Always expect the unexpected

I had the most interesting, unexpected, random, yet surprisingly fun weekend these past few days. Four out of the eight of us girls that hang out all day every day went away for the weekend, which left us with just four left. I already blogged about what we decided to do on Thursday which ended up being a lot of fun and I definitely would want to do another crew date if we ever get the opportunity again, and then on Friday, we decided to hang in all day and try to get as much homework done as possible. Naturally, we all got nothing done and ended up going out that night to a bar that we had only been to once before. It ended up being a lot of fun with random people dancing on tables and running around like drunk monkeys, but when it was time to go home, we stepped outside and I swear I felt as if I was going to get frost bite right then and there. My hands were so cold I could see them losing circulation in them and turning white. My legs were shivering I could barely feel myself sprinting to the U1 bus to grab it before it drove away. It put me and my friends in the worst of moods. We did not speak to each other and all we wanted to do was get home, get changed, and jump in our cozy warm beds. The last time I was that cold was when I was in high school I think because the weather in North Carolina doesn't get like this until probably December or January. I swear it could've snowed that night!

The next day I woke up pretty late and had a text message from my friend Kenzie that goes to school with me in North Carolina and lives the next town over from me in Mass. She is studying in Barcelona for the semester and her and one of her friends from home, Bridget who is studying in York for the year, were in London for the Patriots football game. I had promised Kenzie that I would come and see her while she was in London since I am only a little over an hour away so I could not bail on her now, no matter how tired I was from the night before. So I hopped in the shower, grabbed some money out of the ATM and caught the next Oxford Tube to London. No matter what position I am sitting in, I always tend to fall asleep on car rides, bus rides, boat rides, any type of ride, and that is exactly what happened on this bus trip. All of a sudden I wake up and theres this guy politely asking me to move aside so that he can sit down, so I scooch over to the window and try to fall back asleep. Unfortunately, this man is a little bit on the bigger side and I was feeling a bit too claustrophobic to fall asleep (that and the fact that the window was too cold to put my head on).

So I get to Marble Arch and I'm going to take the Tube into Picadilly to meet up with Kenzie and her friend. I ask some people directions on how to get to the tea place that they were eating at, and when I get there there are 3 or 4 different restaurants in this one building. So I go to the first one I see and I look around trying to find Kenzie, I'm calling her and texting her but we just can't seem to find each other. I go downstairs to the other restaurant and do the same thing, no Kenzie. Finally I get ahold of her on the phone again, about 20 minutes later and walk back up the stairs to where I first looked for them. She stands up and waves me down and I realize that I had walked past her about 3 times while I was up there!

It was sooo good to see one of my good friends from school! I could not comprehend the fact that we were both thousands of miles away from home, in London TOGETHER, it absolutely baffles me. But I was prepared to just stay there for a few hours, hang out with Kenzie and her friend and then head back to Oxford so that I could get some work done and a good night sleep. Of course, Kenzie tries to talk me into staying and I tell her that I'll see how the day goes and maybe i'll stay with them for the night. At this point, it's about 5:30 in the afternoon and they say that they want to go on the London Eye. I have only done it once before and it was when I was last in London for the People to People student ambassador program when I was about 13 or 14, so I figured it'd be cool to go up again and see all of London in the night time for a change. After standing in line in the freezing cold rain, we finally get into one of the capsules that goes up and around so that we can see all of London. It was absolutely gorgeous, you could see everything from up there and it was as if I was looking at a picture rather than actual the real city of London! It was an amazing, breathtaking sight that I had actually had much more of an appreciation for this time around.

After that, I was starving because I was running off of a cup of tea and a small cappuccino. So we walked around trying to find some cute pub to go to for dinner because hey, isn't that what most people do in London? So we're wandering the streets, freezing, and passing all of these restaurants that have Japanese and Italian food, but we were in England and we wanted real English food. Finally, we look up and there's All Bar One, which is a restaurant that actually has a chain in Oxford and the food is unbelievable. So we run in there and decide to try to get an appetizer as fast as possible because we all felt like our stomachs were eating themselves. Now this may shock you a bit, but the service here was AWFUL. We had to wait for our water for about 20 minutes (no exaggeration) and then when we went to order the waitress said that they were actually out of two of the things that we wanted to get! After that, she forgot to put in our appetizer so we had to wait for our food for about another 30 minutes and when we were finished we had to seek out our waitress to give us the bill. If we were in America, I would've felt very bad for that girl because the tip definitely would've been under 20% (and that's saying something because I'm a waitress too and I usually am the best tipper around).

During dinner was when I got talked into spending the night with them. So I called my friends back in Oxford and told them that I was staying in London. Everything seemed great, we were taking the tube back to their place so that we didn't have to spend money on a cab, and we had plenty of time to go back and shower before we decided to go out. While on the tube, we look and the line that takes us directly to where we needed to go was closed off for maintenance. So, we decide to take a different line, and we're sitting on the train about to get off at our stop and a person comes over the loud speaker saying, "this station is closed, the train will not stop". What stop did it happen to be? Yup, ours. So we get off at the next one and decide to ask someone for help. The three old drunk men that tried helping us get on the train actually ended up getting us even more lost and so we just decided to get off at another stop and take the same train backwards so that we could start from square one. Finally, we find someone that knows what they're talking about and we hop on one train that is going to take us to another station, that will take us to one more station that connects with where we need to be. After about a 2 hour journey through the tube, we finally get out at Paddington station and are walking to their hotel. It's about 11 at night right now and we are still planning on going out that night.

The rest of the night was a lot of fun. I met a few more of Kenzie's friends from home, and had a great night out in London at some places that I never even knew existed there. The family that we were hanging out with, friends of Kenzie's from home, were probably the wealthiest people I have ever met. The mother and daughter were both wearing real diamond huge earrings, the father was buying drinks for everyone left and right, and they just looked as if they were our age except with a huge amount of money! I was flabbergasted. I felt as though I was legitimately dreaming because I had never been in a place like this before, especially not in a VIP room. We were being waited on the entire time and the only thing I could think of to do was try to "blend in with the crowd".

Waking up the next morning was a bit rough because I was exhausted, and knew that I had a ton of homework to go back home to. Of course I don't regret staying there and having a great night out in London, but at the time I was ready to sleep for days and not move until someone made me. It's nights like these that I look back on and yeah they're not too fun the next morning, but they are such great memories. If I decided to come back to Oxford that night, I would've just come home and probably got a little bit of work done and then would've gone to bed. But instead, I chose to live up my time abroad. I have come to the realization that it's not worth worry about how much money I have, how much time I have to do my work, or even how much sleep I get while I'm over here. I have so much to experience and learn while being abroad and I am not about to waste a second of it laying in my bed, doing exactly what I could be doing if I were back at HPU. I love being spontaneous and having random things happen to me without expecting it. It's what makes life fun and worth living!