Valentine's Day. Usually, it is pretty depressing. You feel like you are caught in a catch 22 position...feeling depressed on the day, but then hating that you feel depressed because you shouldn't (as a supposedly independent woman!) so then feeling even more depressed! However, this year felt a little different. There is something about the sun-shining and being nice and warm, compared to the dreary, cold, rainy February in England, that takes the edge off of it for sure! Coupled with my amazing roommate leaving a bunch of 'Happy Valentine's Day' notes around the apartment for me to find, aannddd a big bowl of homemade chocolates and biscuits and chocolate covered strawberries by my bed! (I was allowed to eat them now after the day before her subtly hinting that I couldn't) Needless to say, for the next 2 days I didn't eat any real food and just snacked on peanut butter cups! Not the healthiest thing to do but you gotta do it on Valentine's Day! A movie night with the girls was also pretty fun...Matt Damon, George Clooney, Brad Pitt, i'll let you decide what movie we watched.
It was another one of my friend's birthdays this week so off to sushi we went! God I love sushi. I'm going to miss how easy it is to get it and the relative cheapness of it compared to Yo Shushi! where you can easily spend 30quid (can't find the pounds sign on my new computer!) at lunch time. Believe me, me and my best friend have done this before. This restaurant we went to is very well known among students as it is the closest to campus and very eclectically decorated! There are polaroids of past customers plastering the walls, surfboards and random butterflies and flowers hanging from the ceiling and do such wraps like the As$hole. We also made a bbiigg chocolate cake for her which I managed to spatter with my blood when I was grating chocolate on the top and managed to grate my fingers instead. Oh well, extra iron I guess.
On Wednesday me and some friends from my spanish class went to a Tango class downtown! Our teacher said that if we went 3 times then she would give us extra credit, a lot of extra credit, and seeing how i'm hovering in the C+/B- category at the moment I thought I should better get my dancing shoes on and show up! Don't you love the American system of 'extra credit'! This class was pretty funny, me and my friend were pared up and both as bad as each other so just stomped round the room while other couples glided passionately around us. We were stopped a number of times by the teachers to give us some tips, but in the end they just let us do our thing! At one point though the guy teacher grabbed each of us individually and twirled us around which was much better, I felt like I was born with a right and left foot this time. He even said that I was very sensitive to his 'touch' and would make a great dancer. I'm still deciding how much sarcasm was in that statement. I guess I will find out on Wednesday. And the Wednesday after that until I get this extra credit grade!
Last night a big group of us went and saw Hugo in 3D at the cinema. A really sweet film, even if the story line was a bit weak and took a long time to get into it. One thing I will just say is I like how Jude Law is one of the top stars credited and yet in a 2hr film he appears for all of 3 minutes! Not a fan.
Ok well, now I have to go work on my Disney 'Imagineering' project which involves designing a ride/attraction and all the details and costumes and merchandise for this said ride. I am back in Year 7 obviously. But this time, it is actually worth something aaannnddd I think my creative levels since then have plummeted, and they were hardly there to start with. I'm picturing tears and tantrums in my future when my Grandmother Willow tree won't stay upright.
I will leave you with my favourite accordion man downtown in his new costume.... and a small plug for my other blog if anyone is interested in food/exercise; http://justsogoodateating.blogspot.com/
I have been putting off writing this post as so much has happened since I last updated!
I'm not sure whether to write pages and pages, because I probably could, or just quickly summarise the events...perhaps a bit of both.
Hardcore studying coupled with illness made finals week anything but fun. I was ready to leave by the time the week was over, I love Santa Cruz, but I needed a break! Before flying to my sister and brother-in-law's home in Seattle, I flew down to Orange County to stay with a friend. First I should describe my journey from UCSC to the airport. Looking back on it, I am annoyed with myself for doing it this way. There is a website called 'Zimride' where you post the journey you want to take (in my case UCSC to San Jose airport on Dec 10th) and anyone driving that way will post how many seats they have in their car and how much they want you to pay. I could've taken a number of buses to get to the airport but with 2 suitcases and not feeling 100% I thought I would do it this way. I found a guy who was going past the airport and onto Oakland so I 'booked a seat' in his car. I spoke to him on the phone and he sounded a little weird but I had seen his facebook page and he seemed better than some other options. I barely slept that night because I was worrying he was going to be a rapist of murderer! He turned up in an old beaten up, smelly, messy car with a bag of weed on the dashboard. After a bit of struggle getting my suitcases into his car amongst the duvets, walking boots and other random items, and against my better judgement, I got into his car. I spent the whole journey completely on edge. He was giving me his life story and telling me how his sister is a manic depressive, his mum is ill etc, I nodded and awwed in the right places. When he told me he was actually not going to Oakland as he never told his mum he was going to visit and just going to drop me off and turn back that is when I started to panic! I was starting to feel like I was about to live a real life episode of CSI. It all turned out fine though. It is amazing how your mind will work overtime! I am well aware that I shouldn't have gotten in the car if I didn't feel comfortable. Next time I won't!
I had a great 5 days in the OC! My friend lives in a really nice gated community with views over Irvine. On the first day we went down to Crystal Cove and Laguna Beach. Laguna Beach was not how I imagined it at all. I thought it was going to be a really big area, really touristy and a bit scabby to be honest. It was actually pretty small, really cute with little boutiques and art galleries, and not scabby at all:) We also went to a restaurant called 'The Boiling Crab' where they give you bibs, you order seafood by the lb and it is brought to you in a bag with a sauce and you just sit there and dig in with your hands! It was delicious!
LA was just a whirlwind. We managed to fit in A LOT! It is about an hour drive from my friends house in Irvine. We hit Rodeo Drive first and gawked at all the expensive, posh shops that we couldn't even afford to breathe the air in! I mean, a dress made exclusively of diamonds, really? The funniest thing was that we had barely been in LA for 5 minutes when I was stopped by a woman wanting me to be a hair model! Apparently it would be the best haircut I had ever had, I politely declined after hearing it was going to take 2 hours and I thought that they would probably cut my hair like Emma Watson or something else as equally as ridiculous (don't get me wrong, she rocks short hair, but NOT me!). We also went to The Grove, a famous shopping mall, and saw Mario Lopez doing some filming!
We also hit the Walk of Fame and the Chinese theatre. It was really cool seeing all the stars on the floor and the handprints of celebs in the cement. Hugh Jackman has MASSIVE feet by the way...;) We also went up to Unviersal City Walk which is all the shops outside of Universal Studios. It got me all excited for Disneyland the following day!
Before we left we headed up to the Griffith Observatory to get the view of the whole of LA and the Hollywood sign. It was pretty dark by this time so the picture's of the sign aren't great but seeing LA all lit up was just beautiful, even if it was a bit cold!
Disneyland....I don't know what to say. I felt like a little kid. Well, almost. It made me look forward to taking my own children and seeing their faces light up when Belle glides down the street:) I had my picture taken with Woody, Mickey and Minnie and the parade and firework show was just MAGICAL! We were there for close to 13hours. 13 hours of Disney magic! I could write a whole other blog post on Disneyland and all the rides, and the food, and the experience but this I will keep to tell people:)/ I can't be bothered to type it all out! I took a few videos....
I was sad to leave the OC. I had eaten a lot of good food, including Korean food which my friends family thought was so funny that I liked! But I was really looking forward to getting up to Seattle and starting the Christmas celebrations! After a round-the-houses flight which included a trip to Las Vegas (the airport is right next to the strip so I got to see the pyramid, the hotels and the Sphinx etc), I arrived in Seattle pretty tired after a crazy week. I greet my sister at the baggage claim, she says "I have a surprise for you", I feel a tap on the shoulder, turn round and my parents are standing there! SURPRISE! I was in complete shock, i just burst into tears (of course!) and was also aware of my dad with his camera though thankfully he didn't manage to get any good photos of my face! I had been downhearted that whenever I had spoken to them they were not enthusiastic about coming out to visit at some point but it was all a lie! They had this planned for 6 weeks! My sister didn't know they were coming either! It was all my brother-in-laws doing....isn't he so sweet! After re-starting my heart, and dried my tears, we got in the car and drove home. We opened the door to the apartment and sitting there is my brother!!! He had lied to me too and my parents and my sister! He had said he wasn't coming and then turned up at the doorstep a few days before me! So it is going to be a nice family Christmas in Seattle:)
