It's certainly been an adventurous couple of weeks...
I am really happy right now. :D It's about time.
Apart from a quick relapse last week... I apologise to my Facebook friends for yet another whiney status which was probably unwarranted. I immediately disliked that I had become one of those people, but I suppose it's not easy going cold turkey on depression when it's been prevalent for so long.
Here is a BLOODY LONG POST. I've split it into sections, and there are some lovely photos under the cuts too! :)
I had the best holiday in Rome & Barcelona, even if it didn't have the best start (and pre-start, we almost couldn't get to the airport!!). We flew out to Barca on the Sunday before last, and arrived to find that our hotel didn't exist. Seriously... we couldn't find it anywhere, so we went to another hostel round the corner and asked, and they had no idea. Went to a hotel across the road and they said, 'ah yes, people ask us where it is all the time, but no one has ever found it.' Great! Haha, so we went back to the hostel and they phoned the supposed place but there was no answer. In the end, we thankfully got a room at this hostel, for the same price too, and luckily I haven't been charged for the first place. It's called Buba House, in case anyone is planning a trip, lol.
After sorting our accommodation, we decided to walk to the Sagrada Familia. Unless you want to spend your entire holiday walking, don't do this. It took about an hour and a half to walk there and back, hahaha - we discovered that the Barcelona bus tours are stupidly popular for a reason. Needless to say, that's what we did on our second day. Everything in Barcelona is pretty spread out so it was definitely the best way to see things.
We flew to Rome on the Monday evening, the flight was kind of annoying because unlike easyJet et al, Vueling book your seats when you check in... and seated me & Ash apart!! Nice. It was only a couple of hours, but still, geez lol. We even checked in super early.
Anyway, we LOVED Rome! So, so much. We left the hotel around 10am and decided to make a relaxing day of it instead of rushing around trying to see everything like we normally do. We discovered one of our favourite places in the world, Trevi Fountain, hung out by the Victorian monument for a while (which is also just amazing), walked down the road to the Colosseum, then trekked over to Vatican City (which was kind of disappointing). On the way back, we stumbled across Piazza Navona, an incredible little square with lots of restaurants and fountains and lovely buildings. I checked the time: 4pm - and we had seen almost everything. So we stayed in the square and had a meal at one of the restaurants, proper spaghetti carbonara; it was gorgeous!
(my shoulders were sunburnt which is why I had them covered at the Colosseum, haha!)
But I love how everything is so close together, I love how every building is old, I love how they haven't tried to modernise the city at all, I love the ice cream, I love the monuments. Naturally, there were things I hated too. The traffic; drivers are CRAZY out there, the tourist crooks... like someone came over to us and put a budgie on Ash's head, then demanded 5€?!?!? He got really arsey with me so I think I gave him 20 cents before we ran off. Okay, so two things I hate. But I love everything, EVERYTHING else. It's just amazing.
On the second day, we found the Pantheon, which I thought was incredible, and Piazza di Spagna where we were met by more tourist crooks; a nasty blight on an otherwise lovely place. We actually ran out of things to do so we went back round everywhere before we caught our flight in the evening lol. I could spend a whole day sitting by the Trevi Fountain, seriously. Or by the Victorian monument.
So that was adventure #1. I had the best time, and we are definitely going back to Rome. Almost everyone who goes there lists it as a favourite place, and I can see why. It's just incredible.
Adventure #2 was this past weekend. We went up to Birmingham on Saturday afternoon to see a bunch of our friends and a certain band. It was AMAZING, sitting in Claire's garden in a big marquee tent watching them play songs no one's ever heard acoustically, and they all worked so well. Half way through, we had a break for pizza and jelly shots and whatever else... and then the tent blew away. IT WAS ACTUALLY HILARIOUS. The best bit is, it had just gone 6pm, the predicted time of the rapture. It was so funny, we spent the next ten minutes taking the whole thing down, which I'm pretty sure the band hadn't been expecting to have to do! So we had the rest of the set in the living room, which was rather... cosy lol. It was just awesome.
Naturally, getting to my sister's afterwards had to prove difficult. I hadn't got my car back (which was REALLY annoying and the reason behind my relapse from happiness, because in relying on public transport, we had to drop a few plans for the trip) so we got the bus into Brum city centre and then a train to Banbury. Except the train stopped in Leamington Spa and we had to get a bus from there, and it took foreverrrrrrrrandaday.
Anyway, it was AWESOME seeing my sister, I haven't seen her for far too long. She very much approved of Ash haha. Sunday was lovely in every way, we spent most of it chatting and watching TV and taking the piss, then wandered around Banbury, "seeing the sights", then watched the F1 and football updates, then went out for a drink before our train to Oxford. :D Unfortunately, the end of the day was pretty stressful because our bus from Oxford to London for some weird reason took FOREVER (despite no traffic, not many passengers etc), and we got to Victoria five minutes before our last train home, and everything was completely messed up so it was going to take us that time to figure out what we were doing lol.
Then the staff were beyond useless, the board said 'for buses from Purley to Oxted, get the train to Eastbourne' (which is what we needed) so we jumped on that train... which said nothing about Purley. Then we heard the platform staff telling someone that no, this train wouldn't go to Purley but we could change at East Croydon. So we stayed on the train, got off at East Croydon, and the board there said it WAS going to Purley. So Ash asked the conductor, and YES, it's going to Purley. OMG. SO we got back on the same train, loads of other people had got off like we did and were waiting, some of them overheard and jumped straight back on, but no one really knew what was right so it was absolute chaos! ANYWAY we stopped at Purley. Got the bus to Oxted, to find that instead of a bus from there to Uckfield that would get in at 1.15am, it would be a train that ended up getting in at 12.30am, so that was a nice change. The best thing was we only paid for a ticket to Oxted, haha.
Ash has decided he wants to live in Banbury. I think I quite like the idea, too. It's never been something I've considered as Scotland is very much calling to me, but I think it may well grow on me. It's nice, it's friendly, it's got lots of shops and pubs but it's not too oppressive like a city, it's close to Stratford (which will always be one of my favourite places in the world), it has good links with London (AND later trains back than to Uckfield, which is funny), as well as Birmingham and Oxford, I would get to see my sisters all the time, it's slightly closer to home, it's much closer to Ash's "home"... I don't know. It would be nice because it's where my Dad and his family are from, but then Scotland will always be my home and my heritage, and Ash & I both had our hearts set on living in or near Edinburgh... but I think I can imagine this happening.
All in all I am just really happy at the moment. A few things happened on Monday that would normally have irked me a little, but I didn't even care. I also got my car back today, which is SUCH a relief, even if it does mean I'm £500 down. I honestly don't care. I'm just happy. I've spent a year and a half trying to get back to this. :D