one mouth, two hands

Today I found it sad that I have yet to go an entire week without drinking. So I decided to compile a top 5 list for drinking to cheer me up. These are the reasons that always get me back out there, even after one of those mornings that leave me ill from 5 a.m. till the sun sets:

1. Damn, he’s one FINE specimen of British manliness. Actually, no: he’s neither attractive NOR interesting and his teeth jut out in different directions like a political cartoon of any British government official. But alcohol says he is!

2. Other drugs suck. They really do. Nothing makes you so lively and social as booze without sniffing 5 jillion germs and some powder off a toilet seat or searching out those hard-to-reach veins in your eyeballs.

3. The food after. There is a reason food theft is so rampant in BU housing with our communal refrigerators. Someone else’s cold leftover lasagna with Pringles and a bar of Cadbury’s? MINE!

4. South Kensington Station’s 3 bottles of wine for £10 deal. If there’s any class to staining your teeth, you know that a tube station is where you’ll find it.

5. When I go back to the States, I’ll still be 20. And the checkout folks at Albertson’s won’t take pity on the poor little girl who spent the last semester living it up in Kensington and just wants her Foster’s. That means I’ll be sorry if I don’t drink enough for six months worth of sobriety and mean bouncers pocketing my fake IDs when I reach San Diego in May.

Slainte, BU!

(edit: This post was not meant to be related to Valentine’s Day. Must have been an unconscious association. My bad.)

on top-ups and love handles

I love the Brits’ obsession with top-ups. It’s no longer just pulling the lever at the fuel pump till you can smell the fumes pouring from your ecstatic little car, which has spent weeks sucking at dirt. No, it’s so much more; top-ups refer to everything under the sun now because you always do want a little bit more. Of everything! Now there’s the attitude! Come to Britain, where you can top-up your Orange phone, tuition bill, television choices, prepaid credit cards, vouchers, your pedicure, your sex life, your beanbag chair… the possibilities are endless. If only all top-ups involved one stroke of the MasterCard. (Well, who says they can’t.) Needless to say, top-ups are here to stay. Ah, gluttony’s trendiest definition. No wonder it feels like the U.S. is just across a little pond.

Another quick rant: I was down at Fitness First today, and I can firmly say there is no cultural difference when it comes to feeling like an awkward, voluptuous tub beside a peppy, gleaming muscled, smooth-talking Australian twenty-something. That £208 flew out of my bank account faster than that time I had to top-up my UNESCO Travel Fund last weekend in Amsterdam.

That is all. I’ll be here all weekend – within a careful15 minute walk of South Kensington, courtesy of that sexy ball chained to my ankle as an RA. Let’s see that sucker turn some heads on the treadmill at Fitness First.

Happy Valentine’s weekend!

game for a Heineken on Pissenstraat?

If you could take a Cuisinart and scoop up an insane number of colorful bicycles that ring as they modestly clip pedestrians at the curb, nearly-offensive little spits of Dutch and brain-numbingly similar road names –gracht and -straat, scattered light sparkling off of the thin, snaking canals hugged by five-story brick merchant houses leaning kindly in toward the water, and finally the almost eerie but easily adopted absence of authority – that would be Amsterdam.

One of the best things about being an American visiting in Amsterdam is that we’re too rare to be the most hated brand of tourist. Each coffeeshop and club is heavily weighed down by Brits on weekend holidays with at least 30 days to spare before their next mandatory drug test at work. Café menus offer traditional English breakfasts and it’s clear that the waitresses are used to everything from the nasty, incomprehensible northern England accents to the posh, smooth Londoners holding up the cues with their “quite”s and “thus”es. Don’t expect to meet many native Dutch folk at the clubs, museums, or red light district – but I suppose that’s mostly true of any foreign country.

The red light district really proves the absence of authority – or at least that image. In fact the window displays undergo regular heath checks and have even formed their own political party and frequently lobby the government. But you’d never know that based on the live, overly-practiced sex shows, dominating hoards of gawking men crowding the street and street creepers offering to sell you “jokes,” whatever frightening substances those might be, on each corner.

I can’t imagine Amsterdam ever being a hotspot for business meetings or corporate home bases. Nothing would ever get done and at 5 p.m. anyone who claimed that they had a longer day than a hibernating bear would fry most of their newly acquired brain cells in the local coffeeshop shortly thereafter. Hence the reason I should have visited after finals, but live and learn.

It was a fantastic visit. Anything longer than a week might have you permanently desensitized, but I would certainly recommend taking a few days to wander the spirally brick streets along those canals so warmly lit by lampposts and coffeeshop signs, get into a little trouble, and head back with a great story that you’re bound by word never to repeat to your friends at home.

nothing against moving naked pictures…until today

As I blog like the super cool geek I am as the party rages on all floors of my building, I realize a few things. First, the topics my blog covers are certainly going to be different than from when it began. So don’t judge me on my so very imaginative whistleblower posts with their astonishingly original arguments. As a school project originally, all the creative juices had to be focused and specific, which really negates the creativity. So enough about that. I’m letting them stay there.

 

Today my boss and my boss’s boss had a forty minute conversation about this internet bandwidth problem among BU flats here. Six red-faced kids have been sucking up half of the school’s bandwidth streaming amateur porn off of limewire and as a result my brain melted out of my ears while they threw computer acronyms like horeshoes. Block VPN! Track IP addresses! My inner narrative schlooped into a puddle on the ground.

 

To their credit, the Brits are a fascinating species. They just get so excited about technology. Unfortunately, it cuts their productivity in half. On the flipside, it gave me time to recover my liver from Notting Hill Arts Club where I left it this morning.

 

Am off to Amsterdam at dawn! Computer geek or… sexy, mysterious foreigner? Time will tell!

my new home

Yes, it’s been awhile – but that doesn’t mean it’s been dull!

I recently relocated to a little town in a faraway place where it’s acceptable to start boozing before 11 a.m. and the credit cards ingeniously have PIN numbers. I get paid below minimum (think, camp counselor) for a 24/7 job of making sure legal adults don’t give people the impression that the U.S. is chock-full of Quicksilver frat boys and girls all named Kimberly with identical aviators (though at this point I don’t believe it myself).

The busses are as large as buildings and take turns at frightening speeds, making it easy to envision one tipping over and making a fifty-foot crater where Parliament had once stood. The bricks in my building have seen over a thousand years of history take place on the street below. Very cool. 1,000 years of people tripping on that curb, and drunkies stumbling out of pubs and peeing in alleyways. (At least that’s what I see.)

Being a resident assistant in London for Boston University, despite the Prada bitches and meatheads, is pretty fantastic. More on that later. For now I just wanted to update my reader (yes, I believe that is correct – love you Katie!) and say I’m alive and flashing those aviators proudly in 8 inches of snow.