XIX: These Days (Part 1)

I'm back. To real life, anyway.

The last month has been wild. It would be an absolute injustice to try and describe it all through a bunch of meaningless words... because no matter how hard I try to develop a coherent story in my head, it simply ceases to exist in the proper way. It just comes out in my imagination as a series of images and wordless emotions, which look more like blurry, silent home-videos inside a darkened room, than anything else anybody would really fully understand.

Most of my friends and family have already heard some of the stories... about how we went to Edinburgh for New Year, about the long-awaited Beatles pilgrimage to Liverpool, and the brief few weeks afterwards where I got to smash my two worlds together (Simi life meets London life). Oh yeah, and I can't forget about the spontaneous one-night birthday celebration in Paris.

So instead of attempting to document every single minute little detail in what would surely turn into a thousand too many paragraphs, I'll try to take a more reflexive route. Which means, I may quite possibly write things that make no sense to you whatsoever, that serve more as personal reminders to myself about how I felt. Sorry in advance... but I promise to add in some photographs for nostalgia's sake.

I suppose I'll just pick up where I left off. After Christmas, Kim and I didn't have much more to do but wait for Shawn and James to arrive. So when they finally got here on the 28th of December, I was all but exploding inside my own skin for the excitement of seeing them. We were waiting for them inside Heathrow airport, and I'm pretty sure I was jumping up and down in anticipation for what felt like forever - because we knew their plane had landed and that any minute, they'd come walking through the doors with all their luggage. So when they finally came out, both wearing all dark colors and the only two in the entire airport wearing sunglasses - I felt absolutely hysterical.

Here comes the rockstar... and his accountant.


It was a fantastic feeling to see them. The few months in between, where they were there and I was here, all of a sudden seemed to have disappeared. The waiting was over and our friends were here - and it couldn't have been more surreal. For the first few hours, I couldn't stop looking at them. How strange.

After my initial hysteria started to wear off, we were finally on our way to begin the holiday. There was an excruciatingly long bus-ride to Edinburgh- somewhere in between point A and point B, we stopped at rest-point that looked like Baker's Square. There was a VW van... we could've been anywhere in the world. It was freezing but we smoked a lot of cigarettes anyway. Inside the coach, we TRIED to get some sleep and we played a little bit of musical chairs in the back of the bus. Shawn and I exchanged iPod's for a little while, then at the end, he found a battered copy of "Angels & Demons."



Edinburgh was cold. There was a leftover French funk in our room at the hostel, so we had to get air freshener. We drank A LOT, we talked to a ton of random people walking through the streets drunk in the middle of the night, saw people in kilts, watched the torch ceremony, ate warm donuts, had a temporary run-in with the devil (who was waiting for us in a wrapped package under a Christmas tree), gazed at a fireworks display and danced the nights away. We never saw the light of day until it was time for Shawn, James and I to leave days later.

The last 24-something hours of being in Scotland (Dec. 31 - Jan. 1), we stayed awake the whole time. I was miserably tired and I vaguely remember being babied while the guys took care of checking out and everything else. The girl at the reception desk was rude. And at some point, I was on the couch in the hostel common room, trying to get warm and squeeze in a few minutes of sleep before catching a 12:30 train to Liverpool. Eventually, we took a cab to Kim's dorm to say goodbye - and minutes later, found ourselves heading south back to England.






Liverpool was something else entirely. It was seedy, but the people were nice. And the lady at the cafe had super-long acrylic nails. We went on a Magical Mystery Tour... which turned out to be a spiritual journey through everything Beatles... including the real Penny Lane, the real Strawberry Fields, the real homes of the fab four, and the real Cavern Club. We went on a hotel-hunt for Ringo, then later I stood next to the spirit of John Lennon inside a museum, and we all celebrated being there by going to a dirty McDonald's. The last night the three of us were there, we experienced the heebie jeebies- which maybe should have warned us about the short series of unfortunate events that would follow...







On Jan. 4, while buying train tickets back to London, James had a fraud problem with his debit card and had to cancel it. Then, our train back to London from Liverpool was experiencing technical difficulties. A ride that should have only been a few hours turned into a 7-hour ordeal. We got on each other's nerves a little bit - probably from all the stress, the lack of sleep from the last week, and having to wait in the blistering cold through an unorganized mess of coach transfers. Which reminds me... I still need to go to Euston station to try and claim refunds for our tickets.



When we finally got back to London, we were exhausted. I stole the cushions from the downstairs couch so James would have something soft to sleep on. Shawn and I crammed on my single bed. The next five days were a little weird - partly because of the 24/7 close proximity the three of us were in, partly because James was in an unfortunate debit card situation, and partly because everywhere I wanted to take them seemed to be closed. I had no idea what was going on - maybe all of London was still on holiday. Still, we made the most of it by continuing our Beatles journey, walking around A LOT (of course in our billions of layers of clothing), having late-night dinners at "Falafel King" and seeing the city from the top of a giant ferris wheel.







The days just seemed to fly by. It was a bit unnerving to watch my two worlds collide the way they did... seeing people from home in a completely different context. But I was still having a great time, and I was happy to be with them. All the while, something inevitable was lurking behind us...

To be continued...

XVI: Viva la Vida

It's been a while since my last blog entry. In the last two weeks, I've done the following:

- spent way too much money with my American friends at Chili's in Canary Wharf, spurred on by a bout of homesickness, after which we all decided it was worth it if only for the skillet queso and molten chocolate cake.
- tried my hand at making arroz caldo for the first time (which was easy and delicious btw).
- finished 3 presentations, including one home-made wikipedia and one home-made video that my professor has since called "impressive" and "ingenious." I am a bad ass, I know.
- gotten drunk after class with friends and aformentioned professor. (He is gay, fabulous and has a striking resemblance to Hugh Jackman!)
- had an average of 4 cups of tea per day to keep me going...
- developed an addiction to Nero white mochas
- learned how to properly fingerpick "I Will Follow You Into the Dark" on guitar... this is what I did whenever my brain started to hurt.
- kept craving cheeseburgers, which I have since learned to eat with salsa - it's the most fantastic thing ever.
- applied for an internship at the Institute of Contemporary Arts London (I haven't heard back from them yet)
- hung out with Aleem - I know, crazy, right? I didn't even know he was coming until the morning he arrived.
- went to Edinburgh to visit Kim
- saw Coldplay in concert
- almost got stranded in Glasgow (of which I know I will go into excruciating detail later in this entry)

As you can see, I've been busy. Which explains why it's taken me so damn long to update my blog. Oops. But at least I'm doing it now... and I have some photographic proof to back up some of my adventures.

I got an e-mail from Ashley on Saturday morning telling me that Aleem was on his way to London. My first reaction was, "is this a joke?" Not in a bad way, but more like "why the hell didn't he tell me beforehand?" So I called his hotel and left a message for him to call me. It was kind of exciting, It was like the movies - calling the front desk of the Hilton Metropole to leave a mysterious message for a friend who I feel like I haven't seen in ages.

At 5:30ish, I received a call on my mobile from a number I don't recognize. I picked it up and heard in the most familiar voice, "hey Dar!" It gave me goosebumps to know that such an important piece of my California-ness was actually in the same city and time zone as me. He was still going to have dinner with his parents and I had to finish my video presentation.

So we didn't meet up until 9:30 or 10ish, when I came knocking on his hotelroom door on the 11th floor. When he opened it, I started to hear Nico's "These Days" playing in my head - it was like the past and the present were mushed together all of a sudden. It was great.



Given that we only had one night to hang out, I gave him a choice. "Dessert and coffee in a touristy spot" or "Alcoholic beverages with a fantastic view, but off the beaten path." He chose the latter, and I took him to the Founder's Arms near Blackfriars, where we drank Pimm's and lemonade, and caught up as much as we could.

But because the tube stops running just after midnight, we had to head back a bit earlier than we wanted to. We parted ways around 12:30, but only after an emergency stop at Oxford Circus to find a toilet (because SOMEONE - not me - didn't anticipate the lack of potty rooms in the tube stations). Hahaha, sorry Aleem. Welcome to London!


The next day, I flew up to Edinburgh. I must've been absolutely insane to take a vacation during finals weeks, but I couldn't resist. Kim bribed me with Coldplay tickets - how could I say no?

I found out that airport security here is ridiculously strict. They stopped me at random and searched my bag... and used some weird device to scan my phone, camera and iPod for explosives. WTF?

The good news is, I'm not a terrorist. And I found this awesome juice stand inside Stansted Airport that reminded me of home:


No, there's no lovejuice in California... at least none that's made out of real fruit. (I hope some of you will remember this inside joke.)

I arrived in Edinburgh at 3:30 - where Kim came to greet me by way of Lothian bus transfer. It turns out that she really DOES live in a fantastic city.

They have a really big castle.


They have some spooktastically old cemeteries. (That big headstone belongs to William BONAR, born in 1773).


And the ugliest "traditional meets modern" Parliament building in the whole wide world. I hear that this is quite the scandal among the locals.


We spent most of the time just walking around the city. I think we may have easily walked about 10 miles over the course of 4 days... In the frigid cold, this is not a pleasant task. Two pairs of socks, legwarmers and leather boots and I STILL couldn't feel my toes. (James and Shawn - consider this a cautionary warning and I recommend that you bring all the thermals you own.)

But look! In a few weeks... we'll be walking down this street with torches in our hands (hopefully in a state of mulled wine inebriation) getting ready to burn down the city... I mean... an effigy... of some sort...



On Tuesday night, Kim and I (along with three of her other friends) took a train to Glasgow to see the Coldplay show. They were as awesome as expected. Though I suspect that Chris Martin was on some type of happy high during the concert.

Maybe it was the profuse sweating, the random proclamations of "that guy on the guitar is my best friend," the frequent tendencies to hug his bandmates, or the moments of forgetfulness where he depended on the audience to finish the lyrics for him and the subsequent giggles, that gave him away. Or how he would fall to the floor in ecstasy during rock-out songs like "Viva la Vida". Or how his eyes would bug out of his head every time he would play an epic piano song. Can you picture it? "Open up your eeeeeeeeyes...." Then again, he didn't name the last album X&Y for nothing. It was way too obvious for anyone not to notice. But the audience just ate it up.



Here comes the fun part... The last train back to Edinburgh was scheduled to leave from Glasgow Central Station at 11:28 p.m. By the time the concert ended and we finally made it outside the venue, it was 11:09 p.m. But that's only because we waited inside for two of Kim's friends who had seats far away from us. Turns out, they decided to leave early to ensure they'd make the train. We didn't get this text message... because Vodaphone service sucks.

Probably around 11:12 (I can't remember for sure because of our sudden panic), we got word that they had already gone and we found ourselves running in the crowd through an obnoxiously long tunnel headed for the overground station... where a local train would take us to the central station two stops away. Miraculously, we made it to Central Station with about 5 minutes to spare. We were home free... so we thought.

We were just coming up the escalator towards the platforms, when suddenly, Kim's phone regains service again and we find out that the other two are at Queens Street station - because the stupid transportation people decided to move the departure point to there. We had no idea where Queens Street was.

So again, we were running... We stopped to ask some cops where the station was, and they pointed us in some confusing direction... (right here, then left, then right, then left at the borders, or something like that...) Running... running uphill... text message that we have just a couple minutes left... panicking... running... can't breath... shit, where the fuck's the station?

We got to where the cop told us to go, but we couldn't find the station. So we stopped again and asked some girl if she knew where it was. She ever-so-slowly tried to give us two different routes, and at the same time, we inched further and further away from her as if it would make any difference. Then we went up the hill, through an alley and there it was - Queens Street Station. Hallelujah. By this point, my asthma had kicked in from the cold and all the running...

We finally made it inside, tried to go through the turnstile, but the man standing there told us we were on the wrong side. So we were running again... It was all a haze, but somehow we were able to jump onto the train, right before the doors quickly shut behind us. I couldn't breathe. Hooray for inhalers.

But we actually made it. I guess to compensate for moving the departure point to Queens Street, they added a couple minutes to the schedule. Who knows what kind of shenanigans we would've gotten ourselves into had we missed it. And to think... I thought that kind of thing only happened in movies. But at least I'll always remember my first trip to Glasgow.

Viva la Vida!