Back
Two weeks ago I got back from my week-long vacation in England and Ireland, specifically London and Dublin. I’ve been meaning to post about it, but I just haven’t been able to get into the mood to do so. I spent the first couple days back uploading pictures from my trip onto facebook (637 pictures, 4 albums) and then painstakingly captioning them (it was actually a bit of work because I had to consult maps and google to figure-out what some of the buildings were).
I had a pretty good time. I really liked it over there and we weren’t there nearly long enough for me to see everything I wanted to, but I’ll definitely be going back in some capacity to fix that as soon as possible. There were only a few hiccups about the trip.
First, when I tried to use my debit card in London to pay for our bus tour it was denied. So I spent the first few days thinking that my card wasn’t going to work over there and was essentially dependent on my friend to pay for everything. (Turns out the charge was blocked because it was ‘abnormal’ and my bank called me about it right when they blocked it, unfortunately my phone didn’t work over there so I didn’t get the call. This kind of bugged me since I had called and left a note on the account to allow charges from the UK that week. I guess they were being extra careful since I’d just had my card number [a different one] stolen and used to charge things from Germany, of course they didn’t block any of those charges, not even the $560 one. Grr.) Since my friend was paying for almost everything I was extra frugal, so it did end up saving me a great deal of money in the end, I think.
Second, my traveling companion was a friend from high school. I hadn’t seen him in 6 years (I thought it had only been three, but he corrected me) and had never really spent much one-on-one time with him. Huge mistake. Turns out I really need other people around to buffer or just to not spend as much time alone with him because by day 3 I was about to do him serious bodily harm. I swear everything he did annoyed the crap out of me. I even made a list (yes, I wrote it down and everything) of all the things he did that annoyed me in hopes that it would make me feel better. No such luck. We made it back to the states without me having to hurt him (though there were a few close calls) and without me being too terrible to him. The worst I did was just not talk to him, I tried to keep to the Bambi mantra, “If you don’t have anything nice to say, don’t say anything at all.” Also, I may have given him some dirty looks and berated him silently when he wasn’t looking. Overall I tried to keep the peace as much as I could. I feel a little bad about how I treated him, but I could’ve been worse. Some people might say I should have confronted him about the things that were bothering me, but honestly a lot of the things that were bugging me were kind of just part of his personality and not really things I could reasonably ask anyone to change for my sanity/comfort.
Perhaps I’ll post my list of grievances at a later date.
