Well, mum suggested that I keep a diary of what me and KT get up to on our holiday. And this is it. I’ve no idea how successful I’ll be at keeping it up to date, since if anything fun and exciting happens, I probably won’t have time for updates. So this may well end up as an account of just the slowest and most boring parts of the trip. But we’ll see how it goes.
Some background here first off: We originally heard about this trip somewhere near the start of this year. One of my random internet friends - name of Steve, AKA ‘The Tall Man’ - on the guynsmith.com website posted a message that read, "Fancy a trip to Transylvania? (not a joke!!)". As soon as I read it, I thought of KT, since (as you know) she is one of the biggest vampire freaks in existence. At that point I didn’t really think it would go much further, but amazingly it did - we got in touch with the guys organising the trip (‘The London Vampyre Group’, would you believe?), got the details and signed up. Approximately eight or so months later, here we are (‘here’ being a train sat at Paddington Station at this precise moment) en route to Romania.
This is a truly epic trip. I’ll go into details of the itinerary as and when it happens, because otherwise I’ll be burbling on for hours here. But it’s already an epic trip in other ways - for a start, we’re going away for two weeks, making this the longest I will ever have been away from Jacob, and the longest that KT’s ever been away from Sam. This single fact has been bugging me right from the start incidentally. I hate leaving Jacob just while I go to work, so I don’t know how the hell I’m going to cope with being away from him for two whole weeks. It makes me want to break down and cry just thinking about it. I know that mum and dad will obviously look after him fine, but that doesn’t make me feel any less guilty about going away and leaving him.
Continuing on this tangent just for a moment (and then I promise I’ll get on to talking about the trip) - I rather stupidly asked Regular John for his thoughts on this problem. After all, he’s been away from Jacob for two months recently, so I asked him how he’d coped with it. He didn’t seem to understand the question though, just shrugging it off and saying that it didn’t bother him because he knew there was nothing he could do about it. Strangely enough, the person that’s been most understanding about why I’m getting weirded out is KT, and that’s because she’s going through exactly the same thing with Sam. Just think on that little fact for a moment… is that irony, or is that something else?
Anyway, I’m getting way off topic here. Today, on the first leg of our trip, KT and me have travelled to London. We’re not flying out to Romania till tomorrow, but there wasn’t a convenient connecting flight, so we decided to make a virtue of necessity and fly out a day early and go play in London for today. I’ve always found that London is a wonderful and occasionally very scary place - I’m almost certain that I couldn’t live here, it would just freak me out every time I looked out of my window. But it’s a great place to visit, so long as you like doing the whole tourist thing. Last time I was here (with Regular John… oops, this is turning into a bit of an anti-ex-husband diary so far, isn’t it? I promise I’ll stop that soon), we just ended up wandering the streets because John didn’t want to do anything touristy. So eventually I managed to lose him, then had dinner in Planet Hollywood, window-shopped in Hamleys and Harrods, had coffee at Starbucks, then went to see "Cat on a Hot Tin Roof" with Brendan Fraser (as in he was in it, not actually with me, mores the pity). Regular John went back to the hotel for a nap.
KT, bless the cotton socks that I rather tactlessly bought her, loves tourist stuff. We’ve really come to London a day early specifically so that we can go have some fun. And our first stop is… The London Dungeons.
KT’s been going on about the Dungeons for… hmm, probably about ten years now, but this is my first visit. It’s one of these semi-interactive exhibition places, with people dressed up in costume showing you around and occasionally jumping out to scare the beejasus out of you. I have high hopes for the place, since KT’s been raving about it for so long, and when we get there it turns out to be damn good fun. Maybe not as much fun as I’d been expecting, but considering the build-up I’ve been given, I doubt that anything would have been that fun. There’s obviously been a lot of thought and imagination gone into the exhibitions - the ones on the Black Death and Jack the Ripper are particularly effective, and some are genuinely freaky. Right near the end, during the Great Fire of London exhibition, I got so freaked out that I damn near have a panic attack. The tour guide leads you through these tiny winding passageways that are filled with dry ice and flickering orange lights and fiery sound effects, and it scared the hell out of me. It was ace, but I doubt I’ll be bringing Jacob there any time in the near future.
As I mentioned, The Dungeons are populated by people in costume who lurk in the dark and wait for someone particularly jumpy to walk past. Since I myself am particularly jumpy, I got more than my fair share of people jumping out of the dark at me. I screamed so much that I got all dehydrated and gave myself a headache… honestly, you just can’t take me anywhere.
We took several photos of the people in costume, so hopefully they’ll come out and I’ll be able to post them up for you guys to see. KT’s brought ten camera films with her, incidentally. Ten! That’s a lot of photos. Wait, let’s do some maths here - ten films, with thirty-six photos on each film… I wonder if she knows she’s planning on taking three hundred and sixty photos in the next two weeks. Actually, she probably does, I wouldn’t put it past her in the slightest.
(Note from Future Rakie - I can just shut up in fact, because I ended up taking roughly two hundred and fifty photos myself. Oops.)
So, after the Dungeons, we go Tube-Hopping, which is one of my favourite sports. I love the London Tube system, but that’s probably since (touch wood) I’ve never so far had a bad experience on it. I guess that if I happened to get stuck inside it during a heatwave for an hour or two my opinion would probably change, but as of this moment, I think it’s ace. I love really stupid things about it - the smell, the blasts of air that precede the trains arriving, the endless tiled corridors, the pointless adverts that all have chewing gum stuck on them, the fact that it always reminds me of that bit in ‘American Werewolf in London’… I suspect that given a free day and a Zone 1 Pass I could quite happily amuse myself for hours just hopping on and off tube trains.
KT’s not so keen on Tube-Hopping as a fun activity. She gets a little confused by all the different lines (not helped by the fact that all the lines are colour coded, but the tube map I printed off the net is in black and white), and takes to following me around and just trusting that I know where I’m going. Which, obviously, I do. Oh sure, one time I blindly lead us onto the wrong train, but that’s just part of the fun, and it’s not like we end up TOO much out of our way.
After the Tube-Hopping shenanigans, we go to Hamleys, the world’s best toy shop. Seriously. It has five floors and you can just go in and play there for hours at a time. There’re loads of staff members placed strategically around the store, showing off cool products and generally looking like they have the most fun job in the world. I have bought so much crap from that shop just because some random cute guy took the time and effort to show me how cool it was.
We play with some hover disks and very nearly brain some random passers-by, try on a load of cool dressing-up stuff, and climb into an Interactive Fun Tree. Unfortunately, it turns out to be an INTERACTIVE FUN TREE OF DOOM, because it causes KT to split her pants while she’s crawling out of it. I lend her a safety pin, but she is still really not best pleased about it. And with due cause, I’d say.
So now we’re on a train, bound for Reading (unless I’ve got us lost again, in which case I’ve got no idea where we’ll end up), going to check into our overnight hotel and then meet up with some of the random weirdos that are coming on holiday with us. Our contact’s name is Dave, and apparently he’s a big ginger guy who lives in Reading (and that’s the entire extent of my knowledge about him). I spoke to him on the phone this morning and he sounds cool… he said that he’d been to the pub we’re meeting in the night before, ‘just to check that it was still there’. Oh man, I’m so nervous about meeting all these people… God knows what they’re going to be like.
Oh, something I forgot that happened today - we were on the tube, and we got chatting to the most random American ladies ever. They sat down next to me and KT, then asked KT why there was an empty whisky bottle on the seat next to her. Which is really a good question, although I swear that we had nothing to do with it. Anyway, these old ladies start chatting to KT and me (but mostly KT), and they’re really nice and very friendly. When they leave, they take the whisky with them. We have no idea why.
After they get off the train, KT sums it up quite nicely. ‘Y’know when you’re watching a "coming-of-age" type movie or something where a kid goes out and ends up talking to an older and wiser version of himself? I think that’s what just happened here.’
I think she may have a point. I’m hoping that it’s a good omen, but KT reckons it’s a sign that when we’re that age we’re still going to be going on holiday together and having random epics on the Tube. Oh well, that couldn’t be that bad… right?
TO BE CONTINUED!