Sweet T. and Biscuits

I wonder if we can ever really predict how things are going to turn out for us in life. We hope and expect that things will go really well and we'll travel the world and find ourselves learning from other cultures and hopefully contributing something in return, but we can't really know for certain until that moment is upon us. What I've seen and experienced in these last six weeks can't really be summed up in words as much as in feelings and realizations, and while I definitely didn't expect to change my mind or convictions about certain aspects of my culture and myself, I can't say that I didn't end up surprising myself in some ways. Well, I think that about sums up the typical expected Eurotrip college response for those of you that wanted something meaningful and boring. For the rest of you... Having successfully made it to Prague without incident, I went about the task of retrieving my suitcase and I braced myself for the nightmare that customs ...

Atlanta, Chicago, Brussels, Helsinki, Prague. Nonstop. A little over 24 hours of travel time, total. All with the goal of eventually getting me to Prague in time for my Kafka class to start. Where am I now? Currently I'm cruising at some bullshit measurement statistic. (I mean, do you know how high airplanes tend to fly? You do? Fuck off, no one likes a know it all.) Anyway. I'm on this plane to Brussels and I want to jot down all the crazy shit that's been popping into my head since this journey began this morning. My morning started at a quarter of seven after a fitful night of restless sleep filled with anxiety dreams about the wake up call to our hotel room mysteriously failing and single handedly ruining my entire day's travel plans. Mom and I were in a hotel in downtown Atlanta, and in the tradition of a young girl's first European trip on her own, a fight shortly followed our wakeup call. The topic? Quick, if you're a girl and the clothes you wear are ...

After leaving Las Vegas , we began the drive to Middle of Nowhere, Utah. My two cousins and aunt and uncle all live in LA, and we all decided to meet up this year to make merry in a remote cabin near Zion National Park. Despite my mother's promise that the drive from Las Vegas to Zion was only about two hours, we ended up taking four to complete the trip, with exactly two stops in between. Before heading out, however, we had determined that we needed to make a shopping trip for the week, because we were driving up on Christmas Day (when NOTHING is open, be it run by Christians or dirty heathens), and grocery stores around Zion are few and far between. Due to Utah's Prohibition-esque liquor laws (nothing over 3.2% alcohol content can be sold anywhere except in state or Native American run liquor stores. That's wine coolers and light beers, folks), we decided we needed to stock up on alcohol as well. Now, far be it from me to say that my family is full of lushes, but we cer...

Most college kids get a month or so off for the holidays. This is generally about three weeks longer than they'd like to spend with their families, so side trips with friends are common. For me, however, my three weeks of holiday break almost always breaks down like this: 1 week for debilitating illness, two weeks for an exceptionally exhausting whirlwind family vacation, 5 hours for packing/jet lag recovery/preparation for travel. This is absolutely draining (but fun and memorable, blah blah blah). This year's break was no exception-I got sick just as I put my luggage down in my bedroom (literally, my throat caught fire right after I got home, it was like magic. Really, really horrible magic ). The next week or so was pretty tame, involving lots of How I Met Your Mother reruns, an attempt to get my parents to love Dr. Who at least a fraction of the amount that I do, Narnia in 3-D (FUCK 3-D, but I love Edmund . Can't help it. Peter is obviously the hot one and he's a b...

So whether my fellow college students want to hear it or not, I'm done with exams and heading home for the holidays on Day 2 of Exam Week. This is awesome because I get to go home and do generally festive things , but it does have some drawbacks. One of the more serious ones is of course everyone's general lack of holiday cheer in the traveling world. At first I thought it was because I was saying "Merry Christmas" to someone who actually gives winter sacrifices to Norse gods or something, but even after switching to the oh-so-PC "Happy Holidays," I'm still getting sour faces and general lack of cockle-warming cheer. Mmm I love the word cockle. Side note-let's start using words that sound hilarious in general context/serious settings. Like my new favorite word: invaginate. This word is so infrequently used that autocorrect just got all up in my business about it, which is sort of ridiculous because the word "autocorrect" also isn't r...

Now for some vintage posting, which was originally on the Saybrook Blog in 2008. This is my contribution instead of writing a meaningless Anthro final paper. More will follow later this week. On The Homefront: My Tofurkey Day November 28, 2009 by Tara Tyrrell Thanksgiving is my favorite holiday. It’s right after my birthday, it’s naturally cheerful in a way that makes Christmas seem tacky and forced in comparison, and it’s always always always delicious. I’ve never been the kind of girl to pick daintily at a salad, or count carbs instead of grabbing life by the balls and eating that entire pizza. So naturally, Thanksgiving is a great day for me. You spend the whole day cooking, starving, salivating, cleaning dishes so you can reuse them to make yet another pile of delicious food, and finally sit down to a meal the size of a small third world country around 5:00. By 5:15, your barbaric gorging begins to slow, and by 5:21 you...

Today's class is given by one of our TA's-not the male one unfortunately because that would be entertaining. Things are laid out in bullet points on the slides (no pictures WTF?) and she's taking like giant pauses between phrases. It feels like a high school presentation by that one girl who everyone ignores but she daydreams about this presentation and the whole class' sudden realization that she's a genius. The high school soccer captain (WAY better than the football team let's be honest) asks her out after class, she gets voted prom queen, after graduation she crowd surfs offstage...but actually people are just bored. It's the sort of dream that I might have had except I was pretty aware of the fact that being smart wasn't going to get me anywhere within those four walls so I made up for it by being funny and trying to keep my head down when anyone mentioned Battlestar Galactica (mmm Lee Adama). Immigrants are coming over. The TA tactfully says “...