Let's make a list of who we need and it's not much, if anything

I got locked into a showroom by myself for 20 minutes today. kind of scary until i realized it was 20 minutes of personal time with the recent ss2010 collection. not the worst situation in the world i guess.  luckily i mcgyvered my way out through a little hallway that opened up into the editing area....not awkward at all. nope. 

tomorrow is already friday. time is going by so fast and it is NOT OKAY. 

ps- where the wild things are comes out tomorrow OMGidhgfaoghagfoihaoh

someday my prince will come

...and his name will be christopher bailey.

he walked past my desk today. my heart actually stopped.

sigh.

the highest concentration of trench coats in the whole wide world

I survived my very first day at Burberry! Granted, it was an over 9 hour long first day but I still looved it.  My boss is very nice and I got to do some legitimate work as well as sit in on a creative meeting in the morning.  I also had a major Glamour flashback when I had to wheel some garment racks to the showroom. Oh, to be an intern. 

And yes, the stereotype is true-everyone wears a trench coat. EVERYONE. It's like a Burberry army in the middle of London.

My Burberry "Induction"

This morning I had to go to my "induction" at Burberry, which in more familiar terms means orientation.  I was pleasantly surprised to find out it was an orientation for new hires (poetic foreshadowing??) and got the low down on Burberry's history, a tour of the building and showrooms, and watched the recent ss2010 Prorsom show.  We also found out that the CEO Angela Ahrendts and Creative Director Christopher Bailey work on the 7th floor and we'll probably see them in the lift.  We were told that they are very friendly and will most likely say hi and talk to us on the ride! AMAZING. 

Tomorrow is my first day ahhh

Vienna Day 2: "When in Vienna"

We woke up extremely late and caught a tram into the city center to meet Kerstin, an old friend from high school who lives in Vienna.  She showed us around the major sights, including the Hofburg and many large museums.  In fact, a lot of Vienna is very large, very pretty buildings.  The Hofburg itself is an imposing palace that takes up the equivalent of about two city blocks.  Kerstin then walked us through a big outdoor food market before having to leave us for a while to work on a project. 

We continued wandering and saw their Parliament and Town Hall.  Their Town Hall is an enormous place with an intricate church-like façade.  In front of their Town Hall was a circus/food fair going on so we stopped and tried out some fried dough and jam.  Then we went into the Treasury to see some interesting artifacts-the Roman Empire’s crown jewels, a unicorn horn, the Holy Lance, and the supposed Holy Grail! My favorite was definitely the 8 foot tall unicorn horn :) 

After freshening up at the “hostel”and clearing up some language barrier problems, we went back to the food festival outside the Town Hall for dinner.  Next we hopped onto a tram to the “Bermuda Triangle”, an area by the Danube channel full of small bars and a popular place to bar hop.  The first bar we went to was tiny but had a ton of cheap drinks to be drunk. There we met a bachelorette party that was selling small trinkets to help raise money for the wedding (or drinks? same difference).  I bought a cola flavored sucker for 1 Euro.  The next place we sat and relaxed for a while as the boys drank liters of beer, Viennafest style.

At that point we met up with Kerstin and her friends at a bar/club place nearby.  To be more specific, it was a big boat docked in the Danube channel. Oh yeah.  The main floor was a bar and the level below was a dance floor. The music in Vienna was incredible-they love their 80’s and early 90’s hits! We tried over and over again to request anything new and failed and failed and failed.  The scene was totally different than what we were used to in London but we had a blast partying with a bunch of Austrian kids. When in Vienna!

After miraculously finding out way back to the “hostel”, we caught a couple of hours of sleep and then took a train to Bratislava to catch our flight back to Londontown.

EUROTRIP=SUCCESS

Vienna Day 1: "Nein! Nein! Nein!"

We took a train into Vienna and arrived at our Hostel mid afternoon.  Well, hostel might not be the most appropriate word for our living accommodations.  It was more like a smelly sauna of an apartment run by a small Asian woman who also lived there….I wish I was joking. The upside was that we were the only people there (since uh it was an apartment) and within walking distance to the city center. 

All sufficiently starving we walked a few blocks away to grab dinner.  We were greeted by an old Austrian man who sat us with menus completely in German. We ended up ordering some dishes of meat after some major deliberation and lucked out with a very satisfying and filling dinner. 

We pulled ourselves together and wandered toward the city center, aka the 1^st district.  We settled into our first place that was part café, part bar and had huge paintings on each wall.  Some of the boys wanted to play pool so we went to the back room. Ian immediately spilled beer onto the pool table.  The very large Austrian owner comes running over, sees the beer on the table, and EXPLODES. He was yelling “Nein! Nein! Nein!” and flailing his arms everywhere.  We all just stood around awkwardly as he spewed (probably profane) German at us.  Ian apologized and the big owner calmed down, but we still took it as our sign to leave.  We stopped at another bar before getting to the main road in the city center and decided to be really cultural and finish our night at McDonald’s for a mouthwatering McFlurry. (side note-Potato Strips are Austrian McDonald’s fries on steroids and have changed my view of versions of potatoes forever…)

Budapest Day 2: "Cinnamon and Oranges"

After sleeping in late to recover from the previous night’s activities, we set out on our quest to experience a traditional Budapest bath.  After buying some European style (read: small) swimsuits we walked across the bridge to the Buda side to go to the Gellert baths, a huge complex with outdoor and indoor Roman style baths.  The lobby area was a huge marble room with high ceilings and a dome center. Here are some pictures from the Gellert website of the two big pools:

After our bath we hiked up the nearby mountain to get a good view of the city.  At the top we could see 360 degrees of the area, it was so beautiful. We ended the sightseeing by walking through the palace and across the cable bridge at sunset. 

Budapest Nightlife: Part 2

That night we planned our own pub crawl using a Time Out magazine and marked up another map with dots.  Finding the bars this night proved just as difficult…

Bar 1:

Accidently ended up at the cave bar again! We sat back in our little cement corner to start off our night. 

Bar 2:

This bar seemed non-existent.  We asked locals that spoke English where it was and they said they had never even heard of it.  One block further and we walk past some guys standing outside of a big door covered with thick, dark fabric and of course it turns out it was the place we were looking for.  This place was also partly outdoors with totally random seating arrangements and interesting art stuck in every corner of each room and all around the ceilings.  We sat at a table next to plywood walls with a big red couch recessed into the back wall.  The bathroom was next to a weird empty room and the stalls were covered with old broken computer keyboards.  We decide to get the party started with some tequila shots and made one of the best discoveries ever.  In Hungary, they take tequila shots with cinnamon and oranges.  Yes, seriously.  You sprinkle cinnamon on each side of an orange wedge and shove it in your mouth after the shot.  It sounds insane but is so far superior to our salt/lime method.  Needless to say we took many tequila shots this night.

Bar 3:

We ended our time in Budapest by going back to the very first bar we went to with the pommel horse seating.  We were brave and took a traditional Hungarian shot, which is not for the faint of heart. 

Budapest Day 1: "Just follow the dots!"

We arrived in Budapest Wednesday around noon, after a little..delay departing from Luton airport. After quickly dropping off our stuff at the hostel we started walking along the Danube river since it was a beautiful 80 degrees outside.  On the west side of the river was hilly Buda and on the east side of the river was flat Pest.  We walked a big circle around Pest and down Andrassy Avenue to see the main sights including the Chain Bridge, St. Stephen’s Basilica, Parliament, The House of Terror, the Opera House, and Heroes’ Square.  Budapest architecture is an interesting mix of styles and influences, we passed everything from Roman to Gothic. 

We stopped at the House of Terror, a museum made in the honor of those affected by the rule of fascist and communist regimes in Hungary in the actual building that both parties headquartered.  It was extremely well done and pretty depressing.  But I did learn a lot about the history of Hungary, a country I admit I know very little about, and it made everything we saw have much more context. 

Our first night, after dinner at a restaurant that had traditional Hungarian food, we made friends with some Australians while pre-gaming at our hostel.  Our new bestie Carl led the way on a pub crawl to bars nearby with a map marked up with dot destinations.  We followed the dots to the most unique, incredible bars I have ever been to.

Budapest Nightlife, Part 1

First of all, there is no street full of bars or even area of bars in Budapest.  We quickly discovered that from the outside the best places look like the worst, or not even a bar at all.

Bar 1:

The first stop was a bar made from what looked like an abandoned warehouse.  Once through a few rooms the place opened up to the outside with a bar on one side and large tables and other seating to the right.  The seating included benches, a pommel horse, old bathtubs turned into couches, and a Red Bull car converted into a loveseat.  Throughout the place there were also big torches of fire on the ground.  A huge canopy hung over part of the roof.  Needless to say we were not expecting this from the dingy black opening guarded by large men in leather jackets.  We sat and talked for a while with the Aussies, a Brazilian, and a Swedish girl (bringing the Swedish population of the bar to 1.5! haha).

Bar 2: 

This bar looked like the sketchiest place I had ever seen from the outside.  The entrance was cement steps leading down into a small room with graffiti covered walls.  The group went to the back room to sit, which was a huge cement room with low walls-totally batman's cave. 

Bar/club 3: 

We had given up on finding the last dot on our map and were about to buy a kebab when someone realized that the large, unmarked metal doors were actually our destination.  Once inside we walked up five flights of metal stairs that opened up to a dark bar with red lights.  Up another flight of stairs we find ourselves on a huge rooftop with tons of chairs and a big bar in the corner. We heard that the very dedicated partyers stay on the roof to watch the sunrise. After some time on the rooftop we went downstairs and cut through the coat check to the dance floor.  We ended the night with a kebab (a special vegetarian one for me) and found our way all the way back to our hostel around 5 am. 

So long, farewell, auf Wiedersehen, adieu!

Just finished my last final! It's dreary and gray and rainy and blah here in London so the weather forecast for Eastern Europe is a pleasant surprise-80 and sunny the whole time. AMAZING. 

I'm off for my European adventure in just a matter of hours! 

ahhhhh

You feel it when the dance gets hot

Lately, I feel like my life has revolved around Arch Angel.  

This past week I have been celebrating my last chances of irresponsibility before starting my internship.  I'm starting to feel a little better about exploring London; went to Covent Garden on Wednesday and Picadilly on Saturday.  But the highlight of my recent debauchery was this past Friday night.

Alexis and I decided it would be a good idea to do a pub crawl around South Kensington.  I took advantage of my free texting and announced through mass messages that the pub crawl would be commencing at 8 pm.  Apparently everyone thought this idea was good because within an hour we had over 25 people on our "crawl".  The reason it was only a "crawl" was because we spent too much time playing games at Imperial to finish anything more than two other pubs down the street.  I had an amazing time and we of course ended up at Arch Angel to finish off the night.  We also found out that there really is a legitimate pub crawl around our area and at the end you get a free t-shirt so that is obviously happening in the near future. (shout out to Hillary and her unfortunate but hilarious head injury-please watch out for walls hahaha)

Tomorrow I have one last final and then I leave for break, true Eurotrip style.  Me and four guys from my program are spending two days in Budapest, Hungary, one day in Bratislava, Slovakia, and two days in Vienna, Austria.  I can't wait to experience Eastern Europe, especially because I feel like these places are somewhere I may not get a chance to go to again.  I'll leave you with this little morsel of where I may be going to (try watching from 2:00) Eurotrip: Bratislava