wonderstruck and wanderluxe

It's official, Steven and I have plane tickets for Manchester, leaving on May 13th and returning May 28th!

This makes everything feel so real, I can't believe that in less than two months I'll be in London. I've never been anywhere in Europe before, only North America and Asia! Next year I'll hopefully cross Australia off the list of continents I've yet to visit as well.

I think this is doubly exciting for me because London could potentially be home to me someday. I have a British passport that enables me to work in the UK, and I've been thinking about living in another country after I graduate for a while now. At the moment it's between London and Hong Kong, as I will not have to bother with getting a work visa in either, and I am leaning more towards London. Honestly, I love Hong Kong, I was born there, raised there, I've spent so many happy summers there...but this is about striking out on my own, becoming truly independent for the first time in my life, and I couldn't do that in Hong Kong. There are too many safety nets there, too much family to fall back on if I run into trouble, or get lonely.

Just thinking about it makes me nervous, but I feel like it's something I have to do. I don't want to grow old and look back on my entire life knowing I spent the whole thing living in a giant sheltered bubble. Besides, the way I see it, if I'm going to struggle to understand boys and their ridiculous antics, I might as well struggle to understand cute British boys and their ridiculous antics.

Evidently, I have become a wee bit obsessed with blogging. Or at the very least a wee bit obsessed with procrastinating. Either way, it's getting in the way of all real work, and yesterday I had to literally sprint in my heels to my marketing class because it took me so long to finish my paper because I spent all that time starting this blog instead. Priorities, they are a foreign concept to me.

Anyway, in my marketing project group there is a lovely girl named Julie, she's from France, Lyon, I believe. I could creep her facebook to be sure, but it's not really that relevant. The point is, her brother lives in Paris and she has given me a list of places we must visit when we're in gay Paris for the weekend! I'm listing it all here so I don't lose the pages, and I've also taken the liberty of adding other places I wish to visit too. Think of it as a sort of Parisian bucket list, when the time comes I will document each of these places and share them here!

The world lost another great actress of the golden age on March 23rd. After 79 years on earth, eight marriages, two academy awards, and countless jewels, Dame Elizabeth Taylor succumbed to congestive heart failure. She's to be buried today, and my heart is heavy.

I adore old movies, I love the nostalgic feel of black and whites and grainy, soft colours of technicolor films. Since a young age I've been admiring and attempting to emulate the class and grace of actresses from the 40's and 50's. Audrey Hepburn, Katharine Hepburn, Grace Kelly, Ingrid Bergman, they all carried themselves with an air of dignity that I could never dream of possessing, but amongst all these great female legends, I don't think any of them could hold a candle to the beautiful and vivacious Elizabeth Taylor. When you watch one of her films she just draws you in, every seductive gaze, every longing sigh, every passionate outburst, you can't tear your eyes away from her, she simply steals the scene.

I wonder how many times I can make that Friends reference before somebody slaps me?

It occurred to me today that I may watch too much television, or at the very least too much Friends. (I know, what a blasphemous thing to say!) I constantly find myself quoting the show and being met with blank stares, especially with my younger coworkers. I always forget that the show ended before they were even in high school, and that I am well on my way to becoming a spinster whose best relationship is with her DVD collection.

Moving on to the actual point of this post, Steven and I decided to start a blog together (as demonstrated by this blog here), to document our trip to...where else, London, England! Though knowing me, there will also be plenty of non-travel related ramblings on here. Steven has a tumblr to project his randomness onto, but I will be terrorizing you with my many many many different interests here as I have no other outlet/I am too lazy to create a different outlet/if I had another outlet I may as well drop out of school now because I would never leave the realms of the internet again.

Outlet is one of those fun words with lots of different meanings...electrical outlets, outlet malls, creative outlet, etc etc. Bean pretty much only means one thing. Beans. Unless you are an old man from the UK, in which case I suppose you may address your chums as "old bean".

My very first post, and I've only managed to stay on topic for one sentence. This does not appear to be a good start.