Love was made for me and you

So I made it through the week! haha, woo-hoo! I had that Leisure paper and my PR and Media interview points due last Tuesday, and I got them turned in on time! To celebrate, Sara and I went to our new favorite Luton eatery, Desert's Rose. The food is fantastic, AND they have shisha, aka: hookah. We smoked and ate our stress away, then we went home and watched a nice, girly movie (Definitely, Maybe) to complete the day.

Tom and I went to Alton Towers this past Thursday, and it was awesome!! Now I've been to both of the big amusement parks in England. w00t w00t. We had a lot of fun. I think my favorite ride was Air, which had you lying on your stomach to simulate flight. It was definitely the closest I've ever been to being Superman. After getting back to his house that night, his cousin Sam came over and we all went to eat at Old Orleans. It was basically a Friday's, Applebees type of place, but it was tasty. Plus, it was kinda nice to have some American-style food. We had this two-for-one coupon that was good for up to six people, so we ordered four mains...on top of a gigantic starter, haha. Talk about being stuffed...eesh. Twas yummy though.

I have MORE schoolwork due this Tuesday. In PR and Media, I have to complete my interview, which I'm hoping isn't too bad. I chose the evils of video games as my topic, but I won't know if I'll be arguing for or against until I walk into class. Even though I don't think video games are evil, I think I can argue either side well. Guess I'll see, huh? Wish me luck! The other assignment due on Tuesday is my paper for Tourism Behaviour. Boooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo. I'm writing it on Thanatourism, or Dark Tourism. Basically, it's all stuff that centers around death: museums, battlefields, sites of natural disaster, ghost tours, etc. You know, cool stuff, haha.

I can hardly believe it's May 16th already. Time seems to go faster and faster the longer I'm here. On one hand, I'm glad to be approaching the time when I get to see my family and friends at home again. I really do miss you guys. Really. Of course, on the other hand, I know I'm going to be sad to leave. This experience has been amazing so far. But hey, it's not over yet, right? Why be so gloomy?

Pretty soon I'll be celebrating 11 months since Tom and I started talking. June will be my first ever one year anniversary. That's still crazy to me. I don't know when or if it'll ever stop feeling surreal and extraordinary to be loved by someone I am so unabashedly smitten with myself. I don't really want it to though.

As a means of procrastination, I shall now post here two days in a row.

Surprised? Well, if you know me at all, and know how I operate when schoolwork is looming, then you really won't be all that shocked to find me here. But hey, in my defense, I have now completed two of the three assignments due Tuesday, so I'm not a total slacker.

Right now, I am sitting in the She Bar and Brasserie in Kenilworth. That's the name of the restaurant where Tom works. I've been here once before for dinner with his nan, but his boss wasn't in that day and asked that he bring me back to remedy our ignorance of each other. And so, here I am! The boss seems like a pretty chill, nice guy (as does his wife) and both of them appeared happy to meet me. Apparently, my name has been mentioned once or twice, and they were beginning to wonder if I really existed! haha. =) It's been nice here so far. I worked on my Intro to PR overview and journal, and I have internet access (obviously), so that's cool. Tom's made me three drinks so far: a fruity cocktail, Guinness with Tia Maria, and Malibu with pineapple juice, along with a Coke and a glass of water....so needless to say I've seen the bathroom several times now. It's a nice bathroom to be fair.

Well....I don't even know how long it's been since I finished typing that sentence, but I just concluded one of the most pleasant conversations with a pair of strangers I have ever had. Seated at the table to my left here at the bar area was a middle-aged couple who, for the majority of the night, had kept to themselves and rarely raised their voices above a polite murmur. However, out of nowhere, the woman decided to address me, saying that she had been watching me type and work away and had grown curious as to what I was doing. The three of us ended up talking all about my time here in England, from the differences I've noticed between here and America to the sites I've seen and what I'm going to miss once I leave. They were very friendly, and I genuinely enjoyed talking to them both. I'm really happy they chose to sit beside me, and that the woman decided to "interrupt" my typing. I now have the fear we were speaking loudly though, cuz I feel their absence in the overall volume of the restaurant now that they've left. Woops, haha. Oh well.

Oh yes, and add a delicious hot chocolate to the list of drinks. Yummmm.

Ok, so it's been a little while since I've written...

OK OK FINE! It's been a couple MONTHS since I've written on here, haha. Oh well.

So hello! How have you been, Blog World? Miss me? I was reading over my posts today and thought that I'd give an update, so here goes:

Let's cover school first, shall we? I know many of my American brethren are finishing up the Spring semester right now, and most of you are probably already back at home looking for summer jobs or merely enjoying the stress-free lifestyle of massive couch-sitting and blockbuster-watching. That's what I'd be doing anyway, haha. Sadly, I won't be completely done with this term until after the first week of June, but I am seeing it start to wind down now! That's right, it's finals time. Eeeep. I still really like Leisure in Mind, even though I have a 3,000-word paper due for it Tuesday, along with the outline of my press interview for PR and Media. Argh. The following Tuesday I have a Tourism Behavior paper due along with the actual press interview being carried out that day. Yikes! Wish me luck on all this stuff please. I'm a horrible procrastinator, and I have to get this stuff done!

Anyway, enough about uni for now. Blech. I had mentioned McDonald's in my last post, and when I was reading over that it made me think of another restaurant I've come to really enjoy here: Nando's. It's a chicken place. A really good chicken place. Me likey. Oh, and you wanna hear something weird about another, much more familiar and in my case beloved, chicken place? Well, since you asked so nicely, I'll tell you. English KFC's don't have mashed potatoes and gravy. They have chips (fries) instead. What the heck is up with that?? Also, no biscuits! Seriously, the biscuits and potatoes are the only reasons to pick KFC over another chicken place in the US, so I was shocked. It's still good though, just not AS good...in my opinion. They're doing these panini things right now that I've yet to try. Is that happening in the States also?

While on the subject of food, I'd like to say that I have had Indian more than once since my first time with Tom, Katie, and Rich. I really like it! In fact, I chose an Indian restaurant called Lazim's here in Luton as the setting for my little birthday dinner a month ago. Whoa, a month exactly, haha. Weird. I'm olddddd. It was me, Tom, Sara, and one of the housemates Steven. My other housemate Matt and his adorably sweet girlfriend Amy couldn't make it because they were out of town at the time, but it was fine because I had a really nice evening.

What else should I talk about...? Oh! I went to Ireland and Scotland since my last post. The first was in mid-March with Sara and her brother Jeff. It was fun, though there were moments of sibling bickery and general annoyance, haha. I wasn't that impressed with Dublin. I guess I'm not usually a big city person, and since I didn't want to be trashed out of my mind my entire time there, it really didn't have much else to offer me after the first full day of sightseeing. Western Ireland however was amazing. We went to the Ring of Kerry, Blarney Castle, and the Cliffs of Moher, and all of them were absolutely beautiful. That was definitely my ideal Ireland, and I'm glad I finally made it there. Scotland was in early April with just me and Sara, and it was equally as enjoyable. My favorite part of that trip was Loch Ness, though I kinda digged the marketplace feel of Inverness and the ghost-tour-happy center of Edinburgh. As far as future travel plans, nothing is set in stone at this point. I'd like to at least make it to Italy and Holland before leaving, but I haven't bought tickets for anything yet. Also, I think it'd be realy cool to tag Prague on the end of that list, but we'll just have to see....

Now, one more topic before I go, and that's concerts. I never mentioned that it was an Alkaline Trio concert that Tom and I missed on Valentine's, so there ya go, haha. Since then, we've seen Streetlight Manifesto together in London as part of my 23rd birthday, and we recently saw Innerpartysystem in Coventry a couple weeks ago with his cousin Sam. Both were way fun. In the last week of May, we have two Sonic Boom Six shows: one near his house and the other in London. Sara said she'd go to the one in London, so that'll be cool. Then it's Faith No More on June 10th as part of His 23rd birthday, followed by (hopefully) The Download Festival beginning June 12th. So many good bands are playing that, and although it'd be expensive, I think it'd be worth the experience. Fingers crossed!