The End

Dear Everyone,

I hereby announce my official retirement from the blogging industry. It's been a good ride. All 20 or so of my blogs were very special to me and will always be remembered for the next couple weeks or so. After that, I'm sure I will forget them. I have arrived home safe and sound. The journey was terrible as usual. I will not go into detail but I will tell you it involved 3 planes, a non-functioning in-flight entertainment system, broken/lost luggage, and lots of running. In a way I suppose it was a fitting end to my trip. Thank you to everyone who sent me letters during my stay or who read/commented on this blog as well. You are good people. Well, as much fun as I had abroad, it sure is good to be back in America! Now if you will excuse me, there is a hot dog and some french fries waiting for me...

Day 1: Take Off (Sort of)

• In less than an hour a taxi will come to take me to the bus station (hopefully)
• At 10:30am my bus will make a 3hour journey to Heathrow Airport (hopefully)
• I will then check into my hotel (if all goes well)
• The next morning my flight to DC leaves promptly at 11am (one can only hope)
• From DC I fly to Charlotte, NC (granting I make my connection in time)
• Then I hop on a plane to Norfolk (fingers crossed)
• Finally my family picks me up from the airport and drives me home (if they remember)

...I see a lot of potential for mishaps here.

Day 2: Goodbye Bham

I have a weird feeling in my stomach. I believe it is sadness. I spent all day sleeping and procrastinating, and then all evening packing. Then I had dinner with some of my close friends and we just hung out for a while and took silly Polaroid pictures and watched The Office and they made me cards which were very sweet. It's weird, because although part of me loathes my suffocating cubicle room and dimly lit flat, the other part of me will really miss it because it has, after all, been my home for the past few months. And seeing as it costs money to go out, I've spent a lot of time hanging out with friends in here. All of us foreigners have really bonded as a strange dysfunctional family, and I will really really miss eating with them and having tea and laughing when they get excited over learning a new English phrase. My time in England has been eventful to say the least. There have been good times and bad times, but the good far outweigh the bad, and soon all the negative things will become laughable. It is very late now, and I need to get to sleep because tomorrow morning I begin my journey home, and knowing me it will be nothing short of an epidemic...

Day 3: Meredith on Ice

In celebration of our freedom, a few friends and I went ice skating this evening. The rink was outdoors in the middle of downtown Birmingham, which means tons of people lined the outside of the rink, ready to point and laugh at those who fell. And lots of people fell. And I was amongst them. Actually, I made it through most of the night without falling. This was primarily due to the fact that I never strayed more than an arm's length away from the wall for the majority of the time. Sadly, I was actually holding onto the wall when I fell. It was embarrassing and borderline tragic. I didn't let go of the wall as I fell, which was probably a bad idea because I think my arm popped out of its socket. But overall it was an extremely fun (and FREEZING COLD) night. And to top it off, I was able to document it:

(Eniko, Francesca, Michela, and Claire are pumped for ice skating!)

(Slow and steady wins the race)

(our friend Nathan showed up, a local Brummie and a skating whiz kid)

(I finally let go of the wall! Clearly I am petrified)

(The Italians and Claire put on a post-skating skit)

(our train back to campus was delayed 30mins and we froze waiting for it. I am actually still frozen now. In fact I am dictating this type to a scribe because a frozen person cannot move their fingers. This picture is a visual representation of our breaths in the cold)

Tomorrow is my last day in Birmingham. Unfortunately a category 5 hurricane swept through my room recently, and now I have to spend the entire day packing up the aftermath. Thanks a lot, Mother Nature.

Day 4: I Ate Too Much

Things I ate today and the order in which I ate them:
cereal (Frosted Flakes, or "Frosties" as they are called here)
clementine
apple
more Frosties
cheese (just a hunk of cheddar)
chicken
potatoes
carrots
brussel sprouts
Yorkshire Pudding (not actually pudding, by the way)
sausage wrapped in bacon (delicious)
ice cream
Mystery Pudding (also delicious, also not actually pudding)
Christmas Pudding (poison dressed up in a fancy name...and nowhere near actual pudding)
even more Frosties (to get the taste of Christmas Pudding out of my mouth)

The reason for the binge eating was a Christmas Dinner cooked by some of the English people in our building. We put 4 tables together in the hall of our apartment building and feasted. As is evident by my list, some food tasted delicious and some made me want to die. Really it was just the Christmas Pudding that made me want to die. It looked so brown and delicious, like a little dome of chocolate bliss, and that name! So enticing! But I soon (and tragically) found out that Christmas Pudding is some horrible, horrible take on Fruitcake. The brown color comes from the poo they most likely mixed in it. Because that is what it tasted like. Poo.

Day 5: Erin

I bet you didn't think I'd actually name my blog after you, did you? Well, kiddo, that's the last time you underestimate me!

Meanwhile...today I had an in-class essay test for European Economic Issues. What kind of issues do Europeans have? Tons! First of all, they smoke too much. Secondly, they never got the memo that mullets and David Hasselhoff are NOT cool. All right, I'll admit David Hasselhoff is pretty cool, but mullets? In your dreams, Europe. Economically speaking, Europeans farm too much. That's about it. That's what I wrote my essay on. They squeeze too much milk out of their cows' udders and harvest too many sugar beats. How tragic. I guess in the past they've had a rough time of it: wars, genocide, evil mustachioed dictators and all. But I find it hard to feel sorry for an economic community whose currency can buy SO much more than the dollar. Maybe I'm a little resentful. Maybe if my bank account didn't pull a disappearing act on me over here in Europe I'd be a little more sympathetic.

But probably not. Because I was kidding before...David Hasselhoff is definitely NOT cool.

Day 6: GO PATS!!

It is really a pain to watch football via the internet. Sure you can get the scores, the stats, and a tiny animated picture of a football being thrown up and down the field, but you have no idea what the tone of the game is. You can't see how tired one team looks, how close the field goal was to going in, the evil glares exchanged at the line of scrimmage, and my favorite part of the game: ridiculous end zone dances. Sometimes I imagine what my end zone dance would be like if I were a football star. It would definitely involve flapping imaginary chicken wings and "shaking my tail feathers." I sometimes even throw in a standing flip for fun. I know doing a flip is unrealistic because I'd get penalized for excessive celebration, but the possibility of me being a football star is probably unrealistic as well, so why not dream...

...back to reality...Yesterday I set a goal for myself: to finish a first draft of my essay. And who could've guessed that I'd actually achieve that goal? Not me, that's for sure. I spent the entire day working on that sucker. I was the epitome of a crazed author: my hair was dirty and unkempt, I was wearing sweatpants all day, pacing back and forth in my room, shaking my fist in the air and silently cursing Ernest Hemingway for making my life so difficult. I consumed nothing but copious amounts of tea and clementines, and by 2am the storm had passed. I did not leave my tiny cubicle of a room the entire day, save to go to the kitchen to get more tea and clementines, and consequently to the bathroom to pass the all the tea through my system. As I lay in bed, I felt completely physically exhausted, like I just gave birth. But instead of baring a live human being, I bore a six page, weakly supported essay on post wwi disillusionment. If child birth is half as painful as writing that essay, I'm totally adopting.

Patriots update: Wes Welker just scored a touchdown. I wonder what his end zone dance looked like...