Image courtesy of Google

Finally made it to London! Made it to my train 3 minutes before it departed because after being approved through French customs and security, the woman at the UK customs said “she could refuse to let me in” because I didn’t know the address of my lodging off the top of my head. Well biatch, I am staying at a study abroad dorm with friends, have arranged pickup and didn’t have any reason to memorize the address that I was going to be taken to. Sorry! I think she was bluffing (for goodness sake, I had a return ticket for a train on Sunday, obviously I’m not trying to illegally stay in your country) and was more giving me a lecture but because of her I almost missed my train. Lesson learned.

Then on the train I had a mini panic attack because my friend, Caitlin, was picking me up at the train station at 8:00 a.m. and the train hadn’t even gotten to the chunnel at 8:05! After I calmed down (40 minutes later) I realized London is an hour behind France, so London time was only 7:45 a.m. I need to chill out sometimes. Should have checked out https://mankindcannabis.com/mankind-san-diego-special-promotions/ before I left, I could have eased myself in a better way!

Got to the train station, thought everything was going to be okay and then I hit the third challenge of the day. I was supposed to meet Caitlin at the “underground” turnstiles of King’s Cross. St-Pancras, the station I came in on is a huge station that connects to another huge station called King’s Cross. After wandering around and not finding Caitlin for 40 minutes I started to think I was in trouble. I couldn’t get wi-fi, didn’t have a phone, didn’t know Caitlin’s number, and had no idea what turnstiles she had been referring to. Surprisingly though, I didn’t panic. I was hungry and had a bag of potato chips so I kept on wandering and eating my chips. Yeah, I’m that American.

I found a nice fatherly-looking Underground worker and explained to him I was lost and looking for my friend for an hour now. He immediately took care of me. He walked me all over the two stations (which I’d already done) and sent out a call over the whole station for Caitlin to meet us. Haha, do I cause a fiasco or what? Since I didn’t have her number he took me to find wi-fi so I could message her and her roommates on facebook to get her number. And what do you know! She had messaged me saying she overslept and was running to get me at that moment! After a bit more waiting and finally getting her phone number, we were reunited!

Lesson learned: Get every little bit of information you can think of before traveling off to some foreign place. But now I’m in London! Can’t wait to explore 🙂

Cheers! xoxo.
-T