#i was trying to find a bathroom before i headed home and google maps led me uh. far astray lol

[chiimeramanticore]

seen while lost in central park yesterday

[imnotoverlyobsessive]

Looks Like Someone Picked a Whole Bushel Of Oopsie Daisies

Chapter Eleven: Making the Most of a Weekend

I knowwwww I’m the worst author ever I’m sorry blah blah blah. But! This chapter is filthy so at least it’s a fun one, right? Also, the Airbnb they’re staying at can be viewed here. Now, onto the chapter!

You’ve been gone so long, I forgot what you feel like, but I’m not gonna think about that right now. I’m gonna keep getting underneath you, I’m gonna keep getting underneath you, and all our friends want us to fall in love.- Panic! at the Disco, The Good, the Bad, and the Dirty

Being separated from one’s soulmate was both emotionally and physically exhausting. It was also really, really depressing. It was just like, why bother? Why bother getting out of bed? Why bother going to school? What was the point? Dipper wouldn’t be there, and she wouldn’t get to see him again for awhile.

Whelp. At least her parents never monitored anything but her texts. She didn’t text Dipper, so, to their knowledge, she wasn’t in contact with him.

Not that they ever got a look at her phone, anyway. She was never home enough for them to see. The longest she’d spent at home at a time was one night. She never ate with her parents, and she still hadn’t spoken to them. She wasn’t planning on it, either. She didn’t have anything to say to them, and she certainly wasn’t interested in what they had to say.

Rolling over in Kristin’s bed (Kristin’s was the previous evening’s sleepover house of choice), Mabel grabbed her phone off the nightstand.

Dipper had messaged her. He usually did when he woke up.

Are you free this weekend?

It was a three day weekend starting the day after Valentine’s Day, which meant Mabel was feeling the separation hard, and therefore had a hot date with Ben & Jerry (both of whom were currently waiting eagerly for her in Kristin’s freezer). Okay, so it was more of a cold date, but, y’know. Semantics, right? Therapy was great, but eating several pints of Chocolate Therapy was cheaper and more fun.

So… technically she was free. But why was Dipper asking?

Yeah, why?

Okay, cool. Come to this address once you’re out of school. Go around back when you get there. Okay?

He typed out an address she didn’t recognize. It wasn’t too far from Kristin’s, but why would Dipper want her to go there? Regardless, she texted back a confused okay and left it at that. Sitting up in bed, she scratched her scalp lightly and looked over at Kristin, who was sleeping with her mouth wide open.

She poked her friend’s cheek. “Hey.”

Kristin stirred but didn’t wake. Naturally, Mabel poked her again, slightly harder. “Hey!” She raised her voice a bit that time.

“What?” Kristin grumbled blearily, blinking her eyes open. Her black hair was matted, and what had once been expertly applied eyeliner and mascara was giving her the usual racoon eyes. Not that Kristin minded, of course. Yesterday’s eyeliner can be made into today’s smokey eye, after all.

“Can you drive me somewhere after school?”

Kristin propped herself up on her arms and blinked up at Mabel. “Depends on where it is, I guess. Why, where you going?”

“I dunno, some-“ Mabel’s phone chimed, signaling another message from Dipper.

Oh, and bring enough stuff to last you through Sunday.

Mabel blinked and lifted her phone up to show Kristin the message. Kristin’s eyes narrowed against the brightness of the phone screen, then widened. She sat up abruptly, then snatched the phone from Mabel’s hand. She scrolled up a bit, reading their most recent messages, and handed Mabel’s phone back to her after a moment, a knowing smirk on her face.

“He’s taking you on a sex retreat,” Kristin said matter-of-factly.

“A- a what now?”

“A sex retreat,” her friend repeated. “Y’know, it’s a three day weekend right after Valentine’s Day so he’s whisking you away somewhere to fuck your brains out.”

“That is…” Mabel was going to say it was ridiculous, but then she thought about it for a moment. Dipper had a car. Neither of their Grunkles would take issue with him coming down to visit her; it was their parents that had an issue with them being soulmates. “A very real possibility, actually,” she finished.

“Oh, it’s totally what he’s doing. So, to answer your question,” Kristin got out of bed and walked towards her bathroom. “Yes, I will absolutely drive you to go on a sex retreat with your soulbro, no matter how far away it is.”

Checking Google Maps, Mabel said, “it’s fifteen minutes from school.”

Kristin grinned. “Badass! Pack up your shit, homegirl. I ain’t driving you back here before you go.” She glanced down at Mabel’s legs. “And maybe shave again before we head out. Don’t want any stubble the first time you see him after this long, right?”

Mabel blushed. “Right, guess not.”

Kristin patted her cheek with another smile. “Cheer up, buttercup. Today’s the day your va-jay-jay is back in business.”

Mabel grinned back. “Fingers crossed!”

“Exactly, now hit the showers!”

———————————————————————

When Mabel stepped out of Kristin’s car onto the sidewalk, she didn’t know what to make of the yellow Victorian house. She sent Dipper a quick here as she went around back, as he’d had told her to that morning, only to find a small rock garden in the backyard of the house, with a… a vardo? It sure looked like a vardo. The fanciest one she’d ever seen in her life. It was red and purple with a small porch, and it appeared to be quite long, too. There was a set of slender red double doors with round stained glass windows on either side, and the whole thing looked intricately carved and painted.

After a moment, the doors opened, and out stepped Dipper. He beamed at the sight of her, and she nearly dropped the duffel bag she had hoisted over her shoulder.

Scratch that, she actually did drop it, squealing and running over to him to jump into his arms. It was a bit difficult because the wagon-house-thingy was on top of a wooden platform that she had to almost trip over before reaching him, but in the span of a few seconds, she had her arms wrapped around him again and she buried her face in his neck, breathing in his scent.

Mabel stood there for several seconds, trying to melt into his skin. A warmth had flooded her veins at the sight of him. She’d forgotten what it felt like to have him close, what he smelled like. She’d just decided she needed an oxygen tank full of Dipper-smell when he spoke, his lips against her scalp.

“I missed you.”

Mabel pulled back enough to look at him. She hadn’t stopped smiling since she’d seen him, and it was kind of hurting her face, but she didn’t care. He was looking at her adoringly, and she giggled. She was just so freakin’ happy to see him. Mabel couldn’t remember the last time she’d been that happy.

No, wait, yes she could. The last time she’d been that happy was right before her parents stormed into the hotel room like ruining everything was a contest with a billion dollar prize.

Well, whatever. They could suck it. Mabel was too busy to care about her parents and whatever lame-ass contests they’d entered.

“I missed you, too,” she finally told him. “But what’re you doing here?” She glanced around a bit. “Actually, what am I doing here?”

He leaned down to kiss her forehead. “It’s an Airbnb,” he said, taking her hand and pulling away from her. “After a fair amount of begging and no small amount of guilt tripping, Grunkle Stan agreed to pay for a three day weekend stay for us.”

He pushed open the intricate red doors and stepped inside, pulling her along after him. She followed after him, her shoes sinking into a plush rug, and her mouth dropped open.

Directly inside the doorway, there was what appeared to be a kitchen, albeit a small one; the cabinets were white with light brown countertops, a hammered copper kitchen sink, two actual stained glass windows (like, it looked like there were actual separate panes of glass for each change in color and shape), and several additional copper kitchen stuff throughout the tiny kitchen. It was more of a hallway than anything else.

Mabel rushed past Dipper excitedly, eager to see what lay beyond the kitchen-slash-hallway, and squealed again. “Eeeeeeee this place is crazy!”

“I knew you’d like it,” he laughed. “I’m gonna go grab your bag, be right back.”

“Kay!” she called over her shoulder, eager to get acquainted with her new favorite place ever.

Okay, so maybe it was her new favorite place ever primarily due to Dipper’s presence, but it was also really flippin’ cool. Directly across the narrow hallway, there was a door that, when opened, led to a very cramped bathroom. Cramped it may be, but it was also hella fancy. The walls were made of tiles fashioned from dark reflective glass, there was a tiny white sink sticking out directly below a window with a mirror fastened to the wood of the window frame, with a stained glass window directly beside the regular one. There was a toilet that had another stained glass window above it, as well as a regular window directly beside it, this one with a gold-colored curtain hanging over it. The shower had a black curtain in front of it but, when pulled aside, it revealed another stained glass window (yes, three for one tiny bathroom). The shower head was a waterfall-type situation, but it also had one of those handheld ones, which she knew from personal experience would be easier to rinse out her hair with.

“You all good in here, Mabes?” Dipper called, and she heard the thunk of her bag being dropped.

Fingers crossed her toiletries hadn’t made a mess all over her clothes.

She stuck her head out of the bathroom and looked over at him as he shut the doors behind him. “Uh, dude, I’ve only seen the kitchen and the bathroom and I’m pretty sure this whole thing is amazeballs.”

He grinned and stepped over to her. “I’m glad you like it, but was it really necessary for you to pack bricks?” He rubbed the shoulder he’d hoisted her bag over.

“Don’t be such a baby, Dippin Dots,” she said with an exaggerated eye roll and sashayed away to inspect the rest of the wagon-thingy.

Just beyond the countertops of the kitchen, there was a tall set of shelves that went to the ceiling, containing various kitchen-y items, including a microwave (which, good, because Mabel was seventeen and leftovers were her BFFs), and directly across from the shelves there was a fridge, which was also good, because as a living creature, Mabel required sustenance in order to survive.

The hallway ended, opening up into a more spacious area with a table outcropping from the wall directly beyond the set of tall kitchen shelves with two nice-looking folding chairs. There was also a set of white cabinets that started at the height of the fridge and descended almost like stairs. Against the back wall was a large wrap-around couch, and the cushions were purple (which was awesome, obvi), and there were hanging potted plants and more windows, too, including two more stained glass ones, and if she looked up…

Holy cheese puffs, was that a chandelier? Upon closer inspection, it turned out that yes, it was most definitely a chandelier, and a mighty fancy one at that, by the looks of things.

“Hoooooookay, brosephina, this is a pretty snazzy location we have found ourselves in,” Mabel said.

“Well,” Dipper began as he stepped up behind her, “I figured you deserved something nice.” He wrapped his arms around her middle and nuzzled her hair.

“Errrrr. Okay then. No issues with that here, lemme tell ya.” Then a thought occurred to her. This was a very nice house-wagon-whatsit, don’t get her wrong, but if they were gonna be there through Sunday, where were they supposed to sleep? Or… do anything else? Would he even want to do anything else? Never mind that. “Soooooo where are we supposed to, like…” she trailed off.

“Bed’s in a loft,” he said into her hair, his arms tightening around her waist. “Up those stairs.” He pointed a finger at the cabinets she’d noted earlier. Huh. So they really were stairs, then.

“Right, so, um…”

Ugh. Why was she so damn nervous? It was irritating. This was her twin, her soulmate, her boyfriend! He had literally been inside her! She had no reason to be nervous!

She was, though, and she didn’t really know how to voice what she wanted.

Kiss me. Touch me. Get your dick inside me, like, freakin’ yesterday, dude.

“W- would you like to see it?” His voice was awkward, and he sounded almost as nervous as she felt. “The bed, I mean.”

Mabel nodded and he pulled away from her, blushing furiously, and she tried not to giggle. Dipper rolled his eyes. “Shut up, just c’mon.”

“I didn’t say anything!” she insisted as he grabbed her hand.

“I could hear you thinking,” he countered, leading her up the cabinets-slash-stairs.

She was still giggling through her nervousness when they reached the top of the stairs. The bed was a mattress directly on the floor with a striped comforter.

Hesitantly, Mabel sat on the bed. Dipper knelt down in front of her. He was looking at her lips when he took her hand again.

“We don’t have to do anything if you don’t want to.” His voice was soft, like he was afraid he’d scare her away or something.

Mabel remembered what Kristin had said about sex retreats and being whisked away to have her brains fucked out.

And then she remembered that no, Dipper could not, in fact, read her mind.

“Why would you think I don’t wanna do anything?” Had. Had he never encountered a mirror? Seventeen years of existence and the boy had never encountered a mirror. What were the chances? He shrugged. “Have you even seen yourself, Dip?”

“Huh?”

She forced her nerves down. He wanted her. She knew he did. She just needed to reassure him that she wanted him just as much. “You’re really freakin’ sexy, bro.”

He smiled hesitantly. “So, is it okay if I…?”

“Look, man,” Mabel said, “if you try a thing and I’m not about it, I’ll let ya know, but otherwise, go for it.”

“Okay, if you’re sure.”

“Uh, I am absotively posolutely sure.”

Grinning, Dipper leaned in to kiss her, and she smiled against his lips when he did. “I missed you,” she murmured against him.

He moved closer to her, pressing his body into hers. “I missed you, too,” he told her. “Now, I gotta be honest with you here, Mabes.” He pulled back a bit to look at her very, very seriously.

“Oh… kay?”

“This outfit,” he glanced down at her shorts and shirt. It was too hot for a sweater, so her top was light and breezy. It also showed off a bit of boobage, so there was that. “It’s cute, I like it and all, but I’d like it a lot more if it were on the floor.”

“Hmm…” she said thoughtfully. “On one condition.” She held up a finger.

“What’s that?”

“I’m only taking my clothes off if you take yours off, too. All’s fair in love and war, buddy-o.”

He grinned cheekily at her. “Is that right? And which is this?”

She shrugged. “Both, prolly.”

“Fair enough,” Dipper said with a chuckle before he pulled back to strip out of his clothes as fast as he possibly could. She was so busy watching him pull his shirt off that she totally forgot she was supposed to take her own clothes off, too. He paused before dropping his shirt to the floor. “Mabellllllllll,” he whined. “You said you’d take your clothes off, c’mon!”

“Right!” She started, almost surprised. “Right, right, sorry, my b.” Pulling her shirt over her head while simultaneously kicking off her sneakers at the heels, Mabel lay back on the bed, unbuttoning her shorts and lifting her butt to shimmy out of them. She wasn’t paying much attention to Dipper at that exact moment, or the way his eyes were wide and glued to her newly exposed skin, but when she finally got the shorts over her hips and down her legs, flinging them away from her with a flick of her foot, she looked up at him, and he was…

Whelp. He was totally nekkid, wasn’t he? She’d seen plenty of pictures lately (had a whole app she kept them in on her phone, even), but pictures on a phone screen ain’t got nothin’ on seeing her bro-bro in person.

“Looks like somebody’s happy to see me,” she grinned nervously at him.

“Gee, I wonder why,” he said sarcastically. “It’s almost like my soulmate is laying on a bed mostly naked right in front of me.” His eyes focused on hers for a moment before drifting back over her body again. “Which, by the way, you should be totally naked.”

“Fair enough,” she agreed, sitting up and reaching around her back to unhook her bra. He watched her, wide-eyed, as she pulled her arms out of the straps and flung the bra away. He watched, too, as she pulled her panties off the same way she had her shorts.

As it turned out, actually seeing how badly he wanted her, like, seeing legit physical evidence of it, well. It was something of a self-esteem boost.

He stared at her for several seconds. She stared back. Then he dove at her, and suddenly he was kissing her lips, her face, her neck, her breasts- it was quite a lot, really, and he seemed to be going pretty fast, too.

“Dipper,” Mabel gasped out as he attacked her nipple. There was really no other word for it. It was most certainly an attack. He was alternating between sucking it harshly and nibbling on it with his teeth, and it stung in the most delicious way.

He pulled off her breast with a pop, then trailed kisses down her chest and stomach, looking at her intently all the while.

“Wh- what’re you doing?” she questioned when he reached his presumed destination, spreading her legs to examine her body. Which, by the way, was tremendously embarrassing.

He looked back up at her. “Well, I was planning on, y’know…” he gestured to her vagina.

Mabel thought for a moment. “On one condition.”

“Another condition? Really?”

Nodding, she said, “you can eat me out, but only if I get to suck your dick after.”

He grinned up at her. “Deal.”

At that, he gave a torturously slow lick to her slit that ended just below where she really wanted it. She whimpered, which prompted him to do it again. And again. By the third incredibly slow lick, she was just about ready to scream at him before he thrust a finger into her and flicked his tongue over her clit in the same second, eliciting a gasp from her.

He thrust his finger in and out of her, slowly moving his tongue over her clit, and before long Mabel was whimpering again. “Ah- another,” she forced out. “Another finger, please.”

He complied, and when her fingers clenched the comforter, he moved a little faster inside of her, flicking his tongue in the same rhythm he was thrusting his fingers at, and she lifted her hips. He reached his other hand up to hold her down, to hold her still, and continued. “Close,” she gasped. “Don’t stop.”

Dipper hastened the flicks of his tongue, the thrusts of his fingers, and then he did something incredible. He closed his lips around her clit and started to suck gently. Mabel’s hand shot down to his hair, holding him between her legs, and her toes curled, bunching the comforter up in a tight grip beneath the pads of her feet, and she found herself instinctively fighting against the firm hand on her hip bone, trying to raise her pelvis closer to him.

“Ah- fuck, Dip, I’m gonna-“ he kept sucking her clit, only he started to flick his tongue over it at the same time, too, and Mabel shattered with a short, abrupt scream.

Her grip on his hair loosened and her hand fell to her side. Mabel’s entire body was tingling.

She’d forgotten how much stronger Dipper-assisted orgasms were than Dipper-free orgasms. She didn’t know if it was a soulmate thing, a Dipper thing, or an I’m-in-love-with-this-guy thing, and her brain was too mushy to care.

“Holy shit,” she panted, and he pulled away from her still-pulsing heat, pressing a kiss to the top of her thigh as he went. The extra tingles his lips caused traveled throughout the rest of her body.

“Sooooo… good, then?”

She glared at him. “Shut up, man, you know it was tops. Where’d you learn to do that, anyway?”

He reddened and looked away. “I maaaaay have done some online research.”

“What, like, porn?”

“Well, not for that specific purpose, no.”

“Then…?” she trailed off, looking at him expectantly.

“Okay, so I read some accounts from lesbians,” he confessed in a rush. “Mostly blogs and whatnot, and then I also talked to a few female friends I have-“

“Whoa there, pal,” she cut in. “What female friends? I dunno how I feel about you getting all the dirty deets from another girl.”

He blinked. “Oh, I talked to this lesbian friend I have, and also her girlfriend. Just… comparing notes, y’know?”

She looked at him incredulously for a few seconds, then burst out laughing. “Okay, okay, that’s fine. For a second there, I was worried you were exchanging extremely graphic details of our sex life with, like, Pacifica or something.”

Dipper blanched. “Yeah, no, not her.”

“Okay, cool.” After several more seconds, she looked him up and down.

Her bro was still sporting a big ol’ broner.

“I believe I was promised the opportunity to suck your dick in exchange for you getting the pleasure of eating me out.”

He blushed again. Holy bejeezus, he was adorable.

“You… you don’t have to, y’know,” he offered quietly.

“Well, yeah,” she agreed. “Of course I don’t have to, but it’s, like my new favorite hobby, brosephina.”

He grinned. “You’re pretty good at it, too.”

“Hmm,” she said, reaching down to grasp him. He gasped at the feel of her palm, and she motioned for him to lay down. “Maybe I’ll put that in college applications.” Once he was horizontal, Mabel leaned down and took the entire length of him in her mouth (or as much of him as she could fit, anyway) with absolutely zero warning.

Dipper groaned and leaned back against the pillow. “Fuuuuuuck.”

Humming around him, she bobbed her head, letting her lips slide over him and sucking in her cheeks. He reached down to grip one of her breasts, tweaking her nipple, and she moaned, the vibrations from the sound causing him to buck slightly into her mouth. She gagged a bit but kept going, pleased that he was enjoying himself so much.

Each time she only had the head of him in her mouth, she swirled her tongue around the top, dipping slightly into his urethra. “Holy shit, Mabes,” he groaned, fisting a hand in her hair. He didn’t push her head, though, for which she was grateful. Bobbing faster, obscene slurping sounds filled the loft, saliva dribbling down his shaft. His moans got louder, and she sped up as much as she could.

“Mabel,” he gasped. “Mabel, I’m gonna- you should move-“

She ignored him, grasping his testicles gently and taking him as deep as she could manage. She was pretty sure her nose brushed against his pubic hair on more than one occasion, actually.

He came down her throat with a shout that sounded almost pained, and she nearly choked on it all, but managed to swallow the vast majority of it. It was not pleasant-tasting, nor was the texture particularly appetizing, but when she looked up at him, he was gazing down at her like she was some kind of goddess, so it was worth it, she decided.

She pulled her mouth off of him, and when she did, a small amount of his semen dripped out of the side of her mouth. She wiped it away with the back of her hand.

“So, how was it?”

He looked at her incredulously. “You literally just swallowed my jizz and you’re asking me how it was?”

Mabel shrugged, grabbing his half-drunk water bottle that was off to the side of the bed. She sat up, taking a swig from it to wash that nasty-ass taste out of her mouth.

Eugh.

“It was awesome, Mabes,” he told her as she set the water bottle back down. She smiled happily at him, then lay down next to him and rested her head on his chest. “Downside, though, is I’ll need a bit before I can go again.”

“Eh, that’s fine.”

Turns out he only needed approximately ten minutes before he could go again.

She’d still been laying on his chest contentedly when he started running his fingertips over the side of one of her breasts, and when she looked up at him questioning it, he kissed her.

Dipper turned his body towards her, slipping his tongue into her mouth, and she felt his hardness press against her.

She pulled away with a laugh. “Already?”

“I’m seventeen, Mabel,” he pointed out.

She shrugged and went back to kissing him.

No objections from this girl, thank you.

He climbed on top of her before too much longer, his arousal pressing into her stomach, and she wrapped her arms around his neck, one of her hands at the back of his neck, her fingers threading through his hair.

He reached between them with one hand to grip one of her breasts again, squeezing it lightly. He kissed her neck, sucking a bruise into the skin, and she moaned softly. “Dip,” she murmured. “I need you.”

He reached between her legs to stroke her, finding her wet again. “I need you, too,” he groaned against her neck.

“Then take me,” she begged, lifting her hips to meet his fingers.

Positioning himself between her legs, he thrust into her with a groan, his head falling against her, his forehead resting between her breasts. “You okay?” he panted.

Nodding, Mabel wrapped her legs around the backs of his thighs. “Keep going.”

Pushing himself up onto his hands, Dipper pulled out of her almost completely, and she whimpered at the loss, gasping when he thrust back into her. He kept up his slow, gentle pace, like he was worried he’d break her, and eyes were clenched shut with the effort to restrain himself.

She reached up to stroke his cheek. “Let go, Dipper,” she said softly. “Don’t hold back. You won’t hurt me, I promise.”

When he pulled out and thrust back into her again, harder this time, like she’d wanted, she moaned and grasped his arms, her fingertips digging into his skin.

“Fuck, Mabel,” he groaned, his hips snapping against hers. “I missed this so much.”

“Me too,” she agreed, lifting her hips to meet each of his thrusts. “Please don’t stop.”

He leaned down to press his lips to hers desperately, hungrily, and she returned the kiss with just as much ferocity, her legs tightening around him.

“Harder,” she begged. She knew she was begging. She didn’t care. “Give it to me harder!”

Dipper complied, pulling back slightly to watch her breasts bounce in time with his thrusts. Mabel lifted one of her legs up to rest her ankle on his shoulder, and they both groaned at the new angle, the new depth.

“You feel so good,” he moaned, slamming into her again. “Fuck, I don’t- I don’t know how much longer I can-“

“I don’t care, I don’t care,” she gasped out. “Just fuck me, Dipper, please!”

Dipper rose up to his knees, lifting her hips to meet his and holding the leg she’d placed on his shoulder still as he pounded into her.

Clenching the fabric of the comforter in her hands so tightly her knuckles hurt, Mabel couldn’t seem to stop herself from screaming, begging him for more, not to stop.

Putting a hand on her hip to hold her pelvis against his, he gripped her hard enough to bruise, and all she could think was that she hoped it did bruise, she wanted to feel the remnants of this for weeks-

She looked up at him, his pained expression, the way he was staring between them, watching himself slide in and out of her harshly.

“Get me pregnant, Dipper,” she moaned. “I want it so badly, please, I need it-“ she cut herself off with a cry when he thrust into her again.

“I can’t,” he forced out. “You know I can’t.”

“Please,” she said again. “I need it, I need it so bad, fuck-“

He thrust again, moving his hand from her hip to her breast, pinching her nipple between his thumb and forefinger.

“Soon, Mabes, I promise,” he groaned, leaning against the leg she had on his shoulder.

“Now, dammit,” Mabel demanded. “I want you to fuck a baby into me now!”

“I want it, too,” he confessed, squeezing her breast roughly as he thrust into her. “But we can’t yet. I’ll give you one soon, I swear, just-“ he cut himself off. “Fuck, Mabel, I’m gonna- fuck-“

“Cum for me, cum inside me, Dip,” she begged, desperate for it, for him.

“I can’t,” he groaned miserably, then reached between them and rubbed her clit in quick, harsh circles.

“Ah!” Mabel cried out, her toes curling and her body freezing up as her orgasm ripped through her abruptly.

He didn’t stop pounding into her, not even for a second, only lifted his hand away from her clit to hold her hip again, his head falling back. “Mabes, I- I love you, fuck, I love you-“

She knew he was seconds away from orgasming; his thrusts were short and stunted, harsh and bruising. “Cum for me, Dipper,” she encouraged. “Fill me up.”

He groaned her name again, then, to her tremendous disappointment, yanked himself out of her abruptly, his release spurting onto her vulva. Her hips fell back onto the mattress, and he collapsed on top of her.

After several minutes, he lifted his head up to look at her. “Do you really want me to get you pregnant? Like, now?”

She thought for a moment before answering. “Yeah, I do.” He seemed startled by that. “But I also know it’s not really… feasible right now. I really, really want it, but I know it’s not a good idea.”

He nodded and leaned in to kiss her slowly, lovingly, nuzzling her nose with his when their lips disconnected. “I love you, Mabel.”

“I love you more,” she countered with a grin.

“I love you the most,” Dipper insisted.

“Oh yeah?” she challenged. “Think you got me there, don’t cha? Well guess what, buddy: I love you infinity times the most, so there.”

He blinked at her. “Uhhhh… that’s not how math works. There’s nothing more than the most.”

“I don’t give a rat tooth if it’s ‘not how math works’,” she said in her very best Dipper impression. “I dunno if you’ve met me before, but I’m Mabel Pines, and I’m redefining math.”

He snorted. “If you say so.”

“Damn right I say so!” After a moment, she noticed the stickiness between them. “Errr… can you get something for that? I’m feelin’ a bit jizztastic here, bro.”

“Right,” he agreed with a slight blush. “Lemme, uh… lemme get something for that.”

“Coolio, I’ll chill here.”

He nodded and went down the stairs.

Well, Mabel thought. This is gonna be one awesome weekend.

[chaletnz]

Furano Trip

To make the most of my two days off I decided to drive to Furano after finishing work, to ensure I would be able to see the lavender first thing in the morning. I packed up the car and had a shower, then headed off. About 5 minutes after leaving home, I approached a cat sitting calmly in the middle of my lane, I screeched to a stop and the cat didn’t run so I rolled over the top and then it must’ve slunk away. It was enough to give me a fright, I drove a little slower from that point on since I was still in town. Well, after clearing Kutchan town I was on a country road on the way towards the mountains and the second cat was not as lucky... He darted out from a farmhouse and I saw his little ginger face in the split second before he bounced into the right front tyre. There was a bit of a thud but no bump. He ran off into the bushes. Very shakily I pulled over and went to investigate, there was a woman there who could speak English and she said she had seen him run down into the bushes surrounding the farm. I left with an eerie feeling that maybe I should go back home and drive tomorrow, like these cats were meant to be a sign. I drove on for about an hour, my lights on highbeam and my eyes on high alert – I was more concerned about deer now. I pulled over after another hour or so and sent a message to my mum just in case the universe was conspiring, and then the spookiest part... As I was sitting in the car recording my message, a third cat came running towards me! In the middle of nowhere! Very carefully I drove around it and back on to the road and that was thankfully the last cat I saw on the drive. After that it was smooth, I stopped for a late night McDonald’s at Chitose and then drove on until I found a nice big parking lot with a 24 hour toilet. There were bugs everywhere in the heat of a warm summer’s night, flying around the lights of the toilet building. I slept quite well all things considered.

The next morning I woke up around 6am when the heat in the car simply became too much to bear. It was gearing up to be at least 30 degrees today. Somehow the exact time I wanted to use the bathroom there was a cleaning crew surrounding it and I could just quickly brush my teeth and wash my face before leaving. I started by visiting a large campground park that I had intended on staying at last night but didn’t quite reach there, and luckily I hadn’t because it was a crowded carpark with a far worse toilet! I drove up to the first lavender field of the day, Choei Lavender Farm. There was a winding road up the back to reach a mountaintop viewpoint overlooking the lavender and the Kamifurano township. I battled to take some videos with my GoPro that seemed to be struggling in the heat already – by 8am it was already 28 degrees. Japan doesn’t do daylight savings so it means that sunrise is about 3am in summer so the hottest part of the day is earlier in the morning than you would expect. I parked down at the bottom of this farm and took a few more photos although it wasn’t possible to get a good angle of the word “Kamifurano” spelled out in Hiragana in large lettering filled with colourful flowers. I decided to get some gas because Kimbo was already thirsty again, and then arrived at Farm Tomita just before 9am. As Google maps directed me there, she made sure to inform me “this destination will be closed when you arrive” but I figured it wouldn’t hurt to wait for 10 minutes in the carpark. Well it seemed that the Japanese had the same idea! The main parking lot was already full and the parking attendant waved his lightsaber to guide me right down to the back lot. Furano has great flower fields but not much shade so poor Kimbo had to suffer in the sun while I went for a walk around. By now it was 30 degrees and humid. Japanese people carried umbrellas and wore full length sleeves in the heat. Many people were dressed up in their Sunday best to take family photos in the lavender with a bouquet purchased from the gift shop for 500 yen. Dogs were posed for photos and then taken back into the shade where they could lie down. I took my photos and walked around the perimeter but it was far too hot for me so I had to browse in one of the air conditioned gift shops to cool down. I tried to walk up the side of one of the more shady lavender fields but it was deceivingly steep and I struggled to get halfway! It was time for an ice cream break by 9.30am, and of course I had to try the lavender ice cream again. It was a soft purple colour, with a mild taste and started dripping immediately. Luckily there was a shady seat to sit and eat it and appreciate the views of Kamifurano and the mountains in the distance. In winter Furano is also a hugely popular ski resort that is often paired with Niseko for longer snowsports trips. To distract my thoughts, a child squeaked in with those annoying shoes that sound like you’re standing on a plush toy squeaker with every step. All heads turned to look at the child, who promptly trips up and starts scream-crying uncontrollably. And now my relaxing ice cream break was ruined. I walked around a little bit more and bought a few postcards and lavender things to send home then sat down for a drink and a potato croquette for an early lunch. I had been waiting around for a bit because I wanted to visit a café nearby that opened only at 12pm. It was relaxing anyway to sit and watch Japanese people enjoying the lavender and trying to get the best photos when the entirety of the scene is purple!

I drove to Kamifurano town and parked at the post office as I couldn’t find any free parking lots near the Polar Coffee café, I withdrew some cash and then walked there as a loud alarm sounded through the city – presumably a test as no one seemed even mildly concerned. On Instagram yesterday I’d seen that my colleagues Tim and Nick had come to this café which is owned by a Taiwanese guy (they’re also Taiwanese) and it had a good vibe from their photos so I was determined to try! It was even better than expected, I ordered a flat white and it was not only very Instagrammable but also cheaper than anywhere in Niseko. Cooling down in the air conditioned café was also a highlight. After my coffee I made the long drive to Asahikawa to see a rice field. But not just any rice field, one planted very carefully with different varieties of rice that had coloured shoots. The reason I made this long drive just for a rice field is because the second half of July is the perfect time to view such rice fields - the rice shoots have grown in and are brightly coloured at this time. I was very proud of myself as I directed myself to the field. Although a lot of people online said it was so hard to find, I had no trouble at all. Actually my Google map would have led me exactly there but I followed some signposts instead that said “tanbo art” on them in Japanese, and the reason I was so proud – I could actually read what it said! I was the only person there so I parked where I pleased and climbed up the viewing platform to see the art. Unfortunately the field was so wide that it was hard to take a photo of the entire thing, even with panorama! The design changes each year and this time it was a couple of anime characters, there was also something written way off to the left that wasn’t really visible from the platform and I could only see “2021” and some squashed Japanese characters from the ground. Anyhow, it was a very unique attraction and I was glad I had made the trip to see it. My next destination was the Ningle Terrace; a series of log cabin-esque boutique shops arranged along a wooden walkway in the forest. If my phone wasn’t so terrible with capturing greenery then it would’ve been another Instagram-worthy place to see but other than a cool photos the souvenirs were quite expensive and many of the shops were closed anyway. I took a long drive from Furano to Obihiro for tomorrow’s adventure and stopped at a mall for a KFC dinner. Usually Japanese KFC is great, but this one had unfriendly staff and they gave me a half frozen burger which I had to send back for a fresh one. I bought a few supermarket supplies and then drove towards the small Obihiro airport once it was dark to find a suitable parking space for the night. I passed the airport parking lot as it there were too many floodlights which would make it hard to sleep, further up the road there was a small shoulder so I stayed there in the pitch black instead, with a nice forest on either side. I got out of the car to change into my shorts to sleep but I heard rustling in the bushes and freaked out! Instead I changed inside with the doors locked. I felt a little uneasy falling asleep as there had been searchlights beaming around the sky that I’d assumed were to find intruders sneaking into the abandoned Gluck Kingdom theme park and I worried someone would knock on my car window and tell me to move on. Of course I didn’t want to get caught on my urban exploring but I thought “you would have to be absolutely insane to venture in there at night”. As it turned out though, the lights were for the airport perimeter security and nothing to do with the theme park coincidentally located about a kilometre opposite.

[theessaflett]

72 Hours (ish) in... MANCHESTER

Your friendly neighbourhood Essa has a look round a city best known for the industrial revolution, bees, and bad weather. 

…The start of my trip to Manchester wasn’t the smoothest.

The only thing I could find to eat at Euston station for my tea before my 19:40 train were chips coated in some sort of suspicious chilli dust, so it was a very queasy Essa who arrived at Manchester Piccadilly a few hours later and wandered around trying to find the exit. (I had in fact been to the station before last October as part of a band tour, but as I was VERY sick and feverish at the time I had very little recollection of the place indeed!) I trundled my suitcase out of the station and off into the night - and my, what a night.  9.45pm on a Saturday night in Manchester is quite the experience, and as Google Maps took me down back alley after back alley I found myself humming ”Just keep swimming, just keep swimming” to myself with increasing speed. One particularly memorable back alley held two sad looking figures, one of whom was violently throwing up behind a bin. 
“You alright, Tim?” called the other one, who was busy trying to use a wall to stay upright. Tim was almost certainly not alright. I left them to it. 

After about 20 minutes of nervous trundling I arrived at Hatters Hostel. It turned out that Hatters was on top of a nightclub, opposite a nightclub, and instead of being part of the Hilton hotel chain as I’d originally surmised it was called “Hilton Hatters Hostel” because it was on Hilton street. I was beginning to regret some of the decisions that had led to this moment. 

Looks nice, doesn’t it. LIES. 

I tried to get the eye of the receptionist, was told I would have to wait as she was “doing the money”, and sat down on the only couch next to a man in gym clothes who had seemingly waited so long he’d passed out. Many minutes passed. In the end I passively aggressively opened and shut all the leaflets next to the desk  - Manchester offers two walking tours and a make your own beer festival, incidentally - and once Sleeping Man had been woken up and his booking put through it was my turn. Sleeping Man had been asked for ID, and I nervously started my explanation that I’d forgotten my passport but had my 16-25 train card when it was cut off by the receptionist. She didn’t really care, it was just a formality. Also, where had I dyed my hair? She’d tried to dye it that colour but it had just gone green and her mum had made her cut it off because green wasn’t an acceptable colour for her sister’s wedding. But now it was purple which was also cool. I murmured positive words about purple, took the key card and headed for the lift, trying to ignore the fact that the floor numbers on the wall were peeling off. I found 104, glad that the door looked less battered than some of the other ones, and after the second time of trying, keyed myself into my home for the next three days.

…The Hatters Hostel website photographer deserves some sort of award for misguiding photography. And possibly to be sued. I was expecting a fancy room, plush and cosy. I admittedly got quite a comfortable bed, but I also was given a TV that had been installed at an angle that meant I would need to be the girl from the Exorcist to watch it in comfort, a broken heater, no main light, no kettle, thin, pathetic towels…and a hell of a lot of noise. Here’s the thing about arriving, at 10.30pm on a Friday night, into a room on the first floor directly on top of a night club and opposite several other nightclubs: it is astonishingly, awe inspiringly, horrifyingly loud. The vibrations shuddered through the floor and up my legs, and my suspicions about the sturdiness of the walls were confirmed when I laid a hand on one of them and felt vibrations shuddering through the brickwork too. Some optimistic soul had put in double glazing on the one, sad looking window, but it was no good: the pounding music was coming up through the bare linoleum floor and in the cracks between said floor and the walls. Friends, I am not so proud as to deny that I had a bit of a disappointed sniffle as I sat on the edge of the bed in the cold, listening to four different nightclub bangers (that all had driving dubstep basses…they sadly didn’t even merge into one pleasing cross-rhythm beat) and trying to reassess my accommodation expectations. The reason for the massive tub of free ear plugs on the reception desk was becoming terribly, horribly clear. After a bolstering call to my parents where I let them know I’d arrived and tried to elicit some sympathy for the damp boombox situation in which I’d found myself (“Well go down to reception and ask if you can get another room then, sitting there moping at me isn’t doing anything”  is arguably the Scottish version of “Aw poor diddums” so I consider the sympathy bid a success) I mournfully trailed back to ground level and put on my best pleading puppy face. It was no good: there were no other free rooms for the whole weekend, he was very sorry, my heater should be warming up at any moment. (this was a lie. I am certain that I had no heating for the full three days.) I grimly stocked up on earplugs and, comforted with the paltry commiseration that the nightclubs shut at 1.30am, went back to my unappealing room. This was it, was it? This is what £264 got you for three nights in central Manchester? Bloody hell. Tried out the shower. It was cold. Went to bed and sulked. (To be fair, several Destiny’s Child and Britney Spears medleys later, the noise did mercifully stop at 1.30am. Which was just as well, as by that point I was fantasising about punching night clubbers.)

Day 1

My main reason for being in Manchester over the weekend was to attend a one-day writing course at the LGBT Foundation  - 2019 may be a year of me writing lots of things but there’s still not much time for writing “just for fun” so I was looking forward to writing anything I liked for a full day! I blearily made my way out of the hostel - glaring at anyone who looked like they might have been making noise six hours earlier - and headed off to the Foundation, stopping at the “park” (a few trees and a bit of squelchy grass does not a proper park make, Manchester) Cafe Nero on my way. This proved a wise move, as soya milk has not yet made it to the LGBT Foundation so I was sadly under caffeinated for the day…

The LGBT Foundation 

The writing day itself was lovely; I enjoyed the chance just to spend time tapping away on my laptop, the other course members were friendly and the heating was on. The only real disaster was lunchtime, when I ordered rice at a nearby Asian to-go place and got noodles instead. I can’t eat noodles. Ended up eating random selections of snacks and showing people my noodles whilst saying sadly, “Look, they gave me noodles!” (Received a satisfactory amount of sympathy from all.) The LGBT Foundation staff were friendly and it’s great that there’s such an extensive support centre in the heart of the Gay Village…my only quibble about the building would be that it was surprising and disappointing to see they only offered Male or Female toilets and there was no mention anywhere of the additional “IAQ+” that I’m used to London folk using most of the time. It would be a real shame if Intersex/Asexual/Non-Binary/Gender Queer young people used the building and didn’t feel like they belonged, when just a few posters and different bathroom signs  would make the Foundation welcoming to absolutely everyone. (Alright, snowflake millennial moment over!)

After the course I headed over to HOME   - stopping off at Pizza Express on the way, where a chatty waitress asked me if I was an artist…I considered creating a new persona but in the end decided I didn’t have the energy - to see the Old Vic production of Wise Children. 

Part of the HOME complex

Although I felt like some elements of the production jarred (why must new plays always include grim scenes of child abuse, incest and/or rape?) and the ending was just bizarre, I thoroughly enjoyed the onstage music and the breath-taking stage design…and the fact that I knew one of the cast members! Paul Hunter from Told By An Idiot didn’t look very different to when I worked with him on Get Happy in 2013 and it was great to see him in action, getting belly laughs from the whole audience as he strutted up and down the stage in full-blown comedic idiot mode.

The brilliant stage design for Wise Children

Getting back to the hostel afterwards proved a little more difficult than anticipated due to a lost Uber driver and there being two Hatters Hostels (naturally I was delivered to the wrong one) but I eventually made it back to Purgatory Room and grimly waited out the Michael Jackson remixes coming through the walls by watching Brooklyn Nine-Nine clips with my head underneath the covers to retain warmth. By 1.20am I was passing the time by fantasising about how I was going to switch on both of my radiators in my London flat when I returned on Monday night and toast myself in front of the two of them until the heat was similar to Barbados in August.

Day 2

I groggily crashed out of the hotel at 11am with only one clear thought: CAFFEINE. Manchester decided to give me a true North of England experience: it was cold, grey, and miserably wet. I tried to find my cafe of choice with some urgency.

Teacup Kitchen Cafe

Teacup Kitchen was recommended as a vegan cafe on Yelp. This, it turned out, was not wholly accurate. Some of their menu was vegan. Very little of their menu indeed was gluten free, but it turned out that that at least was easily rectified as they did have GF bread. As I had clearly stumbled into the Manchester equivalent of Shoreditch the decor was brutally bare, the music was loud and everyone was dressed in black so it was impossible to tell who were the waitstaff and who were just pretentious. (I found this very funny until I realised I was also dressed in all black, at which point I found it slightly less funny and instead wondered when it was exactly that London had turned me into such a hipster stereotype). 

Note the bare light bulbs... 

I ordered poached eggs and avocado on toast, which, this being Northern Shoreditch, came with chilli flakes and raw onion for some reason. I pleaded for no onion but got it anyway, which led to some sad toilet trips later.

General Public Announcement: Food intolerances aren’t just fads, everyone!!!

Who would ruin a perfectly good avocado by dumping a whole load of onion on top of it anyway?! 

Indignant with this most first world of first world problems, I paid an eye-watering £17.10 for what was essentially eggs on toast, a cup of tea and a juice (more expensive that Shoreditch?! Discuss)  and trudged out into the rain once more. …Then hopped into Forbidden Planet, because Forbidden Planet!! For the uninitiated, Forbidden Planet is a magical world of deep nerdy joy.  

If a non-geek person would react to an object by saying, “Oh that’s from that show you like, isn’t it…that’s nice…?”, they probably have it. That being said, they did not have nearly enough Doctor Who or Tim Burton merchandise for my liking and after wandering around having fun spooking all the nervous looking nerdy teenage boys (A woman!!, I could practically hear them whisper amongst themselves. The last time we had one of them in here was in 2009! Darren still hasn’t recovered!!) I headed off to the John Rylands library.

The (rather wet in this photo) John Rylands Library

Now, my understanding of the John Rylands library was that it was one, quite impressive, hall. This proved to be similar to saying that the Titanic was quite big. It was absolutely massive, with four or five main library spaces and lots of awe-inspiring  corridors and staircases in-between, many of which I am certain have been used in Harry Potter films. By pure good luck it was a great time to be visiting, as there were two really interesting exhibitions on about the role of women in literature and society in general. The Women in Manchester exhibition in particular was fascinating and gave a brief but vivid idea of how crucial the women of the city were both in the Suffragette movement itself and in protests before and afterwards. The “Historical Bathroom” is worth a visit too (if you’re as curious as I was about that description, it turned out to be a ladies bathroom that had been preserved exactly as it was when the library opened in the early 20th century. It was fully functioning but very draughty), as is the main Historic Library. 

The magic of the building overall was, for me at any rate, slightly dimmed with the knowledge that it wasn’t actually very old at all, just built in the style of earlier buildings by late-era Victorians wistful for an earlier “Utopian” age of social harmony, unnerved as they were by the unrest and turbulence of the Industrial Age in which they found themselves. I’m sure that most infamous of old-school folk song collectors Cecil Sharp, for instance, would have been delighted by the righteous pomp of the marble statues and stuffy regal halls, the library a grand symbol of an age and an Empire already on the way out when the building first opened.

That said, the John Rylands library is still beautiful, impressive and well worth a trip - just allocate more time than I did! I finished off my visit with an organic cola (would not recommend) from the rather chilly open-plan cafe then tried to decide what to do next. My initial plan had been to go to the Museum of Manchester, but a quick check of their website brought up the unwelcome news that due to renovations the only section still open was “Fossils and Meteorites”, which was not a gallery that exactly filled me with unbound excitement. In the end I decided to go to the People’s Museum instead  - admittedly because it was only four minutes away and, after inevitably going the wrong way and walking round in circles for a bit scowling at Google Maps, I arrived at the brutalist museum in dire need of the loo and a plug socket for my fast-dying phone battery. 

The rather damp looking People’s History Museum 

They had both of those things, so we were already off to a good start when I guiltily ignored the “Use The Stairs, Save Our Environment!” sticker next to the lift and saved my aching legs the climb to the third floor. It became fairly clear very quickly that this was a museum where if you accidentally started the exhibition backwards everything was really quite confusing, but sadly that was what I somehow did on every single floor. (There are still some things that I’m puzzling over, and probably will be forever.) I also started off foolishly presuming that as I was on the 3rd floor I would be going chronologically back in time rather than forwards, but it turned out that there was no such clear organisational system in place for the exhibits: rather, photographs from the 1940s and propaganda posters from the 1880s rubbed shoulders in cheerful harmony. This only added to my overall confusion but gave a nice overall air of linear history being an unnecessary construct of our modern-day society. The writers of the Old Testament would have approved wholeheartedly!

The museum was truly fascinating, and quite shocking in how openly socialist-bordering-on-communist it was in its beliefs; lots of Karl Marx quotes on the walls and leftist liberal exhibit blurbs. I enjoyed it thoroughly -  particularly the excellent section about the Votes for Women movement - and was delighted to find the cafe offered a proper cuppa and gluten free biscuits. This was the life. The museum sadly shut at 5pm (as do many, many things in Manchester) so I was turfed out to wander the wet streets once more. After an accidental detour into a very posh outdoor dining area complete with more decorative lightbulbs than you could shake an over-priced mojito at, I arrived in China Town. My main aim was to get a good photo of the famous China Town arch, but as I achieved that in the first five minutes I decided to also do something else, whatever that might be. 

China Town’s Arch

I’m not sure what I was expecting from China Town, but I was expecting it to be big; instead, unless there were lots of shops hiding from me, China Town was largely just a square - bizarrely, a square built round a car park - with maybe 20 or so shops… and then that was pretty much it. Those shops were wonderful though, and I loved being an unabashed tourist and wandering round a seafood place full of giant tanks of lobsters, supermarkets filled with cans of things you never thought to pickle but apparently are in fact pickle-able… pickled mango was an especially interesting concept… and gazing hungrily at the menus tacked up outside the many Chinese restaurants. (I had no luck. Very not Essa friendly indeed.) 

Instead I settled for a bubble tea from Chatime. I made several bad decisions and ended up with an apple tea with little ball things (??? Tapioca??? Whatever it was they were suspiciously savoury and worryingly chewy) and rainbow jelly. I gave up halfway through as I could feel my teeth beginning to rot. 

Diabetes in a cup. 

Chatime 

After risking my life and health on some questionable 50p Asian sweets - they were covered in sugar and salt and my pathetic Western constitution decided it couldn’t quite cope with this final insult - I finished off my day out with a very nice sit watching the coloured fountain display in the “park” and then going off to somewhere I could confidently expect to be fed: Zizzi’s. 

The very splooshy water fountains. 

...They may have fed me undercooked, over salted gluten free pasta, but it was gluten free pasta never the less, and I trooped back to the hostel fed and happy.

After attempting to write my journal in the communal kitchen next to a group of very noisy Italian twenty-somethings making a very complicated meal that seemed to need lots of loud chopping, banging and semi-regular cheering, I relocated to the communal lounge instead and turned up Royal Blood to eardrum-bursting volumes to drown out the horror film the other two sofa loungers were watching. By 11.30pm even loud rock wasn’t managing to drown out the film and I was beginning to suspect the heating had been switched off as it didn’t seem much warmer than my own little ice box of a room, so I waved the white flag of surrender and beetled off to watch YouTube under the covers once more. Would it be too much to hope that Sunday nights at least were fairly quiet here in nightclub land…? My heading to bed was foiled, however, by the fact that the key card to my room no longer worked. I trailed unhappily back down to the ground floor and explained the situation to an unsympathetic receptionist who said, “Oh it always does that for 104, just try it a few more times” without looking up from his computer. I explained through gritted teeth that I had been trying it for five minutes, thanks very much, and he reluctantly came with me to see what the problem was. I passed the journey by mentioning how my heater didn’t work. “Oh, that heater,” he said without a hint of irony. “Yeah it doesn’t work, it’s just for decoration.” Apparently my room was meant to be heated by a magical vent blowing warm air into the room. I said grumpily that it did not seem to be doing that at all. “Well, it’s 104,” he said with a shrug. “It’s always cold and the door never works. Dunno why, it’s really weird.” As I contemplated the fact that I HAD BEEN STAYING IN THE POLTERGEIST ROOM THIS WHOLE TIME he swiped me through with his master and left me in my Spectre Apartment. I lay in bed in the dark that night pretending very hard that I wasn’t the slightest bit unnerved and listening to the pounding bass coming through the walls (one stubborn nightclub somewhere in the middle distance was subjecting its patrons to Sunday night indie rock) until 1.30am blessedly rolled around and Geoffrey the Ghost and I managed to get some sleep.

Day 3   

By this point I was thoroughly sleep deprived and just generally over the whole staying-in-a-hostel thing, so it was with a happy song that I stuffed my belongings back into my suitcase. It was an uneventful exit from Hatters apart from one heart- stopping moment when a bit of the shower fell off at exactly the same second that the bathroom light went out (…It was just the timed light clicking off and me turning the wobbly thermostat wheel too firmly. But, hey -  let me tell you: when you’re standing there in the pitch dark, naked and alarmed, “ARGH!” is the defining first thought rather than “I’d better wave my arms and get the light to switch back on.) I strode out into the Manchester streets and decided that as I’d had an improvised breakfast of snack bars I didn’t really need anything else apart from a cup of tea, which I could probably get at Chetham’s Library. Second library of the trip, here I came!

After a significant amount of lost trundling, sometimes round in circles, my suitcase and I finally arrived at Chetham’s, which is situated next to a very nice but sadly throughly fenced-off park and an absolutely enormous museum about football. I sat on a little stone pillar, tried to enjoy the park’s water feature despite the massive fence and munched on fruit I’d bought from the nearby M&S (it had occurred to me that I hadn’t really had much in the way of fruit or vegetables since arriving in Manchester, which is possibly a true representation of the Northern diet but it did seem a shame to get scurvy on my weekend off). 

The very picturesque park with a very large fence. 

It was all very nice but I needed the loo  - an ever present theme in my life - so I decided to get a move on and go see the Library. This is when my day went horribly wrong.

I had not, you see, realised that the Chetham’s Library  - unlike the Bodleian Library -  didn’t have anywhere for visitors to dump their suitcases. Worse, the grumpy security guard refused full-stop to let me take my suitcase anywhere near the building whatsoever. What was I meant to do, I asked him with quite poor grace. I had the suitcase. I wanted to go and see the library. Couldn’t he look after it in his little security hut? What if it had a bomb in it? I assured him there was no bomb. No. Absolutely not. I had a suspicious unidentified suitcase. Hadn’t I seen the news recently? Maybe I could see if the station across the road had lockers.

It was an unimpressed Essa that stomped into Manchester Victoria on the hunt for a locker. There were no lockers. The Information Centre might have been a useful place to ask for advice about what to do next, if it had been open. I went to the loo (always a good thing to do in a time of crisis, I find), stared suspiciously at a very creepy statue of a bee in a dress and decided that as I seemed to have found the busy hub of tram travel I might as well get on a tram.

TRAM!!! I thought the trams were very exciting. 

 After trying to buy a tram ticket at a ticket machine for actual trains for an embarrassingly long amount of time I realised that the tram ticket machines were on the tram platforms and navigated the alarming open-track walkway to get to the right bit of the station. (Manchester runs its public transport system from the viewpoint that if you’re stupid enough to cross a walkway without looking left and right first you deserve to get mangled by a massive tram. I only nearly died once, which frankly is quite good for me all things considering.)

I bought my astonishingly cheap £1.40 one-way ticket, tried to tap my paper ticket on the machine for tapping in plastic travel cards and was puzzled for really an unacceptably long amount of time for a 23 year old before I figured out what was going on, and got on my first TRAM!! It tooted to another tram and I felt like I was living my best life. It would have been even nicer if the tram hadn’t smelt of weed and wee, but as most of Manchester seems to smell of weed and wee I accepted my fate. I realised I had previously been unfair on the “park” as we rumbled through it  - there were considerably more trees than I had first thought and the grass looked less mushy. I admired the greenery, noted with resignation that the tram was making me travel sick and then realised it was time to get off! In a…deserted dark tunnel…? I really don’t know what I did, but I found out later there was actually a legit way to exit the tram station, with proper doors and a little escalator and everything, and I most definitely did not do that. I ended up wandering around a tunnel, nearly getting run over at one point when a tram unexpectedly came round a corner (told you I’d nearly got mashed) and finally finished my mini underground journey by being spat out next to the taxi rank. After some seriously bemused searching I found the train station, only to decide that it was actually just too draughty a place to wait out out a few hours and marched down the hill towards the Costa…that was about an 8 minute walk from the Hostel I’d left with so much optimism several hours previously. Ha. Ha. Ha. Isn’t life funny. As I was meeting a friend at Manchester Piccadilly I decided to just call it quits, buy several random Costa snacks to create lunch and have a quiet few hours in the warm before having to heave my suitcase back up the hill to the station for 3pm. Who says I don’t know how to live a wild life…? 

After a very enjoyable catch-up I was back on the train and headed, feeling slightly battered, back to to noise and grime of Euston station. It had been quite the weekend, and I left still unsure of what I thought about Manchester. At times it had seemed ruggedly attractive, the several red-brick old buildings nestled in amongst all the mid-20th century concrete particularly eye-catching, and at times it had just seemed…wet. And a bit grey. 

The whole “bee mascot” thing has, to an outsider, been taken to a slightly unbelievably wild extreme - there were bees everywhere. On walls. On doors. In restaurant and shop logos. On mugs. On bags. On posters. Even on street bins. As someone who doesn’t particularly like bees, this was a bit unnerving.

On the whole, I did like Manchester - and I would certainly visit again, which says something in itself. 

Next stop: My mum and I’s trip to Berlin in April! Where should we visit? 

What Essa saw:

Manchester LGBT Foundation 

https://lgbt.foundation/ 

HOME Manchester 

https://homemcr.org/ 

Teacup Kitchen

https://teacupandcakes.com/

Forbidden Planet Manchester

https://www.facebook.com/fpmanchester/

The John Rylands Library (free entry)

https://www.library.manchester.ac.uk/rylands/ 

The People’s History Museum (free entry)

https://phm.org.uk/

Manchester’s China Town

https://www.visitmanchester.com/things-to-see-and-do/chinatown-p275031

Where Essa stayed (but does not recommend):

https://hattershostels.com/manchester-hilton-chambers/ 

[artificialqueens]

Gold Dust Woman Ch. 2 (Shalaska) - Citrus

A/N: thank you so much to everyone who’s given me positive feedback on this fic! it makes me so happy, and definitely motivates me to write more. as always, you can find me at @pianowired, and enjoy chapter two!

When Sharon woke up the next morning, she felt good for all of two whole seconds before a mountain of guilt came crashing down on her. She’d left Alaska with nothing but a business card to her shop! A fucking business card! She’d probably never see the blonde again. Dragging a hand through her hair with a sigh, she got up to get dressed for work; she and Jinkx needed to unload their faire setup out of the van and replace their stock before they even opened the shop, so she needed to be there early. According to the clock on her dresser, however, she was about to be late.

Yanking on a pair of ripped jeans that had seen better days and a black poet shirt, she hurried to the bathroom to do her makeup, easily the longest part of her morning routine. When she had deemed her smoky eyes and dark lips acceptable, she rushed to put on heeled boots and get out the door to catch a bus. There was no time to drive, or even to grab coffee on the way, so she texted Jinkx from the bus in a desperate plea for caffeine.

Walking around the block to the back of their building, Sharon saw that Jinkx was already there, two plastic cups in hand. Sharon thanked the gods for her friend and accepted the iced coffee she was handed wordlessly.

“You’re usually the early one, Shaz, what happened?” Jinkx asked playfully. Sharon sighed.

“I have no idea. I guess yesterday got the best of me. Fuck this heat,” she proclaimed loudly, making her partner snicker.

“It’s not even that warm out yet,” she snorted, unlocking the van and throwing the doors open. Sharon groaned at the mess inside, knowing they had their work cut out for them.

“Thank Satan we don’t have to work today,” Sharon sighed, grateful for the extra time they had to unpack.

“Finish your damn coffee so we can get to work, Needles,” Jinkx chastised, tossing her already-empty cup in a nearby trashcan before stepping into the truck and hauling out a box. Sharon stuck her tongue out at the redhead, holding the back door open for her.

“There aren’t that many boxes,” she called after her, rolling her eyes but putting her coffee cup down anyway and taking a box from the truck and into the store anyway. She was right; most of the work had already been done when they packed up at the fairgrounds, and it didn’t take long to get the boxes into the store. The real challenge was going to be taking all of their stock back out of the boxes and replacing them to where they belonged.

Cursing under her breath, Sharon realized that she hadn’t brought a pack with her. After telling Jinkx she was going out to grab one, she made her way to the nearby 7-Eleven and hurriedly bought a pack of cheap cigarettes, knowing Jinkx would want to share and not wanting to spend more money than she had to. On the way back to the shop, she looked through her phone, paying more attention to the Etsy listings on her screen than to where she was going. This led her to quite literally bump into someone, hitting them straight-on. Both she and the stranger stumbled, but Sharon was the only one who fell, silently damning her own decision to wear heels.

“Hey, are you- oh my God. Sharon?” Sharon looked up into familiar brown eyes, taking the hand offered to her and letting Alaska help her up.

“You have a knack for catching me at the wrong moment, apparently,” the witch joked, dusting herself off. Alaska looked mortified.

“I’m so sorry! I wasn’t looking where I was going.”

“Neither was I,” Sharon shrugged. “Don’t worry about it, hon. Where are you headed in such a hurry?”

“I was trying to find Dead Dandelion, actually,” Alaska mumbled, embarrassed. “I was looking at Google Maps on my phone.”

“Oh! Oh. You were gonna-”

“-see you, yeah,” the blonde blushed. “I know it’s probably way too soon, sorry.”

Sharon shrugged. “Hey, everything happens for a reason, right?”

Alaska gave her a funny look, but nodded. “Sure, I guess so.”

Sharon gestured down the road. “C’mon, I’ll walk you there. We’re not open yet, but Jinkx shouldn’t mind.”

“Um, okay,” Alaska agreed, letting the witch take the lead.

“Can I ask you for a weird favor?” Sharon asked as they walked. Alaska looked over to see her opening a pack of cigarettes, carefully pulling one out. “Can you kiss this for me?”

“What?”

“It’s for luck,” she explained. “You don’t have to, but it’s good fortune.” Alaska nodded, taking the cigarette from her and quickly pressing her lips to the side of it, blushing when her lipstick left a print on it. Sharon chuckled and flipped it upside down, sliding it back into the pack. “Sorry, smoker superstition. The flipped one is the one you’re supposed to smoke last, and if you live long enough to smoke it, you’re lucky.”

“That’s kinda morbid, isn’t it?”

Sharon shrugged. “If booze doesn’t kill me first, it’ll be the lung cancer,” she joked. Alaska bit her lip, reminded very much of a girl she dated in college, but Sharon seemed like she was truly joking. They stopped in a back lot, where the redheaded woman from the day before was leaning against a wall, smoking as well. As Alaska got closer, she recognized the familiar smell of weed, and Jinkx nodded at them in acknowledgement.

“Hey, Shaz. This the girl from yesterday?” she asked.

“Yep,” Sharon answered, popping the ‘p’ and leaning against the wall next to Jinkx “I left my lighter at home, help a sister out?”

“Mine died right after I lit up,” Jinkx apologized. “Just light from the joint.” Sharon rolled her eyes, but took out a cigarette and pressed the tip against the tip of Jinkx’s joint, inhaling a few times until it lit. Pulling away, she grinned at her friend.

“Is that the stuff you got from Gia?” she asked. Jinkx nodded, offering the joint to Alaska. The blonde took it carefully, taking a small hit from it before passing it back. “Oh, she smokes,” Sharon jibed, taking a drag from her cigarette.

“Not really,” Alaska mumbled. “I haven’t smoked since college, I had an ex who…” she trailed off at the look on the witches’ faces. “Nevermind. I need it now, so whatever.”

“Nerves?” Sharon teased, blowing out a cloud of smoke before ashing her cigarette against the wall. “What’re you nervous about, dollface?” Alaska wasn’t sure how to answer until Jinkx snickered.

“Don’t be mean to her, Needles.” Sharon cackled, high and raspy, and something about the laugh was endearing to Alaska.

“Sorry, Alaska,” she grinned, dropping her cigarette butt and grinding it under her heel. “Wanna come in? It’s only gonna get hotter out here.”

“As long as you don’t mind…”

“Of course not,” Sharon answered immediately, ignoring the annoyed look Jinkx gave her and ushering Alaska inside and into the back room. “We’re closed today, but you can hang out here while stuff gets unpacked. I’ll probably do a reading or two.”

“Right, the tarot thing. How much do you charge for that, by the way?”

Sharon sat down at a table in the center of the room, taking a box from under it and opening it to withdraw a pack of cards. “For you, sweetheart? Free of charge.” She shuffled the deck absentmindedly, tilting her head to indicate that Alaska should take the seat opposite her.

“I can’t accept that,” Alaska protested, sitting down anyway. “Not again.”

Sharon laughed. “Sure you can. I like to do a reading in the morning to make sure that I’m in-tune with my deck. We have a symbiotic relationship,” she joked. Before Alaska could protest, she laid down a single card and flipped it over. “The Three of Wands,” she read dramatically. “Looks like opportunity is in your future, and you’re getting closer to a goal you’ve set. Something you’ve dreamed of is becoming reality now that you’ve made plans to create it.”

Alaska shifted in her seat uncomfortably. She didn’t like how vulnerable she felt whenever Sharon read her cards, because everything that came out of the witch’s mouth was spine-chillingly accurate. Sure, Sharon didn’t know that, but it affected Alaska all the same. Putting the card back in the deck, Sharon began to reshuffle.

“Um, I don’t really want another reading,” Alaska piped up nervously. Sharon chuckled.

“This one’s for me. Y’know, not everything is about you, pumpkin,” she teased. Alaska looked down at the table, watching Sharon place a card and flip it. “Hm. Okay.”

“Care to enlighten me?” Alaska asked, looking at the card blankly. The witch nodded.

“Sorry, yeah. I forget you’re not Jinkx, and you don’t know all this already. The Chariot. Achieving desires can only be attained through self-control and the ability to harness the forces of chaos. Willpower leads to success and victory.”

“And is that accurate?”

Sharon shrugged. “This particular deck and I have a… special relationship. It’s always told me the truth, no matter how blunt or painful. So I guess, yeah, it’s accurate. Always is. The cards usually know more about us than we do.”

“So I’ll accomplish whatever it is that I’m trying to make real, and you’re gonna do the same thing as long as you maintain control?”

“It looks that way, doesn’t it?” Sharon tilted her head to one side, looking Alaska up and down. “So, you obviously know what I do for a living, but what about you?”

Alaska pushed her hair behind her ear, staring down at the table. “I’m a musician,” she mumbled.

“Really? That’s awesome.” At Sharon’s voice, Alaska lifted her head. The witch sounded genuinely impressed, and her smile proved that she was being sincere. Alaska flushed.

“I guess. It’s not great money, but it’s enough to live on, usually. And it’s not like I’m Beyonce or anything.”

Sharon laughed at that. “No, I don’t take you for the type. So you sing?”

“Yeah. I write a lot of my own stuff, but usually when I busk I do covers.” Sharon nodded in understanding as she put her deck away.

“What do you write about?”

Alaska shrugged. “Queer identity, mostly. My own experiences with identity and love and stuff.”

“And people are into that? Gods, I was kicked around in high school for just looking like a dyke, let alone being out.”

The blonde flushed again. “It’s really heavily veiled,” she admitted. “I don’t wanna make it too personal, y’know?”

“Mhmm. Tarot’s a lot like that,” Sharon admitted. Alaska looked at her inquisitively.

“Really? How?”

The witch shrugged. “I know a lot more than I let on, but I don’t like being too specific when I’m giving someone a reading. It usually freaks them out, and I don’t like making people feel weird or vulnerable.”

“That's… surprisingly sweet,” Alaska said. Sharon snorted, but the blonde continued. “No, really. It’s nice.”

“That’s not really a word people associate with Sharon,” Jinkx snickered as she came into the back room to haul out another box. Sharon flipped her off.

“I can be nice,” she argued. Jinkx raised an eyebrow, and Sharon stood up, gesturing to Alaska. “If I was a total bitch, Alaska wouldn’t have come back.”

“I might have,” she said, and Jinkx let out a triumphant cackle, “But only because you’re hot,” she finished in a mumble. Sharon shoved a laughing Jinkx out of the room, flushing slightly.

“You think I’m hot,” she deadpanned. It was more of a statement than a question, but Alaska still nodded.

“Obviously,” she answered with a tiny smile. Sharon’s expression never wavered as she crossed the small room and swung a leg over Alaska’s lap, straddling her before connecting their lips.

Alaska shuddered, caught off-guard for just a moment before adjusting and letting her hands rest on Sharon’s hips. The witch cupped her jaw, slipping her tongue between Alaska’s parted lips and intensifying their kiss, grinding gently against her. The blonde let out a soft noise of contentment as her hands slid down to cup Sharon’s ass and stroke her thighs. The holes in her ripped jeans allowed Alaska to splay her hands out on the tops of Sharon’s thighs and feel the softness of her skin in places where the fabric was torn, and the witch shuddered at her touch.

Sharon lifted the hem of Alaska’s t-shirt and slid her hands underneath, her palms cool against the blonde’s heated skin. Alaska made another little noise and Sharon broke the kiss to laugh and press a gentle peck to her cheek.

“You are adorable,” she murmured, cupping Alaska’s breasts and squeezing gently. Alaska let out a squeal at the unexpected move, but Sharon was too busy kissing her jaw to see the way she was blushing. Her lips were soft and plush against Alaska’s neck, and she tipped her head back to give Sharon better access, gasping as the witch sucked a hickey into her delicate skin.

“Mother Goddess, are you two fucking kidding me?”

Sharon twisted to face Jinkx, who stood in the doorway with a frown. “Sorry, Jinkxy,” she said, not sounding sorry at all. Alaska sort of wished she was invisible, but Jinkx only rolled her eyes as she discarded an empty box on the floor.

“Thank you so much for helping me unload, Sharon.”

“Hey! Which one of us set up the entire fucking booth yesterday while you napped in the passenger seat?”

Jinkx stuck out her tongue at Sharon. “Just come help me, Needles.”

“What are you, my boss? Fuck right off,” she proclaimed succinctly, giving Alaska a peck on the lips to punctuate her sentence. Alaska was still silent and flushing, unsure of just what she was supposed to do in a situation like this.

“God, I wish you weren’t a founder, otherwise I’d fucking kick you out,” Jinkx complained. “I’m gonna leave to set up for the Esbat, which means you need to lock up the last door. And don’t be late.”

Sharon nodded. “I’ll be there.” When Jinkx left them alone again, Sharon brushed a lock of blonde hair out of Alaska’s face and kissed her cheek. “Sorry she interrupted us,” she smirked. Alaska cocked her head to one side.

“What did she mean about the founder thing? And what’s an Esbat?”

“I’m one of the founders of our coven. It’s a group of witches, we all practice magick both individually and as a group. I usually lead the rituals, since I’ve been a witch for the longest and I’m the most experienced. And an Esbat is a sacred day honoring the full moon. There’s one tonight, so we’re doing a ritual.”

“That’s… cool. How many of there are you?”

Sharon paused to give it some thought. “Six. Jinkx, Max, Raja, Pearl, Katya, and me. We used to have five, before Pearl joined.” Sharon stood up to lock the door connecting the front room and the back, and Alaska immediately missed her touch.

“So what are rituals like? Sorry for asking so many questions,” she added quickly. Sharon laughed, tossing her hair over her shoulders as she leaned against the wall.

“Well, it depends on what they’re for. Since Esbats are so common, they’re a lot more low-key than Sabbat rituals, which only happen eight times a year. A lot of the time, we don’t even do a group ritual because of scheduling, but we planned for this one. It’s a Thunder Moon, which happens every summer, and it’s really good for spellwork.”

“Wow,” Alaska said softly. “I guess I know a lot less than I thought. My mom went through a crystal healing phase, but that’s about it. All I know is that they do different stuff.”

“You’d love Raja,” Sharon answered, resting her leg against the wall. “She’s mostly a crystal witch, and she does Reiki. She’s also a medium and a healer, she’s pretty fuckin’ badass.”

“Sounds like it,” Alaska agreed, playing with the hem of her shirt absentmindedly.

“I think you’d get along with most of ‘em,” Sharon continued. “Max is kinda reserved, not a big talker, but she’s nice. Pearl has this super laid-back energy that makes her really easy to be around, she’s really likeable. Katya’s a crazy motherfucker, but we love her anyway. And you’ve already met Jinkx.”

“Yeah,” Alaska nodded, blushing a little as she remembered Jinkx walking in on them. Sharon grinned and pulled Alaska to her feet, wrapping an arm around her waist and kissing her gently.

“Jinkx’s bark is worse than her bite, I promise,” she assured the blonde. “Hey, if you wanna come observe tonight, we can make that work. If you want.”

“Sure,” Alaska smiled, pressing closer and kissing Sharon’s cheek. “It sounds really cool.”

“Mhm,” Sharon agreed, not entirely paying attention, as she was fixating on the warmth of Alaska’s body against hers. She traced a careful hand up Alaska’s back, tangling her fingers in soft blonde hair and pulling her in for a kiss. Alaska’s lips were so, so soft against hers, and her body was pliant in Sharon’s arms, pressed up against her so tightly that the witch swore Alaska could feel her heartbeat if she paid attention.

Though she was still a little anxious, Alaska found herself able to relax in Sharon’s embrace, feeling more at ease with her than she had in a while. Something about the witch’s energy was inherently soothing, and even the way she kissed was calming, as if she sensed that Alaska wasn’t completely relaxed and was doing her best to make her feel more comfortable.

“Do you wanna get out of here?” Sharon murmured, playing with Alaska’s hair. She nodded, unable to do anything but bask in the attention and think about how quickly her heart was pounding. The witch smiled, pulling away to lock up and lead Alaska outside. “Shit, it’s hotter than I thought,” she cursed, tugging at the sleeve of her blouse. Maybe black hadn’t been the best decision, but she was committed to her aesthetic and the sun would have to deal with it.

Alaska giggled. “Maybe it’s because you’re wearing long sleeves and pants?”

Sharon rolled her eyes as they began to wander down the street. “Yeah, maybe I should’ve taken a note or two from you,” she admitted, gesturing to Alaska’s skater skirt and loose t-shirt. The blonde grinned, twirling mid-walk like she was some kind of model. Sharon mused to herself that she definitely could be; she was beyond pretty enough, and had a tiny waist and legs for miles. She was definitely model material.

They ended up catching a bus back to Sharon’s apartment, and the bus was unusually crowded for a Sunday, leaving Alaska with two choices: stand next to a guy who kept eyeing her, or sit in Sharon’s lap. After one too many looks from the creepy guy, she chose the latter, sitting sideways and letting Sharon keep a hand around her waist to steady her.

On the way to the Sharon’s, they talked about their families. Sharon divulged that her coven was her family at this point, since her father had been missing since birth, and her mother had died when she was twenty-one. She’d been a great witch, Sharon told Alaska, the most powerful witch she’d ever met and probably ever would.

In turn, Alaska talked about her brothers, and how they’d had a rocky relationship growing up, but how they were much closer now. She told a story about how her brother Cory had reacted to the news of their parents’ divorce, and Sharon was remarkably attentive, throwing her head back in laughter when Alaska explained how their parents had babied her and Cory had gotten angry about it.

Sharon’s laugh was something Alaska wanted to bottle and keep for herself, the people on the bus who glared at them every time Sharon let out a particularly loud cackle be damned.

[drtanstravels]

The annual Euretina Congress was upon us again and this year it was to be held in Paris, France. Anna was speaking at the conference on the morning of September 3 and attending other events as well. We figured that while we were in France on this occasion we should venture out of Paris for the first time once the conference was over. Anna and I got married in Colmar Tropicale, a fake french village in Berjaya Hills, Malaysia so we decided we should take the opportunity to visit the real village of Colmar in northeastern France. However, there were a couple of other events that reared their collective heads during the planning of this trip; first of all, Anna’s cousin, Robin, was to be married in Vancouver, Canada on September 7 and nobody from Anna’s immediate family were able to attend. Secondly, Anna had been invited to speak at another conference in Paris on September 15 so our adventure would be as follows:

We would fly out from Singapore on the evening of Tuesday, September 3, arriving in Paris early the following morning.

We would stay three nights in Paris before flying out for Vancouver on the morning of Saturday, September 7 and, due to timezones, landing the very same morning of the wedding.

After four nights in Vancouver we would return to Paris on Wednesday, September 11 and immediately make a two-and-a-half-hour train ride to Colmar after we landed on Thursday, September 12, changing trains in Strasbourg along the way.

We had two nights in Colmar to see the legit town before making the same train journey back to Paris on Saturday, September 14.

After two more nights in Paris we would make the 13-hour flight back to Singapore on Monday, September 16.

We had a hectic and exhausting itinerary planned and this post is about the initial Paris leg of the trip, but the story begins a little before that — My 40th birthday fell five days before we were to depart, on Friday, August 30. Anna had planned several surprises for me, but they didn’t quite go as secretly as she wanted, nonetheless it was a fantastic night all the same. She had initially organised a surprise party at my local pub, Coq & Balls, complete with karaoke and a bar tab for my friends, however, the surprise was kind of ruined when one of the staff asked me if there was anything else I’d like planned for my birthday after Anna had just finished organising everything while I was in the bar’s toilet. A few days later a package arrived in the mail for Anna, but the contents were written on the outside; my favourite films are the original Planet of the Apes series and Anna had found a copy of the Mad magazine from 1973. She also caught on that I knew what was in the package because I left it discreetly on the bench, as opposed to telling her like I usually do when something comes in the mail for her. None of that mattered, though. When the night came it was so much fun, just hanging out with mates, drinking, singing, and eating an incredible sushi cake that Anna’s friends, Pat and Roshini, made for me, as well as a crêpe cake from Anna’s favourite store, Lady M. Pat and Rosh didn’t want to try their own cake though, because they did a trial run the previous weekend and had been eating sushi all week as a result. A great night was had by all, take a look at some scenes:

I’m pretty pleased with this!

Belting out a tune with Mike in the Trump-ish tie that Anna’s auntie bought me without a hint of irony

Cheers Rosh and Pat for the sushi cake, I can just never get a photo where they all have their eyes open

With Pat and Rosh’s cake

But enough about me, let’s get down to brass tacks here — Our epic journey.

Tuesday, September 3, 2019 There wasn’t much that is particularly relevant to this post that happened on the Tuesday, however, before we left to the airport that evening, Anna had been notified of a promotion she had received. Her official title will soon be Adjunct Associate Professor so that made me feel more than just a little bit proud. Anyway, we had no problems boarding our flight, popped a sleeping pill each, and when we woke up it was time to prepare for our landing in Paris.

Wednesday, September 4, 2019 It took us forever to get out of the airport as there was only one booth open at immigration, but after about an hour we were through and in a taxi en route to our hotel. I remembered from the last time we visited Paris that it was a very dirty city with dog shit everywhere and countless tramps wandering around, the level of both depending on the area in which you were staying, but I had completely forgotten about the large villages of small tents, some legit one-man camping tents and swags, others a folded piece of cardboard propped up with a stick, in which the more privileged homeless dwell, occupying large parks and grass areas, particularly along the freeway in the spaces between entrances and exits as you get closer to the city from Charles de Gaulle Airport. We eventually made it through the insane traffic and checked into our home for the next few nights, the Hotel-Residence Foch, a name that had required us to ask our taxi driver for the correct pronunciation so as not to offend the staff or other potential drivers. Apparently it’s pronounced “fosch.” Once we had checked in we took the tiny elevator that barely had space for the two of us and our suitcases up to our room, one where there was only space for one suitcase on the counter and one on the floor. The only problem was that my suitcase was the one on the floor and when it was open the door could only open wide enough for someone to slide through sideways, but in a strange twist the bathroom was really large.

Once Anna was ready we left the Foch, her for the conference and me to just have a bit of a wander around. Just like our last visit we were staying near the Arc de Triomphe so I just Googled some flea markets and stores that I thought I might like, inadvertently ending up walking quite a distance to where we had spent an entire day on that previous trip. The ever-unreliable Google Maps led me past the Eiffel Tower, where there were endless stalls selling unofficial merchandise, as well as counterfeit and stolen goods, and then I made my way across the Seine to a dodgy-looking market under the train lines that was beginning to shut down by the time I had arrived. I put my wallet in my front pocket and had a look through the stalls that were still open and the rest of the afternoon was spent browsing through stores and looking at statues in the 15th arrondissement until Anna messaged me to let me know that she was done with the conference and to meet her back at the hotel. A bit of what I saw on my walk:

Even Napoleon himself would say that our room was definitely on the small side

Looking at the bathroom from the bed

The view down our street

A statue on a roundabout taken during a split second when there wasn’t traffic chaos

Not sure what’s going on here

The fake goods start well before the Eiffel Tower…

…but this is just a fraction of the knock-offs sold once you are nearby

It doesn’t look all that dissimilar to one of the numerous cranes on the surrounding construction sites to be honest

A chair baked out of bread in a bakery

A bridge over the Seine

A closeup of the figures on the bridge

A statue near the bridge

Carvings on the way back to the hotel

Another carving

“To the glory of the French army 1914-1918”

Once I was back at the hotel Anna told me about an area where there were a bunch of shops she wanted to look at, as well as some decent restaurants, it all just happened to be in the general direction from where I had just come. We wandered to where I had been, albeit taking a few different streets, looking at some cool shops, as well as a really bizarre furniture store. Anna loves French bakeries, especially all of the cakes and macaroons, so we also visited some bakeries along the way, despite the fact we would be having dinner soon, and it became clear it wasn’t just the case with the one I bought a coffee at that morning — The cabinets in the bakeries in Paris that contain all of the sweet pastries, tarts, and cakes also have bees flying around inside and absolutely nobody seems to care at all! The cabinets with quiches and cheesy items are fine, but if I were working there I’d be extremely hesitant to put my hand in one to grab a sugary dessert item. Seriously, some of the bakeries we saw over the course of our time in Paris had swarms of bees inside the cabinets! I guess the flies pay more attention to all of the dog shit on the ground instead.

Maybe it was just the bee-ridden cakes, but Anna was starting to get peckish, it was around time for dinner and she had her heart set on soufflé so she managed to find what was rated as one of the better soufflé restaurants in town, however, they were completely booked out that night. We walked around for a bit, but there wasn’t anything else on the block except for a small restaurant that looked a little suspicious with menus in multiple languages and the word ‘pasta’ stencilled largely on the wall among the names of some French dishes. Still, we were hungry and it had a lot of people inside so we took a seat at the only spare table, one which had to be pulled out so Anna could sit. In fact, if she needed to go to the bathroom while eating, at least three other people would need to slide across the bench seat to let her out. It took forever for menus to come and while we were waiting it soon became abundantly clear that everyone in the restaurant was a middle-aged person from the USA. “This is the best foie gras I’ve ever had, it’s even better than that one in San Francisco!” was one pearl of wisdom we heard while sitting there. We were a tad disappointed at the prospect of what was potentially going to be our first dinner on this trip to Paris, one of the food capitals of the world. Generally it isn’t a good sign when a place has the menus out the front written in several different languages with no mistranslations and there isn’t a single local person eating there, plus the service was so slow so I gave Anna a nod and we both stood up to leave. This got the waitress rushing over with the menus, but I had already prepared for this by looking at my phone with a shocked look on my face as we stood so we could simply tell her we had to go, as if it were an emergency.

Once out, Anna took to Google again and found what looked like was going to be a decent restaurant in the 6th arrondissement. When we arrived it turned out to be unbelievably good and as an added bonus it had a whole bunch of different soufflés so we ordered beef tartare, foie gras, a phenomenal local pasta dish with mushrooms and truffles, and an escargot soufflé to top it off. By the time we had finished all of that food, all of the other patrons had left and it looked like the staff wanted to close up so we went to a nearby bar for a drink or two, but we were tired from the flight and Anna had the conference the next day, plus we were super-full, so we didn’t have a late night. Here’s some shots from that strange furniture store, plus some from dinner:

Just a bed frame covered in pictures of people doing it

This would probably clash with most of our other furniture

Even though it has a tail, this still wasn’t the weirdest bike we would encounter in France, but you’ll have to wait for the other one

I guess it’s kind of cool if you like polar bears or fluffy white dogs or whatever the hell they’re supposed to be

That’s one bad-ass bike

There was some strange stuff in this shop

Notre Dame de l’Assomption

Snail souffle

Beef tartare

Anna with some foie gras

Place Vendôme

The interior of the restaurant as we were leaving

Thursday, September 5, 2019 Anna was at the conference again in the morning so I waited until she was done and then we checked out another part of town, this time in the 3rd and 10th arrondissements with a lot of vintage and retro stores. Much like the previous day, we spent a fair bit of time looking at shops and avoiding bee attacks in bakeries when Anna got it in her mind to check out Canal Saint-Martin, which is described on Wikipedia as follows:

Today, the canal is a popular destination for Parisians and tourists. Some take cruises on the canal in passenger boats. Others watch the barges and other boats navigate the series of locks and pass under the attractive cast-iron footbridges. There are many popular restaurants and bars along the open part of the canal, which is also popular with students.

That seems cool so we walked down through the Place de la République to the canal, but we definitely didn’t end up at the section Wikipedia was referring to. To be honest, I’ve been considering updating that portion of the page to something along the lines of this:

Today, the canal is a popular destination for the homeless and beginner graffiti artists. Some take the wallets, phones, and other personal items of unwitting visitors. Others watch the drunks and strung out junkies while navigating a winding path through garbage and, of course, canine faeces. There aren’t many shops or restaurants along this particular open part of the canal due to a fear of everything in the building, right down to the final length of copper piping, being stolen in order to fund the perpetrators’ various addictions.

Yeah, that sounds like a more accurate depiction of what we saw along the particular length of the canal that we walked. After the canal we looked around a few more stores in a different area, grabbed a coffee each, and then went home to clean the grime off ourselves before we had dinner at the house of Anna’s former colleague from New York, Polina Astroz, and her husband. We took an Uber to meet up with her and instantly remembered exactly how bad Parisian traffic is, especially at peak times. The main roads have many roundabouts with at least six other roads consisting of about the same amount of lanes leading into each roundabout and thousands of drivers throwing caution to the wind, and when it comes to traffic lights, nobody tends to care either, both situations resulting in a massive gridlock. Our driver told us about how the key to driving in Paris is stubbornness, as it is the only way you will get anywhere, you’ll just get stuck or cut off if you obey the rules or give way to other drivers, and when two truly stubborn drivers won’t budge, it usually results in a fight on the side of the road. Just as he finished talking we passed a fistfight between two drivers who both refused to budge. It took us almost an hour to get to where we needed to be, making us extremely late, and it would’ve been almost twice as fast if we had’ve walked, but we finally made it. Prior to dinner we had drinks with Polina and one of her friends at an awesome rooftop bar near her place until Polina assumed her husband had almost finished preparing dinner. When we arrived at their beautiful apartment we spent a few hours that night chatting, mainly reminiscing about old times in New York over home-cooked duck confit with apricots, a traditional dish from Toulouse, the area of France they are both originally from, and a few more drinks. It was quite late when we left and some of Anna’s Singaporean colleagues were meeting up in a bar that night, but that was all over by the time we were done. I didn’t take any photos around the canal for fear of my phone being stolen, but here are some others that I got that day:

The Museum of Modern Art

Me with some of our lunch

Although she had been there before, Anna still wanted the token shot

Place de la République

Walking around

The view from the rooftop bar

A closeup of the church

Now at dusk

Looking out Polina’s apartment window

Friday, September 6, 2019 We did most of the tourist attractions on our first trip to Paris; we walked down Avenue des Champs-Élysées, saw the Arc de Triomphe and the Eiffel Tower, visited Notre Dame, and saw the Mona Lisa in the Louvre. However, there was one attraction I had always been fascinated with and wanted desperately to see — The Catacombs:

The Catacombs of Paris are underground ossuaries in Paris, France, which hold the remains of more than six million people in a small part of a tunnel network built to consolidate Paris’ ancient stone quarries. Extending south from the Barrière d’Enfer (“Gate of Hell”) former city gate, this ossuary was created as part of the effort to eliminate the city’s overflowing cemeteries. Preparation work began not long after a 1774 series of gruesome Saint Innocents-cemetery-quarter basement wall collapses added a sense of urgency to the cemetery-eliminating measure, and from 1786, nightly processions of covered wagons transferred remains from most of Paris’ cemeteries to a mine shaft opened near the Rue de la Tombe-Issoire.

The ossuary remained largely forgotten until it became a novelty-place for concerts and other private events in the early 19th century; after further renovations and the construction of accesses around Place Denfert-Rochereau, it was open to public visitation from 1874.

The catacombs in their first years were a disorganized bone repository, but Louis-Étienne Héricart de Thury, director of the Paris Mine Inspection Service from 1810, had renovations done that would transform the underground caverns into a visitable mausoleum. In addition to directing the stacking of skulls and femurs into the patterns seen in the catacombs today, he used the cemetery decorations he could find (formerly stored on the Tombe-Issoire property, many had disappeared after the 1789 Revolution) to complement the walls of bones. Also created was a room dedicated to the display of the various minerals found under Paris, and another showing various skeletal deformities found during the catacombs’ creation and renovation. He also added monumental tablets and archways bearing ominous warning inscriptions, and also added stone tablets bearing descriptions or other comments about the nature of the ossuary, and to ensure the safety of eventual visitors, it was walled from the rest of the Paris’s Left Bank already-extensive underground tunnel network.

Although the catacombs offered space to bury the dead, they presented disadvantages to building structures; because the catacombs are directly under the Paris streets, large foundations cannot be built and cave-ins have destroyed buildings. For this reason, there are few tall buildings in this area.

Anna booked an audio tour of the catacombs for us and after we caught the train to that area and walked to the entrance, we were glad that we already had tickets. The line for tickets was around the block, and we even had to wait for about 15 minutes to enter, because according to the official catacombs visitor’s website, despite being 1.5km (1 mile) long, the number of simultaneous visitors is limited to 200 so those people in line for tickets could be there for hours! Once inside we walked down the 131-step spiral staircase to the tunnel network and soon we were in the winding corridor of human bones. One thing that became abundantly clear is that some people can be complete dicks when visiting historic sites. An extreme case you may remember was when a fifteen-year-old Chinese school student was identified back in 2013 as he who had scratched his name into a 3,500-year-old Egyptian artwork in the Temple of Luxor. Although the defacing of the catacombs may not be quite as severe as that, it is extremely frustrating to enter and see that tags have been sprayed and stickers stuck allover the place, some even on actual skulls! However, this soon ceases and we spent over an hour walking through a mile of winding passages consisting of exquisitely arranged human remains, all the while learning how it came to be that way. Take a quick tour of this macabre, yet beautiful construction for yourself via just a handful of the pictures we took during our adventure underground (all translations via Google Translate):

It’s a long way down

There are some areas I struggle to fit

A tunnel leading to the catacombs

I’m not sure why this guy has a bone in his eye

Upon entrance not all of the remains are organised

Arranged into a heart

I guess I shouldn’t try to smile for ALL photographs

“Bones of the old cemetery St. Laurent deposited in 1848 in the western ossuary and transferred in September 1859”

A collapsed cross

“They were what we are, dust, toys of the wind; Fragile as men. Weak as the nether!”

Winding our way around

Don’t let the expression fool you, Anna thoroughly enjoyed it, but just thought this look was a little more appropriate

Continuing either side of a supporting pillar

Random arrangement

A skull bearing torture scars

The amount of effort that went into arranging the remains of six million bodies is staggering

Dick move example #1

A pile of bones beneath an inscription too small to translate

“M.D. bones of St. Laurent Church filed on April 17, 1873”

Still making our way through

“Bones of the Old Cemetery of the Magdalen (street of the city Leveque No. 1 and 2) deposited in 1844 in the ossuary of the west and transferred in the catacombs in September 1850”

Approaching the end

Dick move example #2

The piece de resistance

A little bit of trivia: Scenes from Will Smith’s upcoming film, Gemini Man, appear to have been filmed in the catacombs, although it was more than likely just a set.

Anyway, after the catacombs we had dinner with some of Anna’s colleagues and then went out until the wee hours of the morning to avoid sleeping too much; we had to catch an early flight in a few hours that, due to timezones, would arrive at almost the exact same time in Vancouver, and then we would need to rush to a wedding so we wanted to sleep as much as we could on the plane. But that story is the basis of my next post so stay tuned for Part 2!

Oh, and I just wanted to say that while we were touring the catacombs, I could help but smile as I thought of this classic Michiel Sweerts piece, Self-Portrait with Skull, circa 1660:

It was tempting… (Image source)

The first leg of a trip that would have us covering a lot of distance over a relatively short time The annual Euretina Congress was upon us again and this year it was to be held in Paris, France.

[kchatjjigae]

Korea trip, day five! At this point, I can’t believe these travelers have already been in South Korea for almost a week, and I can’t believe we’re also at week five of this series! In this episode, the lingering effects of Steve still direct our day and we hike up, up, up, towards a “cool temple”, catch the others members up on Gamcheon, find the truth of Biff vs. Beef, get the first glimpses of a bad moon on the rise, meet some meerkats, and then check off a significant Kdrama moment. Oh, and have our first run-in with the Korean police. Yep, it’s another jam-packed day!

Travelers on the go, go, go! When we came to Korea, we had some ideas of what we wanted to do but chose primarily to keep things loose enough so we’d be comfortable to do things on the fly. This day, (day five for those of you who weren’t paying attention) we did a little of both. A breakfast of triangle kimbap and coffee/banana milk/ and tea kicked off the day and our strategy session. As on the previous day, we’d shown such delight in the lanterns hanging in the temples, Steve suggested that we may want to check out a big temple right in central Busan which uses thousands of lanterns and he figured should be mostly decorated by then. This time we all took a look at my wildly inaccurate tourist maps and determined where we thought it would be. (I’m not incredibly clear on this point, I may have just been the only one looking while they used such things as Naver Maps and Google to figure out what he’d been talking about. From there we debated on whether it was smart to go to Gamcheon Cultural Village (though I’d already been, I didn’t mind going again and figured, after what had happened the other day splitting up probably wasn’t the best choice if we wanted to do any touring together), stopping at the shopping area I told them about by the university first and then come back and do Biff Square? Or to do the opposite?

We decided to wing it and go forth. 

The storm has moved off, the sun was out, and I was no longer bone cold. Bring on the tourism! But not before a quick stop to get SaraG cash (unsuccessful as, unfortunately, note to you future travelers, only ATMs specified for foreigners will work for…foreigners.)

We also needed to get the other girls hooked up with travel cards, so off to the convenience store where, the same manager was there, hovering happily as SaraG, Alix and Leila sorted through all the handsome young men options. Guys. Remember when I couldn’t buy one and ended up with a plain black card? Totally worked for each and every one of them. BOOOOO! I mean… I’m very happy for them and their choices.

I felt like an old pro as I led my friends to the bus stop where we caught the same bus I’d used before, but this time we sat in the back like a bunch of Kdrama badasses.

Alix was firmly in control of our direction, and it wasn’t too long that she directed her ducklings to hop off the bus. We were in downtown Busan, her with her Naver app, Leila and I attempting Google Maps again, and SaraG wandering around with us with a willing “let’s get this going” attitude. (Future note, SaraG has absolutely no sense of direction, it’s adorable. She makes up with a magical ability to know almost to the minute what time it is at all times without the use of a watch.) 

Where we were in use of differing directional maps, there were some conflicting ideas of how to get to the temple, and as we climbed up and up and up stairs (so many stairs), some of us despaired we were headed in the wrong direction where some of us were “You’re going to question my directional abilities? I’m mother flipping Alix and let us not forget you’d be wandering around the Busan subway hub still if it weren’t for me.” 

Good point. Continue to tell us which stairs to climb, leader.

We seemed to be marching further and further into a residential territory, with no real directions on the street to what was supposed to be some sort of large scale temple. Suddenly? A lady with a full-on ahjumma visor came around the corner, saw us, smiled, asked if we were looking for the temple, and gave us directions. 

For anyone keeping score as to what was right, Naver or Google, I’d have to say both were in this case. Naver/Alix took us more on a trail that deposited us along the side of it, where Google/Leila and I had directions to the bottom of it. We were all right! Let’s rejoice and be friends. 

As we got closer and closer to the building or series of buildings, I was amazed. This thing was HUGE. Steve was right, it was almost completely ready for the lantern festival and was covered entirely in lanterns of various colors and styles. As we arrived, several of us instantly pealed off to the bathroom while I listened to the drum practices that were going on while we were there. The atmosphere was set. 

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Its Sunday, which means I'm catching up on posting Korea videos needed for the weekly post. We are gonna have a couple. Brace yourself. This is #samgwangsatemple #samgwangsa #lanternfestival

A post shared by Stephanie (@kchatjjigae) on Jul 14, 2019 at 8:15pm PDT

From these buildings, we followed up the road (and more stairs) and found the central portion of the temples. From there, we scattered and investigated the nooks and crannies of the property, which just seemed to keep going further and further, higher and higher.

Past the buildings, there was a trail with wooden bridges, Buddhist music playing softly on loudspeakers and, you guessed it, more lanterns! The views from this height were pretty amazing, looking out over Busan, with the backdrop of these classic buildings.

What we didn’t expect to find was a set of outside exercise equipment which, as good kdrama fans, we were honor bound to try out. At the top of the hill, we reconvened and sat there taking it all in a while eating some of the trail mix Alix was smart enough to carry and kind enough to share.

It was decision time though. Where would we go? Gamcheon or Biff? Would we be able to find Steve’s restaurant? If we did would that be creepy? “We promise you, Steve, we’re not stalking you, we just find you adorable and want to know if you’d like to come home with us.” 

Why were we so concerned about what and when? It was all part of the bigger plan. In Haeundae, there is the Rainbow Bridge, which is supposed to do a light show and we were determined to see it in all its glory, full night time with fried chicken and beer. Everything other schedule was built keeping the end goal in mind. Booze, a beach, and a colored bridge?

So we decided on Gamcheon, thinking to go the furthest out and work our way backward towards Haeundae. So me, again heady with the knowledge that I’d been there before and could totally get us all back there, wowing everyone with my Korean directional prowess, insisted on being lead. 

Not a great plan. Sorry, ladies.

Turns out there was a bus stop right at the temple, so we hopped on and headed back to the city center. Which is where it got a little wonky. Turns out I got us off on the wrong stop (ugh, thanks, Google) and said, that’s cool, we’ll just hoof it from here, it’s not far. Turns out, that was a little wrong, or, not so much wrong as Google couldn’t quite figure out where I was, and I couldn’t figure out if I were heading us in the wrong direction or not. Frankly, I was super stressed about it. Sometimes it’s not easy being the leader, knowing everyone is waiting on you, knowing you’re just burning time. 

Anyway, I did Google Maps again, worked with Alix and found out we were actually right by a subway station which would take us most of the way there, then we could pick up that little bus I had previously ridden. All good except we couldn’t find the correct subway entrance number. 

Actually. Side note. The Korean Subway system is pretty amazing. It gives each entrance a number so you can tell your friends exactly which door to meet you at, or GPS can tell you precisely what door to enter or exit to get to your destination. At each entry to the subway cars (as they have doors that open and close so 1) it can be temperature controlled and 2) you don’t have any people vs. train incidents.) the floor before each door is labeled with a number as well so when you finally break down and use Naver Maps, it will tell you which door will be the best for you to wait at in order to get off and be closest to your destination. There are, as seen in Kdramas, underground shopping areas (with the swankier stops getting swankier shops) bathrooms galore, and also as seen on Kdramas, ahjummas, and halmonies selling produce or kimbap rolls. 

In the more significant station hubs, you can find foreign ATMs, the place is loaded with adverts including those ones you see online put up by fan clubs wishing their favorite idols happy birthdays. During the longer connections, you know, where you mainly are just traveling underground to get from one subway train to another thinking, how far did we just walk? There are those flat escalators you see in airports. As a reward for choosing not to take them, you’re given the cartoon journey of a man or woman who is getting healthy, slowly getting smaller as you walk. By the end of the treck, you see them at their healthiest and are told how many calories you’ve burned by choosing to walk. 

The train itself has pregnancy seats marked in pink, they have constant commercials running, and the subway train is all yackety yack, giving directions in multiple languages. The trains and stops are all clearly labeled, not only with what station you’re at or approaching, but it will tell you the next station in either direction. So handy — especially when you get on and quickly realize you’re heading in the wrong direction. 

A downside to the subway station? The signage to get from one place to another (get off one train and have to go find your connecting train) is not always the clearest. It will tell you to go one way, then the next sign will say to swap back to your original route. 

End Subway tangent. 

So we’re back on the street in Busan trying to figure out, on this series of intersections and large roads just where our subway entrance was. Somewhere. I noticed some young police officers wandering around on the street before they went into the local police officer and my ears pricked up. A local police station? Putting on those big girl panties, emboldened by my stress of leading everyone astray, I was all, “Don’t worry ladies, I have this,” and waltzed into the police station. 

Where a shocked a small contingent of police officers with the “Oh no, she’s going to want us to speak in English” look on their collective faces. They spoke no English, I spoke no Korean. All I had was a destination, directions on a cell phone, and the determination to find this subway stop. Unfortunately? No go. We couldn’t really get around our language barrier, though for some reason, this didn’t stress me out any more than I already was. I climbed out of the station, went to go find my friends, looked up, and there was the giant subway number. 

Like, right next to the police station. 

Moving on and moving underground, we managed to get to our stop fairly uneventfully, ready for the next leg, which to me meant catching the next bus, to my friends, who I think were a little leery of my directional skills were more, “or we could just walk up here a ways fortified by this street fish bread we found.” “Are you certain? The bus stop is right here,” says me. Buuuut instead we marched. Higher and higher, the road in some points almost vertical. We’d have to be those people who stopped to catch our breath, thankful for my Nature’s Republic Chanyeol blotting compact. I felt especially terrible for Miss Leila, who was doing this with a terrible head cold, so bad that she had her own adventure….the Korean pharmacy. And then another Korean pharmacy when the first one refused to sell her the cold medicine she needed. (Not malicious, just a miscommunication.) Finally, though, thankfully, we arrived. 

WAIT! 

Gah, this post is like verbal vomit. But I just remembered something super important now that we’re back in Gamcheon! Remember, on my last post where I kept pointing out how my shoes were wet and sandy and promised there was a reason for my banality? GUYS. I woke up to slightly damp shoes, walked outside, and….no squeak! They were (almost) silent. Or as silent as regular non-squeaking shoes were. At that point to the best of our knowledge, getting the insert wet was the key to stopping the squeak! We were all very excited as now I would stop embarrassing myself and them as we walked everywhere. 

As we did walk everywhere.

Back to the squeakless story! So we, hot, tired, and a little cranky, finished hiking Busan and were ready to experience Gamcheon as a team. I picked up more of the postcards that I’d purchased the first time around as they were so pretty, and I knew I wasn’t going to be able to give out the first set as souvenirs as I’d anticipated and settled into our next order of business. LUNCH.

We found a tiny little cafe up one of the alleyways and popped in. I got a delicious Katsu, but I think also at our table was some ramen, some kimbap, and some pork. All the food was so yummy and super cheap. (I think my whole tray was 7000 won.) As we sat there, recovering, eating, and blotting, we watched out of the window as a group of school kids, mostly schoolgirls, all dressed in hanboks, made the one boy pose with them for saeguk kdrama selfies. You know the pose, the heroine leaning against a wall, the hero looming above, his arm pressed into the wall above her head. They were all having a blast, and so were we watching them.

Nourishment level achieved, we went out to enjoy Gamcheon. Checking out the little artist shops, taking pictures, stopping off at the little senior tea house (this is where we found the black bamboo salt that got me in trouble with security). Just as I had thought, this is one of those places where you can go multiple times and continue to see different things and have different experiences. This one was through the eyes of my friends, as I really wanted them to like the place as much as I did. Was I successful? Who knows? I like to think so, as it’s a really special place. 

But it was time to go. We decided to skip the University shopping district and go immediately to Biff Square. Luckily, the tiny Gamcheon bus was ready to take us on our way.

Turns out, Biff Square? Is the same location as the Busan International Film Festival! It was pretty cool to see. There were tons of shops and food stalls. We wandered, popping in and out of stores. Not so much Kpop but there was a butt-ton of KBeauty, and I think we all took home a portion of it. (We purchased it, the shoplifting didn’t come until later.)

It was there where we saw it. The Animal Cafe. 

On the list for several people in our Kconvoy, was visiting one of the animal cafes which are prevalent in Korea. (We actually have a cat cafe here in Denver, but only on vacation would you be willing to pay actual money to have coffee with a cat.) These animal cafes have regular cats or dogs but can also be more exotic with raccoons, owls,  basically if you name the animal, and they probably have a cafe for it. This one? Meerkats. While I had been on the fence of going to one, the idea of seeing a meerkat up close had me tagging along.

We paid our money, squeeing over the tiny little herd of meerkats racing around a large enclosed pen. My only other previous meerkat experience had been Meerkat Manor on PBS. (Did anyone else ever watch that?) There was also another room which had cats and two HUGE raccoons. But meerkats first. With your entrance fee, you get a can of soda or tea (the cafe portion) and all the animal interaction you can take. The worker offered to let SaraG and Leila in to see the meerkats and, no dummies, they jumped at the chance, sitting in the pen while meerkats raced around them. I was let in a little while later and, no lie, it was an awesome experience. They are the cutest little creatures, and we got to pet and held them, feeding them little bits of lettuce while squeeing over their tiny little chattering voices. In the holding pen, it was us with another couple (obviously on a date, it was super cute) and when the manager walked back in from break saw us all, and chided the employees, before coming in to give all the women lap blankets. He said it was so we could hold the meerkats, but I didn’t notice him giving one to the guy that was in there. Hrm. 

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Last one for the day, day 5 if the korean memories. We went to an animal cafe, this one? Surprise new friends!

A post shared by Stephanie (@kchatjjigae) on Jul 14, 2019 at 8:31pm PDT

While one is never actually done looking at meerkats, we decided to keep moving and go into the room with the cats and the raccoons. With a regretful pat to our new chewy friends, we climbed out of the enclosure and (after Purexing our hands) grabbed our sodas and went into the cat room. First off, the raccoons were huge. I come from New Hampshire, raccoon country. You could almost count me as an expert on these rascals that always want to get into your garbage or break into your back porches (in pursuit of more garbage), so when I tell you these things were big, they were big. Big in stature, but also clearly just fat. They bumbled around, asking for treats, asking to be petted and scratched.

There were also at least 5 maybe 8 cats of a particular Korean breed, and this is where I got skeeved out a little bit. Either these cats were SUPER chill, or these cats were on something. I’d actually heard of that before in these places. There were a couple of cats that moved around, but for the most part, they just lay there, most of them sleeping no matter how much they were patted. Just as I know raccoons? I also know cats. This is not the natural behavior of cats, and it made me feel really, really bad. I hope I’m just overthinking it, but after that, I was pretty much done and was ready to go meet Alix (who had opted to go find a coffee shop.) Luckily the other ladies were prepared to go, too. 

With a wave and a coo to the meerkats, we put our shoes back on (we took them off and swapped them for house shoes) we were on our way to find Alix. At this point, the sun was starting to sink, and it was time to break out Operation Chicken and Beer. 

But not before some street food! I’m not certain why I didn’t take pictures here! Shame on me! And for everyone else as I have access to everyone’s photos and no one took any of what we ate here! It’s almost as if we all decided if it’s not hoteok, we don’t care. I tried a fishball thing, decided I didn’t like it, offloaded it to SaraG and ended up with a pornato. Noms. 

Thanks, Steve, you were right, we really did enjoy ‘Beef Square’! 

On a mission though, we take the next train to the beach where we thought we’d be able to see the Rainbow Bridge. We walked on tired feet, down and down and down, not finding beach and not finding fried chicken. Luckily, much further than we thought, we realized not only were we close, but the fried chicken was within our grasp! Dropping SaraG and Alix off to wait for our order to cook, Leila and I hit the convenience store for the second most crucial ingredient, beer. 

I love Korean convenience stores. Look what I found!

Also, the soju was like 1700 won. Amazing. I stocked up. 

Goodies in hand, we walked to the beach where a bridge sprawled out in front of us… abridge we hoped would be the Rainbow Bridge. The beach was relatively empty as, just as our luck, the weather turned to a light drizzle. You know what though? We didn’t care. We were there for an experience, and we were not going to leave until we had it! We sat on the stone stairs eating fried chicken, pickled radish cubes, and drinking beer. (I was drinking Coke Zero and soju as beer is gross.)

Then suddenly it happened! The bridge not only lit up but it did a solid five minute light show! Pretty cool, man.

Experience completed, we bagged up our garbage (pack in, pack out, folks) actually finding one of Korea’s only outside public garbage cans. Not sure if I mentioned this before, but there are no garbage cans in Korea. None. You have a piece of garbage, I hope you have a pocket because that thing is going to be with you for a while. Gloria, who’s Seoul foodie food tour we booked that night when we got back to the Airbnb, actually laughed when we asked, and actually told us about the pocket of her purse that’s just for the day’s garbage. 

On the hike back to the subway station, we passed one of their newer subway stops which have tv monitors built in. The news that evening? The breaking Seungri, Burning Sun, hidden video fun chat news. Yeah, our stay was about to get WEIRD.

That’s a story for another post though. 

KOREAN ADVENTURE DAY FOUR: Stairs, and Meerkats, and police…oh my! Korea trip, day five! At this point, I can't believe these travelers have already been in South Korea for almost a week, and I can't believe we're also at week five of this series!

[dlybookeviewblog]

Cowboy Games by Audrey Randall

My Review *****5*****

What an amazing quick read, I love love love this book! What an amazing author Audrey Randall is.  I've got say it's another steamy book!

Meet Lana

Lana shakes her head as she says“Frack! This can’t be right!” Lana immediately tapped on the GPS screen on her funky little rental car. When Lana pulls up to the side of the deserted Montana road, Lana suddenly stopped and couldn’t help but take a look at the natural beauty outside. It definitely  would have seemed more awe-inspiring if she hadn’t felt so lost and alone. Around hundred miles from the nearest hint of civilization recognized by Google Maps was not the best place to be lost. Lana’s over active mind suddenly began to imagine that there are animals waiting to eat her. Out in the open forest or other worse fates. Other fates that Lana had seen on the news back home in Berkeley. Lana decides to pull out her phone when she noticed that she had no bars. This wasn't good

Lana groans and shakes her head again “Frackity frack frack frack! Oh for the love of Zelda!” Opening the car door, Lana stepped out to see whether it was possible that she could get any bars at all. A small part of her knew that it wouldn’t make the slightest bit of difference to the situation. But it didn’t stop Lana from trying. No more bars appeared on her phone. This then led Lana to make the only conclusion that she would now have to trust the GPS. It was either trust the GPS or turn back and head home. Since Lana  now knew there was nothing but a run-down gas station which was fifty miles behind her. Lana figured that her bladder would rather she try to move forward.

Lana knew that she'd been taking a huge risk traveling out here. Lana was going to meet her longtime online friend. Lana's online friend was known as Solar Cowboy. Even now, Lana couldn’t believe that she had trekked way out to the middle of nowhere just to meet this person. Who in their right mind ever did that? Lara berated herself for what seemed the hundredth time within the last hour.

Lana had met a lot of people through The Celestial Prophesy gaming circuit. Only a few that she had connected with like Solar Cowboy. In Lana's case not in the romantic sense, but as a true kindred friend. Lana had never met him before,It's not like it really didn’t matter. When Lana had told him of her and her best friend/ teammate, Steph’s plan. Steph and Lana plan to make a camp for very underprivileged girls to help learn coding and experience life. Solar Cowboy had suggested that Lana consider his Montana ranch. Solar Cowboy had played up with how the girls could learn to ride horses, even learn to lasso, and code all in one week. When Lana had finally mentioned it to Steph. Steph had loved the idea. So, here Lana was in the middle of nowhere to scope out this ranch. Would Lana ever find the ranch?

“Great idea, Lana. A world-class idea to come out to the middle of nowhere only to meet a guy you really don’t know. Have you asked or thought to yourself what if he’s an ax murderer?” Looking over her shoulder at the long dusty road she had traveled on. Lana's bladder kept on insisting that she move forward toward hopefully to find a bathroom. If Lana didn’t find any signs of civilization soon, she knew she would be squatting for sure.

Finally getting back in the car, Lana huffed as she had now resigned herself to trusting the car's built in GPS that Lana hoped had been upgraded in the last year. “I should have downloaded the directions on my phone before you left. I'm such a big dummy!” Lana pounded hard on the steering wheel with her palm. Just before she pulled the mustang back onto the desolate dusty highway.

Meet Jesse

Jesse was shaking his after he asked “What the fuck are you doing, Cody?” Jesse couldn’t do nothing but laugh as he watched his seventeen-year-old brother Cody; race around the house as he was throwing things this way and that. Jessie still laughing at Cody as he said“Don’t get me wrong, I appreciate the cleaning, but why now? What’s your rush?”

Cody stopped and looked at Jesse like he had horns growing out of his head as he said “She’s coming!” Cody let out almost a loud boyish squeal as he loaded up his arms with clothes and so much more other random junk that had been lying around the place.

Jesse followed his brother’s crazy mad dash into their bachelor-pad like kitchen. Jesse very rarely understood his younger brother. Cody had always been a geeky kinda guy. With Cody preferring to spend most of his spare time on his computer; rather than riding out on the the range with Jesse. So many times Jesse felt bad for Cody. Cody had been born in the totally wrong place. Cody would have been so much better suited in the Silicon Valley, rather than their hometown of Somewhere Valley, Montana. After the sudden and quick death of their parents when Cody was fourteen. Jesse had hoped that he and Cody could find ways to try and bridge their gap of personalities. There had been no such luck.

Cody starts getting frustrated especially when he looks at the time“Fuck! She’s almost here and it looks like this?” Cody whined.

[whereintheworldisclairerans-blog]

Iceland & Italy

Oh man what a first week it has been. I can hardly believe that we left Denver only last Friday because it has been absolutely nonstop since. If there are any of you reading this who are not my mother - I'm spending the next month backpacking through Europe with Jordan, my very best friend of the past 12 years. We're making our way from Iceland to Madrid, where she will help me get settled in for my year teaching abroad. Our adventures began before we even left the airport, when we realized that we had left our Eurail passes at home. Luckily, we had decided to start our trip with an extended layover in Iceland and had the time to have them shipped to us in Italy. We were picked up in Reykjavik early Saturday morning and headed straight to retrieve the camper van that we would call home for the next 5 days. Both of us were eager to get out of the city, so we jetted south and spent our first day in Iceland on a 6km hike to a natural hot springs, where we bathed in the river with locals and tourists alike. With the stress of the beginning of our trip effectively washed away, we spent the rest of the day at the beach and trying to force ourselves to stay awake. As neither of us had slept on the plane, it didn't work very well. We were curled up in our van by 8pm and slept for a whopping 15 hours. Feeling thoroughly refreshed and ready to take on the day, we spent Sunday hiking to giant waterfalls, seeing black sand beaches and gaping at the gorgeous glacial landscapes. By day 2 I was already ready to declare that Iceland is by far the most beautiful place I have ever been. It took us a bit of driving around to find our next campsite for the evening and by the time we found it, we were tired, hungry and cranky. However, that all washed away as we backed up into our spot with a the perfect view of the massive waterfall 100 feet away from us. We slept hard and spent the next day hiking through incredible canyons and up to the top of waterfalls. My favorite part of the day though came at the very end. I had heard that a Diamond Beach was a must see, and so we followed Google Maps to unsuspecting parking lot off the side of the highway. There was a path up a pile of rubble and Jordan and I were both incredibly skeptical that we were in the right place. We most certainly were. When we rounded the corner at the top of the path, the most incredible view of my life sprawled out on front of me. Thousands of pieces of ice and snow floated on the giant glacial lake, surrounded by mountains and flowing directly to the ocean. With our jaws on the floor and tears in our eyes, we both inched forward and desperately tried to capture the breathtaking beauty in front of us. The quality of pictures that we were able to take will never do it justice, so you all will just have to trust me when I say GO. Just go. The only thing that ripped us away from such a beautiful sight was our growling stomachs and the promise of lobster in Hofn. Food in Iceland is incredibly expensive, so we had packed most of it with us from the states. However, with no cooler or real ability to store food easily, we had been consisting off a diet of oatmeal, rice, sandwiches, ramen and trail mix for the past several days. We decided to treat ourselves to a nice dinner at the very farthest point of our journey and MAN was it worth it. After the best lobster bisque of my life, we crawled back into our homey little van and crashed. We spent the next day driving all the way back from Hofn to a campsite near Reykjavik, right next to where the European and American continental tectonic plates collide. We spent our last morning in Iceland seeing a final massive waterfall, the city of Reykjavik (not very much because it was cold AF and very expensive to do anything. 3 euro just to use the bathroom!). We finally returned our dear Victor the Van and caught a ride to the airport. We got into Milan around 11pm, where we had a mild panic when we realized how far the city was from the airport. Luckily we were able to catch the last bus and 1.5 hours and a few funny exchanges with some taxi drivers later, we crawled into our hostel beds. Getting up at the ungodly hour of 6:30 the following morning was only aided by the fact that I got to take a shower after 5 days and felt like a new woman afterward. We got on our first train to Florence (and paid for the tickets - which will hopefully be reimbursed by eurail later) and arrived in our wonderful AirBnB around 11am. We treated ourselves to our first big Italian meal and spent the rest of the day exploring the winding streets, stumbling upon famous cathedrals and eating our body weight in pasta. Going from freezing in Iceland to roasting in Florence was quite the transition, but luckily the weather cooled off by Friday. We explored in the morning, but were getting increasingly nervous about the fact that our eurail passes hadn't arrived yet. Jordan's boyfriend had overnighted them, but a comedy of errors and misunderstandings led us to dash to the UPS store on Friday night, which was 20 minutes outside of the city and was set to close 30 minutes after we left our apartment. We slid in the doors panting and sweaty, but made it 5 minutes before close. They had the package, and we walked away euphoric and with our passes in our hands. I don't even want to think about where we would be if we had left our apartment even a few minutes later... Anyways- we spent our last day in Florence at the top of the Duomo and reading in the park. We found the PERFECT restaurant for our final dinner and neither of us ever wanted to leave. The next morning, however, we packed our bags and prepared ourselves for a loooooong travel day. First, a 4.5 hour train from Florence to the port city of Ancona, then a 17 hour ferry to Igoumenitsa, Greece and yet another 1.5 hour ferry to the island of Corfu. After an hour of anxiety caused by Italian time and their complete lack of interest in doing anything quickly, we walked onto our first ferry that was set to leave at 13:30 at 13:45. Luckily it didn't actually leave the port for nearly another 2 hours, during which time Jordan and I discovered that we didn't actually have any seats or a bed- and we slept (or rather, didn't do any sleeping at all) on the floor. We decided that we would not be doing that again on the way back, and promptly canceled our return ferry and booked a plane directly from Corfu instead. I'm currently sitting on the second ferry of the day, which should be arriving in the port any minute now. We'll spend the next few days being beach bums before jetting off to Budapest, Croatia, Vienna, Prague and Berlin! I promise to try to keep this more regularly updated, at the very least with some pictures!

[theprismaticintrovert]

My First Day in Milan

June 21st, 2017

           Today marks my first official day in Milan, Italy. I feel like yesterday could not have been the first day because we only arrived around nine o’clock in the morning, and then we had to wait in the airport for 3 more hours until some other students from different flights arrived and claimed their luggage. Not only that, we spent another three to four hours to get each other settled into our apartments. Then we went grocery shopping at a little supermarket just two blocks away from us, and it was very affordable too. Finally, we ended the night with some pizza and wine at a pizza parlor.

           Since I signed up for this study abroad adventure, I was not really sure what to expect; in fact, I am kind of glad I did not try to guess because I would have had high or low expectations of this place. There really isn’t a reason why I decided to study abroad I guess it’s because I have always just wanted to travel and never have. So the only way I knew how was to do this. Luckily I had a friend my age who had done it two summers ago and she recommended that I should do it in my college career. And I did. However, if I am being totally honest here in my journal then I can say that I was not expecting to be studying in Milan, Italy that’s for sure. I was planning on going somewhere in Australia, London, or Argentina (Because my friend went to study there and it looked gorgeous on her Snapchat and Instagram I had to check the place out. Now fortunately my college only had one study abroad program this year and that destination was Italy. The reason I am saying fortunately is because like I said, I had no high or low expectations of this place, I really didn’t know much about Italy except for the fact that they have everything Pasta and Wine! Two of my favorite things combined oh it has been heaven here! The night before I left I talked to my grandma about the trip, and she asked me the simple question, “Are you excited?” But that wasn’t it, she was looking deep into my eyes because she then added, “Because you look like you are extremely nervous about it.” For some reason, her saying that made me cry out all of my anxiety and nerves that I had been bottling in since the moment I put down the deposit for the program. I then answered, “I am scared,” and her face just reassured me that everything is going to be fine. She replied back with, “Oh my, and here I was thankful you have the bravest soul.” As understandable as it sounds, my crying and anxiety did not allow me to know what that statement meant. It didn’t hit me until I began walking the cobblestone streets of Milan. It takes a lot of guts for someone to just live in a foreign country to study for a while instead of taking a vacation at home and going to the beach, or binge watching any Netflix show until four in the morning or once they go to sleep. No, I decided to buy a ticket and think to myself “Why not?” instead of “why?”

           Upon arrival in Milan, I did not believe the side effects of jet lag until I have done it myself. Waiting in an airport for 3 hours, flying from Los Angeles to Miami, waiting once again for another three hours until we boarded our connecting flight to Milan. So a five-hour flight, plus a ten hour one, and nine hours of waiting equaled up to twenty-five hours of being fully alert and awake. I was only able to sleep about 3 hours throughout the entire day. We were all dying of exhaustion and jet lag and we still had to get our rooms in order and attend a welcome orientation and eat dinner. I saw so many people closing their eyes and dozing off I am sure the professors noticed and decided to cut it short because they kept saying, “I am going to make this short.” I was happy to hear those words but I was getting annoyed when I saw each minute pass on the clock and we were yet to get up from our seats and walk out.

           The next part was quite interesting, for it was the first time I was going to take a look at my Italian apartment. First, let me start off by saying how cute and wonderful the girls’ apartments were. Well, each apartment had a small kitchen, a bunk bed, a small living area, a dining/study area, and a huge bathroom. It was cute and modern I kind of liked it that I was really hoping that the boys’ apartment would be just the same. Unfortunately, since not all of the apartments were remodeled, the only boys of the group (Carlos and I) had to get our own apartment just two blocks away (about an eight-minute walk). So our advisors of the group took us to the other location which I had already seen on Google Maps (I know I am a cheater) but I was so excited for what I saw. First off, there was a riverboat restaurant right in front of us, then a pizza parlor on the left-hand side, as well as a bar right next to it. I assumed we had it all. I thought wrong. Once the car parked in front of the apartment building with the local businesses surrounding it, I took the liberty to actually take in my surroundings. I am eternally grateful that I did so because before entering, there were these really big gray wooden doors. They were humongous but the funny part was that there was a cut-out door at the bottom that can open for anyone who has a key; it is so small and short that you have to duck your head upon entering in order to avoid a big red bump on your head. Once entering, the doors led to this beautiful yellow courtyard leading to either three different houses or the apartment building which had five floors with one apartment on each. We got the room on the second floor and I was dreading it as soon as I saw how narrow and steep the stairs were. But I managed, mainly because there was an elevator to accommodate mine and my roommate’s luggage and taking it up the stairs.

           I have never in my life actually seen an Italian apartment, I have never in my life seen Italy period. So for the first time in my life, I was indulging in so many different things. The culture, the city, the people, and now my very own apartment. Once getting off the elevator, the doors opened on a big brown and white wall, and to the left was a veranda looking out to the houses and cobblestone streets that made this little heart of the city. To the right, was a big dark brown double-sided door that when opened, led to an all white twelve by twenty square foot apartment (I could be getting my accurate calculations wrong). First off, the key we got to open our door was huge it was bigger than the size of my palm and quite heavy too I might add. That is how ancient it was. To the right of the room, stood two all white clean twin beds, only they were right next to each other. I was already beginning to think how uncomfortable the situation was because of how the beds were put right next to each other and there were supposed to be a boy sleeping on each one. However, I did not mind it at the moment, like I said, I was indulging everything in until it could finally hit me. There was a large closet right next to the beds, and then an old green chair sitting by itself amongst the corner of a wall. Then a big white with a vaguely opaque glass door opens up to a toilet, sink, a shelf, a shower, and a small little bidet. In case some of you might not know, a bidet is a little sink in which you are able to wash your front parts and your anus as well. There was some fresh crisp all white towels, some soap, and shampoo. The little kitchen contained a stove, a microwave, a sink, some cups and plates, pots and pans, silverware, cooking utensils, and even an espresso maker. We had it all for an Italian apartment; the wonderful scenery, the restaurants and bars right next to us, and the beautiful canal which was beautiful to look at at night when the buildings’ lights reflected on the water.

           Now the next part was to go grocery shopping and buy the rest of the things we needed for our little apartment. We were not the only students going to the supermarket to buy all of the things we needed. We found one about a couple blocks away from us that had everything we can think of. If I can remember correctly it is called Simply. Just like that, and we walked in only to find some escalators leading down. Once walking in, the smell was familiar, almost that of a supermarket in Mexico. Once we hit the first floor, we saw a security guard and about eight cashiers checking people out (they are always overstaffed here in Italy). Everything is so crowded and fast-paced that it was almost impossible to look at everything I needed to buy; I almost forgot half the things I needed on my shopping list. We bought mostly food items, water, and some toilet paper because that was the most important thing of all. The way how the pricing worked was so odd. It felt like shopping American style only instead of a period between the numbers to separate dollars and cents, there was a simple comma placed in between (plus the Euro symbol). On one visit, I spent only 19 Euros, which is like twenty-three dollars. But then again, I did miss a lot of things that I needed.

           Finally, to end the night, my friends Nely and Alexa, including my roommate Carlos and I decided to go out for pizza at the pizza parlor that was right next to us. Once we did, we walked by the pizza place not knowing a single clue of what to do; luckily, a waiter approached us and asked what we liked – in English. I was beginning to question myself if we really looked like American tourists. When we answered yes, he brought us inside to sit at a table. Upon doing so, he kindly handed us menus and offered us drinks. We all asked for waters and got them back in bottles. We were confused as if the bottles were filled with sparkling water but it was regular mineral water that actually tasted quite refreshing (way more than American water if I might say so myself). I looked at the Menu and felt a little overwhelmed with how many types of pizzas there were, along with other pasta dishes, salads, finger foods, and drinks they could offer. There was not a simple one like pepperoni or supreme which would have been easier for me to choose and indulge. As I scrolled my eyes down the menu, seeing all of the varieties and names like bufalo or margherita. Well I ended up choosing a margherita pizza because I read that all it had was tomato sauce, mozzarella cheese, and basil. Simple as that. My friend Alexa got the bufalo pizza after fifteen minutes and it came out a little different than she expected. First of all, she did not expect it to be a whole pizza, and I don’t think she realized that the on the bottom of each menu item stood a translation of the ingredients. The ingredients called for mozzarella cheese, spinach, and grape tomato slices; somehow she forgot to read that and was not aware until she got her food, she looked at it with big eyes. She was still able to enjoy it for she took off the tomato and spinach and only ate the cheese pizza without the tomato sauce. My pizza came out right after hers and I could not wait to dig in. The waiter put it down on the table in front of me and said “Bon Appetíto.” I saw it look a little different than I expected, there was hardly and I mean hardly any mozzarella cheese. I did not bother to question it and I decided to just dig in. Once I cut into my whole pizza and began to bite into my slice, I can say it was pretty hot but delicious. The pizza would have given me a total of eight slices and I was only able to consume four. I felt terrible because I did not want the cook to feel like it was not appetizing.

           We realized our first day was coming to a close and we all went our separate ways. Nely and Alexa went their separate ways to their apartment, while Carlos and I went to our own and decided to call it a night. I showered, changed, laid down on my bed and looked up at the obscure ceiling overhead and thought to myself about how good it felt to be in a bed and not on a plane, walking around parts of the town, or listening to another lecture or orientation meeting. Jet lag hit me so hard for my first time, but let me tell you, so far it has been extremely worth it. I have been able to do some things I have been dreaming of doing; that is fly, travel, and live in a different country. The good thing about those types of dreams is that you can keep doing them, you can do them as much as you want because you never have to let your dreams go. I keep telling myself that it is pretty impressive I am studying in a foreign country, living in a foreign country, indulging in the culture, and last but not least, travel parts of the world I never thought I would see. 

Until then! 

Damian