that is good in the world. It was a bad idea in that it significantly bolstered the belief I already hold that I am cooler than everyone I know. "Oh, you had a dinner party last night, too?! How great! Oh - oh, you said yours wasn't made with all organic and fair trade ingredients and free-range poultry? ...Oh."

Mostly, though, my Whole Foods experience provided me with the first very odd moment of my day. As I was meandering along, trying to look casual while desperately searching for the beans I had already unknowingly walked past six times, I noticed that I was not the only American in the store. Somewhere nearby, there was a down-home bro. "Joe Theismann, man, he was the greatest - well, no, of course he never played again after that injury!" I didn't understand much of the sports-y conversation he was having, but I knew the subject was American football and the pastime that every American but me enjoys, baseball. As he seemed to be explaining rather basic things to a British person who clearly didn't get it, I was intrigued. Eventually, I tracked the source of the bro convo: the Whole Foods deli counter guy. That's right, folks, the guy who runs the deli counter at the Whole Foods in the middle of Piccadilly Circus is a straight-up, college-aged, American bro. I have never been more confused in my entire life.

Once I picked my jaw back up from the floor, I purchased my pretentious basketful of ingredients and headed back to da Conwizzle. (Yes, I am now calling Conway Hall "da Conwizzle;" you can all thank Ms. ReNeigh I'm a Horse for that one.) From there, my setbacks were pretty shockingly few.

The first setback was a fire drill during which I and a whopping ten other people left the building. Sorry if this blog post somehow gets back to someone important and gets anyone in trouble, but I feel it should be pointed out now that if this building ever catches fire, hundreds of people will die. Death everywhere. Errbody. Since the fire alarms go off practically every time you do so much as open your bathroom door after a particularly lengthy hot shower, their efficacy at inspiring people to evacuate has been reduced to pretty much nothing. They are the fire alarms that cried wolf. I hope this building has some sort of PA system that can be invoked in the case of an actual emergency. JUSSAYIN.

Anyway, now that that PSA is over, back to my cooking. Just so everyone is aware - mother - it was not, in fact, my cooking that set off a fire alarm at any point during the day. The only thing that went wrong with my cooking was that my two pots of chili looked like entirely different substances. Same recipe. One had chicken, one didn't, and besides that, they were the exact same food. And yet, when the two pots were done simmering, the final products looked completely and utterly different from one another.

Two very different-looking chilis, all gone because they were so gosh darn tasty

 Luckily, until just now when I admitted it publicly on the internet, no one actually knew that as they were eating it, so all they knew was that I had two different kinds of chili that were both pretty darn tasty and were especially nice when paired together. So take that, people who make food look pretty for a living. Take that. The other minor setback of the day was that time when I spilled champagne all over myself because I thought the bottle was empty. Eh, you win some, you lose some.

Overall, Operation Be God's Dinner Party was a wild success. I made food that didn't kill anyone, I had my very first Ben's Cookie (I know, I know) after having it delivered straight to my door, and I got to sit in my common room hanging out with fifteen of my best buds from all over Europe all night. I am a domestic goddess, my friends. Respect it.

The fruits of my first dinner party - complete with hard candy, because I am ninety years old.

I am one classy broad