For the last time, I woke this morning under my red comforter, in my bedroom, in Cardiff. I laid there for a little bit, not nearly long enough now that I think about it, and listened to the music I had set as my alarm. I turned it off in my habitual haste, and looked out my window; it was gray and rainy. Then I looked about my room. Everything was laid out as it was the night before; almost completely packed up, but not quite done. Seeing my progress so close to completion, I got out of bed before the snooze came on.
I threw on a hoodie and went downstairs to wash my outfit I wanted to wear today, as I wanted to be sure it started this trip of three outfits as clean as possible. After I threw it in the wash, I checked on the hashbrowns. I was super surprised to see a whole bunch of fat, fluffy, grated potato bits in my pot! I was tempted to get them started right then, but I decided to clean up a bit more before the others woke up. I went upstairs, did a quick wakeup set of crunches (I'm up to 125), and threw on some makeup and my (clean) jeans and an old shirt. Donning my hoodie on my way out, I went back downstairs to the kitchen. I strained the water from the potatoes, got them frying happily in some butter and oil, and hung my wet clothes out to dry while they sizzled in the pan.
Tom, Katy, Anders, and Courtney had left our house early that morning. Tom and Katy would be back late that night, but Anders and Courtney were gone for good. Miya had been gone since yesterday, so it was me, Lydia, Josie, Theresa, and Abbey left. Josie was leaving today at 11. Theresa and Abbey would be leaving the next afternoon. oh boy.
Over the course of the next few hours, all the girls came down one by one and made some breakfast. Abbey poured me a lovely cup of redbush and vanilla tea with honey that I had with my lovely warm breakfast of hasbrowns and eggs.
After I got my dishes cleaned off, I went upstairs, rolled up the last few things, and moved my two parcels and jacket downstairs to the unused office we have lovingly titled 'Spare Oom'. While Tom will be staying at this house until the 29th, some new students will be moving in on Monday. This means that we can still use our house as a home base to store our extra luggage while we are in Paris, but we'll be sleeping on the couch when we return on Wednesday and Thursday night. No problem, they are brand new, super soft couches. no joke, we took the plastic off ourselves :)
At about this time, the others had finished up their breakfast and were starting to get on the wifi, when we discovered that it wouldn't work any more. Apparently we blew through the 3GB Theresa and Josie picked up at the beginning of the week. So we all grabbed our things and headed over to the other house to raid the pub's wifi. The only thing I really had to do online was dump my pictures from my camera onto facebook, since my dropbox is full, so that I had a free camera for Paris.
When I got over there, the girls had already taken chairs outside to the garbage-filled back area and were lined up against the wall neighboring the pub. Theresa never could get access, so she left first. Lydia and Abbey had stayed home. So it was just me, Josie, and Matt online, with me on the back of the couch and in the windowsill where I would usually skype.
I had internet just long enough to upload two photos and for Connor to come onto the chat and ask when everyone was leaving. When I told him that many already had and that many others would be soon, he sounded worried that he would miss the chance to say goodbye and asked if he could come by. But before I could let him know that it would be fine, the internet completely died. Josie gave up and went home, but Matt was still good in the other room. I tried reloading and restarting the wifi for about ten minutes before I accepted defeat and went back home.
As I walked the few gray and kind of sad blocks home, guess who was standing outside my door to greet me, baby in arms? You guessed it, Mr. Pakistani Creeper Head.
I felt bad that I had accidentally left Connor hanging, so I told Lydia about what had happened when I got back. That's when she told me that Deborah, one of the third year Welsh students who had come super late for her own advanced program, had moved into Courtney and Anders's room while I was out. And she had purchase a mifi device too. Lydia reminded me that we had not looked up how to get from the Paris bus station to our hostel, so we would need to find that information out too.
Sheepishly, we asked Deborah if we could use her mifi for five minutes, to which she smiled and said that we could use it all day if we wanted to. She said she was skyping her husband often with it, so she was fine picking up more and more data as she needed it throughout her last few weeks of school here. I suppose the whole being long-time married and having a little more money saved away makes trips like this a slightly different experience than ours. I'm not jealous, convenience almost always makes for too few adventures.
So we got back online and Lydia told Connor he should come by soon if he wanted to see Josie off before she left. In the mean time, I did some work on travel stuff. After we had found the map of our train stop and hostel and had found the best walk route, we hung out on the mifi and did a little more checking. Lydia really wanted to call home, but since it was not quite 11am here, that meant it was not quite 4am back home, so that didn't quite work. I took the chance to briefly check to see if I had any emails. I was delighted to find that I did. Oh, it was so good to get updates from my dad, Gretch, and Ethan. I just couldn't stop smiling as I read through them each.
I knew Deborah said she didn't care about us using her internet, and she in fact got on Skype with her husband while we were there with her, but I felt bad using up her data. I sent an all too quick and very overdue travel outline to my dad, so he knows where to send the flowers, before I signed off. In consolation, though, we have booked hostels that are supposed to have free wifi, so we should be able to send emails more easily in the next few days.
With that, we went back downstairs and bid our dear Josie a fond farewell. She is going to Oxford for the next four days to stay with a friend of her brothers before she flies home. We thought about going with her, but Paris was calling our names instead. Theresa and Abbey decided to walk with her to the train station so she wouldn't be alone. We would have all gone, but we still weren't sure if Connor was planning on stopping by, and we would have felt bad if he had made the trip all the way to our place and not had anyone there, so Theresa and Abbey told us to make sure that if he stopped by, that he would stay there until they got back.
So we did. My clothes had finally dried (inside) by this time, so I changed out of my old shirt and into the new. It had been raining and cold all day though, so I happily put my new hoodie back on. It's certainly getting a workout, but its so nice to have a warm hoodie that fits me so well!
After a while, Connor did stop by. We chatted for a bit until Abbey and Theresa got home, and then we let them entertain our guest while we made our final preparations. It was about 2pm by this point, so Lydia went back up to Deborah's room to call home. After her call was finished, we gathered our Paris gear, whipped up a few peanut butter sandwiches, and then gave the girls hugs goodbye.
And just that fast, we were off. In the rain. To the bus station past the Hays.
It was actually really nice to walk there. The rain was more of a steady misting (which was cool and obnoxious all at the same time). I had, for some reason, thought that I had taken my very last walk through the Hays the day before, so it was great to be walking through those fun familiar streets and arcades again, even in the chilly rain. The pubs were packed full of people watching a game. Connor had mentioned that there was supposed to be a 'truly brilliant' boxing match in Cardiff on that day, but from the screens I caught glimpses of, it looked more like a foot ball game to me.
When we made it to the station at last, we were a bit wet and kinda cold. Basically, we were ready to be on a bus. So when we saw that our bus was ready and waiting right at the front of the lot, we were very excited. We double checked the numbers and the departure gate, then handed the driver our tickets, and when he didn't tell us we were total drips (another phrase we learned from Connor. On the hierarchy of insults, it's not as severe as 'idiot' but worse than 'blonde') and that we had the wrong bus, we got on and sat down.
I don't know who engineered those seats, but they were the most perfect seats for dozing in. Really, I wasn't tired at all when I sat down, but I fell asleep for an hour by accident as we drove through the country lands towards London.
It still kills me how gorgeous it is here. I smile I see a busy exit ramp or highway change area, because they are always just black winding roads in the middle of a grassy hilly field. Seriously, where there isn't an asphalt road, its a thick lawn. Nuff said.
Lydia and I took some time swapping ipods, something I absolutely love doing. She got some new music the other day, and she played some of the orchestral Zelda theme music. It's so great! I was delighted to hear how fun and intricate those songs are!
We left Cardiff at 4pm and arrived at the London coach station at half past seven. We made our way to the departure station across the street. I was surprised at how less easily directed the coach stations are from the other forms of transportation we have used in Ireland and England, but we got to our next area in about ten minutes. I wasn't sure what else we needed to do there, but I felt like we probably should get our passports checked before we got on the bus. Sure enough, we found a back area where your tickets were converted after your passports had been approved, so we we got our tickets updated and then waited back in the hallway for our bus. It came probably 45 minutes later.
The bus in the parking stall in front departed late, and a whole ton of busses pulled in for the customary 21:30 departure time, so it was kind of chaos in the lot. We checked with a few of the ticket officers there and finally found our transfer bus. We were still nervous that we had been directed to the wrong bus, as it didn't look like the other Euroline National Express busses, but once we checked with the driver, he said we had it right. So we went in, found one of the last set of empty seats together, and breathed a sigh of relief.
We were now only one bus ride away from Paris.
The trip went pretty smooth from there. A huge Indian family was sitting behind us, filling the back portion of a bus. They had a lot of elementary school aged children, and they were all extremely energetic and happy to shout as we drove to the port of Dover. A few of the ladies in front of us turned around and asked them to be quiet, but the only thing that changed was the language the family spoke in.
This surprised me at first. Josie spoke arabic to us often on the trip, so I kind of recognized when they spoke arabic at the beginning of the drive, and they spoke only English before that. After they were asked to be quiet, I heard a few muttered retorts, some in English, and then after a bit of silence, a few statements in German! As the drive continued, my focus was pulled away from my writings when I heard something strangely familiar. It came to memory really fast: it sounded just like the language the cute little teddy bears in the Star Wars movies had spoken! I was kind of shocked that I remembered it so well, but that really was my absolute favorite part of those movies when I was little, and having the dad that I do, we were able to watch them all the time. What's also funny is that I remembered something Ethan had told me about the Tagalog language. He said that the writers of Star Wars had actually used tagalog as the language for the ewoks, so I deduced thusly, dear Watson, that these people were now speaking Tagalog to each other, their fourth language now! Cool huh?? Their kids are still particularly loud for it being midnight now, though...
At 12:30am, we pulled up to the Dover port. I was so stoked I was able to look out at the White Cliffs again!!! Hopefully we will be able to see them more in the light upon our return trip to Cardiff. We got out and had our passports checked and stamped again. I must have looked like a goober, bringing in my backpack while everyone else left theirs, but I really didn't want to leave my iPad behind.
After we got back on, we drove to the loading gates and waited for a good hour before we were able to drive onto the ferry. Once we were parked tightly up against a dozen other busses on the ferry, we were told we had to get off again and go inside. So Lydia and I walked up the line into one of the upper decks. It was mostly empty, but the noisy family happened to follow us up to the same deck. We found an empty table, pulled up our hoods, and tried to sleep.
Lydia put in her music to try to drown out the loud noise of people, but I was afraid that we would miss the landing intercom and miss our bus, so I put in my headphones but left my iPod in my bag. And then smiled.
See, for the past few years, I have actually always tried to fall asleep to some darling old radio broadcasts I found. Part of this is because if I was taking a nap, this was the only time I usually had to listen to these recordings I love so much (yes, multitasking even as I sleep. I know, crazy right?), but the other reason was actually even stranger: I wanted to be able to fall asleep anywhere I needed to regardless of noise. So, an adventurous radio story makes for excellent practice. Fun huh!
So when I put my headphones in to mute the sound a little bit, I knew they were unnecessary, because I would only need a few minutes before I fell right to sleep to the loud yells, laughs, and busy chatter that filled the large room we were in. Which I did.
The problem was that the ferry ride was only about an hour long. So even though it was infinitely more comfortable to sleep hunched over on the table there, I awoke to the intercom announcing our arrival and knew we had to leave quickly before the busses pulled out (they don't count the people or check the seats before they leave). I woke Lydia up, and we sluggishly headed back downstairs through the crowd where we eventually found our bus.
Gah, sleeping on busses, not the most pleasant of experiences. I was really missing my table at the ferry by the time we were back in our seats. The family just behind us was wide awake though, somehow, and let the whole rest of the bus know it. At this point, I swapped them out for my adorable old time radio broadcasts and dozed on and off of the four hour drive into Paris.
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