Excerpts From a Year Abroad

I'm nearing the end of my stay here in London. It's only three weeks and a few days before I pack it all up and head back to the States. There are a lot of conflicting emotions happening in my head, the dominant of which is stress. I only have a little over three weeks to finish my dissertation, write a critical essay about how hard it was writing a stupid novel, and put together some sort of presentation about my time doing work experience at Little, Brown. I also have to pack up all my stuff, get rid of the things I don't want or can't take back with me (my pillows and duvet, sob), and do as many awesome things as I can in the UK before it's thousands of miles and an ocean away.

Wow, just typing that made me super emo. Never mind. Let's talk about nicer things! Namely my favorite memories over the 11-ish months that I've been here so far. I have so many awesome memories that it's actually kind of impossible to pick only a few, but these are some of the bigger events and the things that really stick out to me. I might do more of these later but who knows. The first, the photo above, is from a couple weeks ago when I visited my friends Richard and Emma in Stockport (just outside Manchester). Richard drove me and some of his grad students around in the countryside, and I got to see where the Bronte sisters lived in Yorkshire. A really amazing, and totally English, weekend. I could have stayed there forever. It was truly one of the most magical few days I've ever experienced.

A (very cold) November weekend in Vienna. It was so fun to meet up with Rachel, who I'd only known on the internet until then, and who turned out to be super awesome! This is Rachel, her flatmate Samantha, and me at Schonbrunn Palace in Vienna, freezing slowly to death. We visited Christmas markets and drank mulled wine and wandered the streets of Vienna. It was so magical (lots of things are magical it turns out).

The orangutan/camel/llama hybrid from Hampton Court Palace. We laughed at it for ages. Seriously the best moment ever.

MARK GATISS. Enough said.

Spending Christmas with my super good friend Lily and her partner Angus. We stayed in a flat right below the Edinburgh Castle, and wandered the streets of Old Town, ate stew, drank pints, and spent cozy nights indoors watching weird British television. I also slammed my finger in a door, which was exciting. Lily hugged me and made me drink mulled wine afterwards, which totally helped.

Shaun and Lucy! I know they're not a memory, but meeting Lucy and becoming such close friends with Shaun was one of the best things to come out of moving here, hands down, no contest! I absolutely love these girls, and they're now two of my best friends. Every second with them is always tons of fun!

When Greg came to visit! Wow, what a perfect week and a half. We hadn't seen each other for over 7 months, and by the end of his stay it was like I'd fallen in love with him all over again, even more than I thought possible. We had afternoon tea at Chatsworth House (where this picture was taken), watched The Apprentice while it hailed and rained incessantly outside, ordered pizza, wandered around Walthamstow, and generally had a very very good time.

The traumatizing day in Lewes! This creepy dalmatian life-size furry doll thing accurately sums up the bizarreness of that day. Antiques, bad taxidermy, over-priced burgers at the Real Eating Co. (bastards!), rain, 3+ hours in a pub with drunken creepers, and at the end of it all... hysteria in the train station. So good.

Brenn's visit! Shaun's and my mutual friend Brenn (the reason we met in the first place!) came to visit us for a week in July. It was so fun to see her and share London with such a good friend!

Visiting Emily in Bonn, Germany. I've known Emily since college, and I haven't seen her since college either -- silly girl went off and joined the Peace Corps, and then moved to Germany to be with her German lover. It was a spur-of-the-moment decision, but I flew to see her for a short weekend (only one night) in Bonn, but it was so much fun to catch up, buy tons of Haribo from the Haribo shop, and visit Beethoven's birth house! We also saw the corpse flower the day it was set to bloom, but were a few hours too early to see it in full bloom. Regrets!

Being in London during the Olympics. Wow, what a seriously awesome summer to be in London, you guys! First the Diamond Jubilee, now the Olympics. So much British patriotism! Sadly I haven't been to any Olympic events, but the atmosphere in London is amazing, and watching the Opening Ceremony live on the BBC was seriously incredible. We could hear the fireworks from Shaun's flat! So cool!

Shaun and I are leaving on Saturday morning for Northern Ireland, where we'll stay two nights in a B&B in County Antrim along the coast. We're gonna see the Giant's Causeway, Dunluce Castle, and hopefully lots of green hillsides, rain-lashed cliffs, and pints of Guinness! I'm beyond excited, and hopefully if I'm not a giant pile of lazy, I'll make a post about it when we get back. We also recently went to Bath for a day, and I mean to post about it, but who knows if/when that will happen.

Anyway... I think I'll leave the sadsack goodbye post until just before I leave. But I do want to say some of my life's best, most memorable, and incredible experiences have taken place in the last 11 months. I can't begin to describe how grateful I am for every moment I've had here!

6 Months

This was me six months ago today, sitting in my first London cab, heading off to Brunel University in Uxbridge. Look at the raw terror hidden behind those twinkling eyes. I was scared. I was so scared. But I was so excited, because there I was, inside a cab that had "London Calling" scrawled along its sides, a Union Jack on wheels. And there we were, my mom and I, squealing at "quaint cottages" and grinning manically when the driver called us "luv." A mixture of terror and excitement. The only way you really can feel, setting off on an adventure.

Of course everything got much worse before it got better. I was homesick, oh so homesick, and being away from Greg made me cry every single night as I tried to fall asleep alone in that tiny, rock-hard institutional bed in Isambard Complex. I cried so much those first few weeks, and well into the first couple of months as well. They don't really tell you this, but moving overseas all alone is hard. I may speak the language, and I had a friend in Shaun, but they just do not tell you how difficult it's going to be. Which is probably good, because if I knew exactly how harrowing most things in my life would turn out to be before I set out to do them, I don't think I'd ever leave my bed. So well done, world, for not telling me how scary and insanely hard it is to move to England!

Things did get better, though. I made a friend in Lucy, who turned out to be like a Welsh, better-dressed, funnier version of me (who happens to write better as well, that harpy). She's my writing muse and my Mine-Husband and I couldn't be happier that I met her. I also grew closer to Shaun, who I would never in a billion years have guessed I'd be hanging out with on a weekend in London, drinking cider and discussing our futures. I can now call her one of my best friends. What amazing and unexpected turns life can take, really.

And so here I am now, just having finished an incredible work placement at a prominent publishing house, working diligently on my novel, and about to finish the second term of my MA program. I'm in London and I'm loving it. My living situation may offer up a fresh new hell every day, but I'm content. I like my room, and I like this city (despite how much it sucks sometimes, let's be honest), and I like the way my life is going. I really, really like it.

So here's to six months in London, and to six months more. May they be even more amazing, hilarious, ridiculous, and life-changing than the first.

Faraway Friends

Feeling sentimental again. Or did I ever stop? I suppose my life is an unending cycle of sentimentality and melancholy, interspersed with moments of sleeping. I'm usually relatively happy, but lately I'm feeling like such a useless lump that it's hard. I am a useless lump; Greg confirmed it. I won't deny it. It's true.

I miss my friends. I mean, I always did, but tonight it actually hurts. Greg's absence has been hurting me every day since I flew out of Portland, I cry almost every night (I feel so pathetic typing that), but the absence of my friends has been a dull ache. Of course I miss them, but then I'm used to friends moving, going to college, leaving Montana, joining the Peace Corps, going to grad school. I was even the one leaving, once, but nobody really missed me except my mom, and I went to Portland where my best friends were. Now I've left them, not even a full two years later, and I'm alone again. Tonight the dull ache is a sharper pang.






I'm being a sadsack but if I can't be a sadsack in my own blog where the hell can I be one? I guess I'm writing this for my friends back in Portland, mostly. I miss you guys. I miss you guys so much. At the end of this stint in England, what I want most is to go back to Portland and see you all again, drink Oregon beer with you again, eat a shit-ton of Thai food because there's so much of it in Portland (and so little by comparison in London), and watch Trek in the Park or have coffee on Hawthorne. I think of home, and it's Portland. It's all of you there.

I don't know if I'll make it back. There are so many things that could happen in a year. I could be taken on by a British publishing house, doomed to spend years in London working with my agent and editing and promoting my novel (ha!). I could decide to fly back to Utah to meet Greg, and stay there for years. I might decide I need to cut all earthly bonds and ascend, like Daniel Jackson in SG-1. I could even fall so deeply in love with England that I could never imagine leaving. You never know. I accept that. I do. I think I do, a little. Maybe? ...I accept, anyway, that I don't know what's ahead.






I do know that if I had my way, "home" would always be in Portland. I'd have a city to go back to. Because ever since Missoula grew too small for me, I've only felt at home in one place, and it was my one-bedroom apartment in Southeast Portland. I fucking loved that place. It was the best place. Greg and I made it ours. It was our cozy Portland place. I miss it.




I don't regret a thing, though. London? I love it here! It's London! But it's huge, chaotic, and grasping. I imagine when it's done with me it'll spit me out, like an owl pellet, whereas Portland would always hold me close to its beating heart. I don't mind. London might be too much for me in the long-term, but there's always the rest of England. And the world.

You never know.

I do know that I miss you all. My friends. You mean more to me than anything else in the world. So come visit me, you giant lazy butts. ♥

Finally, though, I'm more than a pile of fucking grateful for Shaun, my fellow ex-patriot trapped in London's wonderful claws. We love it here. It's absolutely amazing. We're like adventurers, explorers, spelunking in the great foreign recesses of the city. Sometimes we get lost, feel lonely or homesick, have weird emotional outbursts for no reason, but at least we have each other. And we make this city pretty damn fun when we have a mind to.