Labels for Our Trunk

..we had an assignment in one of my classes in London called Labels for our trunks (we fondly called them, Junk for our trunks) we had three of them to write. the idea was that they were to be reflective pieces. they were to provide an outlet to reflect on what we had experienced.. and a few of the better papers were to chosen to use as advertising for the program next year. this is my favorite one that i wrote.. and it got chosen by my teacher to be used later. It's kinda long (remember this waaas for class, there was a length requirement) but i hope you enjoy.
i wrote it in mid march.. about a month before i actually came back to the states.. it kind of sums up how i felt (even though after i wrote this i had soo many experiences meeting more and more new people, in new countries.. having fun, enjoying myself and growing up all at the same time!

Comparing Notes
I had met a girl, in a beer hall in Munich, Germany. She was an American studying in Barcelona Spain, we were two Americans from the opposite sides of the country both living in two different European countries, meeting in a completely different country over a liter of beer. Her name was Brittney she was very sweet and we had a good time, we exchanged email addresses and went out own ways. She was a very fun girl, and I was excited when I got an email from her a few weeks ago saying that she was going to be in London for the weekend and she wanted to meet up. We decided to plan on meeting her last night in London. She said that she had really wanted to see a big show before she left. The Lion King was sold out, but we had both heard good things about the show Avenue Q you know, the one with the puppets. I really didn’t know what I was getting myself into.

I had told her to buy tickets to whatever show she wanted to see, and she had them when I met up with her outside the Odeon theatre in Leicester Square. We exchanged big, frantic girlie hugs you know the kind, with high pitched voices and lots of fast, acute hand movements. We were excited to see each other again and even though it was planned it still felt so random. We really were just strangers who had bumped into each other one night nearly a month ago now, you might dare call us acquaintances but we were meeting up for a night out in London. We were meeting up and going to a show that neither of us knew anything about other than it was supposed to be funny, oh and we knew it had puppets in it but that was just from the posters in the tube.

She had bought our tickets from some last minute ticket stand in Leicester Square earlier in the day. The show started at eight, and it was only almost seven so we went to a nearby coffee shop and brought our little friendship up to speed as of the last time we talked, in Germany. We talked about where our travels went from the night we met, where we were going to next, how school had been and of course what she had thought of London. We had no problem talking to each other, I think it’s a girl thing. It was as if we had been the best of friends for years. We casually exchanged blows and anecdotes as if we were inseparable roommates, it was random and it did feel a little bit distant, but it was so much fun.

We finally did make our way to the theatre, and once we found our seats and made ourselves comfortable our conversation strayed for a few minutes. Instead of catching up with each other our attention shifted to the theatre we were in. Our seats were in the first balcony in the first row, we were really quite impressed. Our last minute tickets had landed us really great seats and we were just wrapping our heads around the fact that we were really going to be seeing a West End show. This idea spun our conversation in a whole new direction.

We stopped just talking about us and what we were doing and we started talking about why we were here. We found ourselves really amused with the idea that we were twenty one year old girls, both in their third year of college meeting up with strangers in a number of different countries. We compared this with what we thought of Europe and traveling Europe before we had experienced our time studying abroad. We just couldn’t believe it, we never knew how easy it was. Sure we thought, everyone says they want to travel Europe. We found ourselves so amused with the idea that we were actually doing it. That we had both been to numbers of different countries, seen so many things, had life shaping experiences and made globetrotting friends along the way. We weren’t gloating or using this time to one up each other by listing places we’d been or things we’d seen it was a time of real revelation. We were realizing for the first time that we had almost become so comfortable with our new ‘European’ lifestyles, just assuming that this traveling we were able to do was a normal part of it all. We had forgotten how nervous we were about going to our host country only a few months ago, and the daunting idea of traveling around on our spring break, and it all seeming so far away. Well now we had done it, and done it with ease and grace. We now were booking flights and reserving hostels in different countries any free weekend we had without a thought of nervousness or doubt.

We had strayed so far from our state of mind we occupied only a few months ago. We were humbled at this transformation that had taken place right before our eyes, and we envied the people who were going to do this after us. I think we sat quietly for a few minutes, just smiling to ourselves. It was something so individual and unique that we were experiencing. Each of us from our own places, but the themes were universal and I think we were pleasantly surprised to be able to finally put it into words, and with a stranger nonetheless. It brought us closer, we still don’t know very much about each other like where we came from or what the other likes or dislikes but we were able to see eye to eye on what we were experiencing and realize what that was doing to shape us. We may have only spent two nights together, a matter of hours but we were on the same page, we understood where each other was going and why it made sense. The house lights in the theatre began to dim and our conversation was forced to finally cease, but we were ok with that, we had learned a lot about each other and had been shown a lot about ourselves.