Travels

This is the part where I tell everyone about my travel plans for the month of March! I will be acquiring many new exciting stamps and things on my passport and taking an embarrassing number of photographs in the following locations:

PARIS

Claire, Sydney, Alissa, and myself will be going to Paris for what will certainly be two of the craziest days of my life from March 20-22. We're basically going to see all the big sights and gorge ourselves with croissants. They're might also be some shopping. 

And of course, the main reason we're going:  to put paper cranes on Jim Morrison's grave. A sort of "Thank You" and "You kick so much ass!" gift from the dance drama kids. 

PRAGUE

The day after Paris, Claire and Syd will jump on a plane back to Dublin, while I will hop onto a plane bound for Prague. Prague is the capital of the Czech Republic, and everyone I know who has been has nothing but good things to say about it. I'll be there from March 23rd-26th. 

Eastern Europe, ahoy. 

(And, so help me, I will also get to Hungary before I leave Europe if I have to hop on a gypsy caravan to get there.)

I'm meeting up with Monika, Jessica, and Cat in Prague. From there we will travel together to:

SPAIN 

Barcelona, Madrid and Granada

March 26th we fly to Barcelona from Prague. We're flying on a Spanish airline, and I'm really excited to finally put Spanish to a useful purpose. And also kind of interested to see if I actually can use my Spanish. Meaning, will anyone who actually speaks Spanish have any idea what the hell I'm talking about?

We're staying in Barcelona for 3 days. I'm hoping for "warm" weather. This is a relative term. Right now, I consider anything over 52 degrees to be a miracle. If it's in the 60s I'll be happy. If it's in the 70s, I just might actually weep for joy. 

On the 29th we're taking a train to Madrid, where we will be for another 3 days and I will be, hopefully, living in El Prado. I'm especially excited for El Prado because I remember sitting in a history class in high school and reading about a Velázquez painting and learning that it was housed there. I remember thinking, "I'm going to go there one day." Well, boo-ya! Velázquez, I'm coming. (I just hope the painting isn't on loan, or something...)

From Madrid we'll head to the south, again via train, on the 1st of April. We'll be in Granada for three additional days, which will include a tour of Alhambra Castle. 

We will come back to London, completely exhausted the night April 3rd. 

That's all I have for now. Soooo excited!!!

Kisses, Imo

Dear Uncle Imo,

I wanted to extend my most sincere apologies for not having sooner expressed my gratitude for your most generous gift. Your generosity, as always, is most appreciated. 

Though late, your gift made my Valentine's Day very special. 

Most Sincerely,

Coco

p.s. But seriously, Thanks! I love getting mail, and it really made me laugh and smile! Kisses! 

My new favorite thing

Watching British people trying to do the "Soulja Boy" is quite possibly the funniest thing ever to be witnessed by mankind. 

Dance on, white boys! 

The Royal Ballet

I went to the Royal Ballet tonight and it was AMAZING. It was a triple bill, so Alissa and I saw "Chroma," "Different Drummer," and "The Rite of Spring." 

Chroma was v. contemporary, and choreographed by a man who utilizes ideas from neuroscience and brain behavioral study in his choreography (Alissa, a neuroscience major, nearly had a cow when she found out...). The score for the piece included music composed by Jack White III (aka, the guy from the White Stripes). I can't tell you how cool it is to listen to "The Hardest Button to Button" as performed by a full orchestra at the Royal Opera House. 

Different Drummer was kind of disturbing. In a subtle way. It was about war. And the use of soldiers as science experiments. And climaxes with the hero killing his wife by stabbing her again and again with a razor. Cheerful stuff. 

The Rite of Spring was INCREDIBLE. Now, I know virtually nothing about dance. (I say virtually because I do know who Martha Graham is.) But I know this was good. The visual images that came alive on the stage were completely captivating. I was in the moment, the whole time. And, I am very rarely in the moment. I'm usually worried about at least four things at a time, some of them serious, others complete irrelevant when considered outside the bounds of my imagination. But while I was watching this piece, I was paying full attention. It was really cool. Not many things have that sort of effect on me. 

I saw it as exploring ideas of a primordial world, where power systems are arbitrary, but also completely unquestioned. Where life is up to chance, and people run around systematically imitating the people who are in line before them. 

It was also v. pretty. 

The set design was exquisite. The stage looked like it had been painted with grotesquely distorted images of giant feathers. Perhaps the result of an explosion of birds. Nothing too clean. But not as disturbing as that description may sound. 

The costumes looked like they may have come out of the closet used to dress the chorus members in The Lion King. Bright orange body suits with yellow and black and white hand prints all over them. They reminded me of those pictures of ancient cave drawings that one sees in the pages of National Geographic. 

The women also had on these awesome wigs. How they kept them on their heads is beyond me. I can't imagine how many bobby pins they must have used. The wigs kind of looked like very long mops, with the ends of the little robes painted black. When the dancers tossed their heads the ropes when flying into the air, only to remember while in the act of retreating from the stage that they were in fact tethered to the dancers, and had no choice but to return. 

Anyway, the show was beautiful. 

All three shows were beautiful, and made for a wonderful evening. 

Our seats were pretty high up, but not too high, and dead center. 

I loved it. I'm so glad I went. And I'm in a great mood right now. Can you tell? 

Scotland!

Claire and I and the Highlands; The Highlands; Claire and I on the boat cruising Loch Lomond, Me at a creepy park that used to be a loch and was formerly used for sewage run-off and as the place where witches were drowned... (very fertile soil, now...); Claire and I in front of the Edinburgh Castle.



Because this website is being incredibly tempermental, I am having trouble uploading all the photos that I would like to share with you. I might just have to add them a little bit at a time. 

Scotland. Scotland was great. Scotland was great because I got to see and spend time with my Clairey in a really beautiful place, and it also allowed me the opportunity to travel by myself for the first time in my life. I did the transit stuff by myself. This required me to get up at 2:45 AM on Friday to catch a cab at 3:30 on the lonely streets of a cold London morning in order to make it to Victoria Station to catch the Gatwick Express to Gatwick airport at 4:30 in order to make my 6:05 flight. Whew! That was a mouthful. 

"Why the hell did she book such an early flight?" you may ask. 

Answer is simple. It was the cheapest. 

Because I hate to fly (something I realize more and more every time I'm on a plane) I was completely awake for the short flight. 

The guy sitting in front of me kept scratching his frizzy flaxen head. I thought of my mom upon seeing this. I figured she would have commented on his need for Friz-Ease, or said that he had fleas, or called him Scratchy, or something. I love my mom. 

Once we started to descend into the Edinburgh airport my attention switched from a memory of a documentary that I once saw describing all the different types of lice in Bob Marley's hair when he died, to looking down upon the vast verdigris of the Scottish Highlands. I realized as we got closer and closer to the ground that the little white splotches that sporadically appeared among mounds of green were in fact snow. It was absolutely beautiful. 

At the airport I reunited with Clairey. She was wearing about 6 layers. "Girl from Tucson goes to Ireland and freezes her ass off," she explained. 

Once we got to Edinburgh we got lost a few times, thanks to my inability to make any sense of a universally acknowledged system of direction (Never Eat Shredded Wheat), and then we found our hostel. We dropped off our bags and headed back out into the cold to scrounge up some breakfast. We stumbled across The Three Sisters, a pub that served breakfast starting at 9:00AM. We were starved. We didn't think twice about eating there. And I was pretty happy to be eating at a place called "The Three Sisters" in the land of Macbeth. (My internal monologue: The Three Sisters> the Wëird Sisters> there were three of them> Yes!)

Claire ate some haggis while I looked on in horror. It looked like it just may have come out of a cauldron. 

All in all, the grub wasn't bad. 

We went back to our hostel to embark on a guided walking tour of the city with Tom. Tom introduced himself saying, "Hi. I'm Tom. I'm from Australia, and I've been in Edinburgh for three weeks." 

Yep. This was going to be good. 

Tom wasn't all that bad. Though in the end he turned out to be a bit of a pretentious-know-it-all-jerk-face, the tour was entertaining if not completely enjoyable due to Claire and my lack of sleep from the night before. 

He shared with us many gory details about the bloody history of Edinburgh. About ghosts and the drowning of witches and sewage run off things that I'd rather not think about. (Quite the charmer, as you can surely tell.) He also introduced the idea of going on the "City of the Dead Tour" which Claire had her heart set on. 

Since I know better than to subject my sensitive constitution to such things, I refused to go. I don't doubt for a minute that it was better this way. Especially after Claire's friend Allison told us that when she and a friend went on this tour when they first moved to Edinburgh to attend law school, her friend was so frightened that she literally passed out on the tour in some crypt someplace. That totally would have been me. No thank you!

(And Adam, if you're reading this, go ahead and make fun of me. I would rather not pass out in any crypts thankyouverymuch!)

Friday night we went on a pub crawl. The night concluded at a pub/ bar called Frankenstein. The DJ at this place was straight up out of his mind. His playlist included:

Stronger- Kanye West

Can't Touch This- MC Hammer

Something by The Strokes

A song by Dolly Parton

and a number of other v. random selections that Claire probably remembers in total. 

DAY 2: We went around the city, seeing a number of museums and eating the best piece of apple pie that has ever touched my lips for dessert after lunch. 

Something very interesting happened when we were looking for a place to eat for dinner. 

A woman came up to us when we were looking at a menu on a restaurant window. She told us to get inside because the sirens meant that trouble was coming. (We had no clue what sirens she was talking about.) Then she pulled out a red umbrella and said that she had been attacked before. 

Well, whatever her delusional mind may have been attacked by, I can assure you that her teeth hadn't been attacked by a toothbrush at any time in recent past.

While doom never befell us, as soon as this woman had imparted her wisdom, this group of drunken teenagers came rambling through the street. This guy, maybe 13 or 14, was yelling and trying to free himself from the clutches of two young girls who were clinging onto him, trying to drag him to the ground, and yelling back at him with a volume that matched his own. Behind them walked a group of older guys. I don't know if they were looking to have a word or two with screaming boy, but they didn't appear to be too happy. 

Claire and I then found our way into a restaurant that was trying to be an Applebee's (and served Claire a chocolate shake that tasted a little too much like cake batter for it's own good). As we sat down at the window to wait for a table to become available, the street outside became eerily empty, and a group of mean looking guys ducked into an alleyway across the street. For a while I was convinced that a street brawl was about to ensue. In my mind this brawl resulted in one of the mean looking Scottish gangsters getting hurled through the window we were looking out of. That, or we would have a front row view as the riders of the apocolypse rode through the deserted street of the Royal Mile. 

Neither of these things happened, thankfully. But this account provides a perfect example of my susceptibility to frightening ideas or circumstances, which offers even more support to my opinion that going on the "City of the Dead Tour" was the worst idea EVER. (Sorry, Claire.)

DAY 3: We went on a lovely tour of Loch Lomond. We had wanted to go Nessie hunting, but sadly the Loch Ness tour sold out right before we got to the ticket booth. So, instead, we rode on a bus through the rolling green hills and gales of Scotland, and the views were beautiful. As was the site of Claire sleeping during at least half of the bus ride. She really likes to nap :) 

We took lots of pictures and learned a bunch of interesting facts from out tour guide including the fact that the film Braveheart is a load of crap. I will now dispense with a bit more of the knowledge he imparted on us:

In Scotland a Glen is a valley, and a Ben is a hill. 

Traditionally, only highlanders wore kilts. (And real Scotsmen wear nothing under their kilts.)

We took a boat ride on the Loch, and were v. amused at the site of a man who was basically the French equivalent of what would happen if the characters of Dwight and Creed (from The Office) were combined into one human being.

That night we went to dinner with Claire's friend Allie, who lives in Edinburgh. The two met when Allie did an exchange at Claire's high school. We ate Mexican food for dinner, which was quite hilarious. After din, we went to the Elephant Cafe, the birthplace of Harry Potter, where we drank hot chocolate and tried to soak up J.K. Rowling vibes. (She wrote Harry Potter in this very cafe!!!)

On Monday morning, we woke up at an obscene hour, jumped on a bus, jumped on different planes, and I came back to London while Clairey returned to her Emerald Isle. 

After just a weekend, I was so excited to come back to London. When I came out of the tube station and onto Tottenham Court Road, I actually smiled to see the sun trying to shine down through the London smog. And I like that I'm starting to associate London with a sense of familiarity. 

Don't worry, I'm coming home in June, but for now, I'm really happy to be here. 

My next trip is planned for March. I'm headed to France with Syd, Claire, and Alissa. Yes. It's going to be legendary. Watch out Paris, here we come. Be very, very afraid. 

The Land of Scots

I only have 4 minutes left of internet, so I'm going to make this quick:

Edinburgh is really cool.

It's really spooky, but Claire and I are having a good time. I'll explain this statement in more detail when I get home.

Just wanted everyone to know that I'm doing well.

LOVE!

And Imo, I'm still waiting on that money!

Imo, give me my money

Hey Imo, 

Just wanted to let you know that I have yet to receive your Valentine's Day card. Also, I think I should get at least a pound out of you for Valentine's Day. 

My mom told me that you read this. So, pay up. 

Xoxo,

Nicole 

The Sky is BLUE!

I went to club Koko again last night with some friends. And something kind of cool happened. 

Well, I think it's cool at least. 

We were on the dance floor, and this club plays a lot of indie british and some American rock. The DJ was really good, and also quite amusing to watch because he was rockin' out white-boy/ i-wanna-be-a-rock-star-style. In a moment of brilliance he started playing "Nobody Move Nobody Get Hurt" by We Are Scientists. This made me incredibly happy. Not only because I love the song, but because the band is made up of a guy that went to Harvey Mudd and two guys that went to Pomona College. I was in this ridiculous club, and I felt a bit of a 5-C hug. 

Basically it made me think about the world, how randomly connected people and places are. It made me happy. It made me happy that three guys who spent part of these lives in the same place as me had music blasting so far away from home, and had a bunch of wacked-out British kids singing along to their lyrics at the tops of their lungs. 

Last night also included a live band, The Runners. (They're on myspace I think.) While music is more Clairey's thing than mine, I thought these guys were INCREDIBLE. The lead singer man was channeling Mick Jagger (circa 1965) like you wouldn't believe. He also had a really great voice. (I value this in live performance.)

Today I'm headed into Chinatown to celebrate Chinese New Year. I'll let you know how it goes. 

Friday I'm off to Scotland with one of my favorites! We'll take pictures and send post cards. 

LOVE!

Yes, I do realize that this is just another form of procrastination

It's that time again. Paper-writing time. 

Last time I wrote about Pinter, this time I'm writing about Keats.

This paper is due by 5PM tomorrow, and I'm still not entirely sure what I'm writing about. Don't get me wrong, it's not like I haven't been working on this. I've been writing and re-writing for days, but my topic keeps evolving, and while I'm nearly certain to continue in the current vein of writing about the worship of the body over the spirit in situations of romantic love as depicted in The Eve of St. Agnes and Isabella; or, The Pot of Basil, I'm getting to that dreaded point where I'm running out of things to say. This would be fine if I didn't have 600 words to go to meet the word count minimum. Boo. 

In the meantime, I have succeeded in cleaning my room and going to the gym. I have watched all of the super bowl commercials deemed "good" by the Huffington Post. (The barfing baby is not funny, it's gross. The dancing geckos, however, are genius.) I have even listened to the entire cast recording of the Miser. (I was complaining to Caroline that I had the songs stuck in my head and she gave me the link to the recording online...) I have done dishes, reorganized my shelf, and a number of equally non-productive things...

A revelation

Last night a friend of mine told me that he was going to a cast party with a bunch of people who I very much love and I got sad. For about three minutes. Because after three minutes I remembered: I AM IN LONDON!!!! Wooooooo!