Back from Belgium & new layout!

Yay I’m back! New layout up too! Aren’t I organised?! It’s pretty plain, but only so the focus of the layout is my photos For those of you who have seen my MSN name, I have mosquito bites, lol. They itch like crazy Anyway, I had a fantastic time, and I’ll summarise the days for you as briefly as possible, although a lot happened.
29th June
At college for about 7am, met up with everyone and got on the coach about 7:45 because it was pretty late coming lol. Went by coach to Dover which took about 7 hours (or more) because there was a small traffic jam, it takes ages anyway because it’s right in the south east and I live in the north west. We missed the ferry we were supposed to get and so ended up getting one an hour later, but which was faster. Got to Calais, France about 5-6pm and drove on to the hotel. It was quite nice, I shared a room with my friend Hannah and we had our own bathroom and TV and stuff which we thought we might not have so that was good. The food was pretty horrible there though, but I can’t really complain because we didn’t pay that much to go on the trip in the first place lol. After dinner we (about 8 of us then) decided to walk up the main road to see if there was anywhere to buy alcohol, which there wasn’t lol so we walked back and had to buy it from the tiny crappy bar. We all sat outside though with everyone else and had like 4 bottles of wine between the 5 of us, and spent like £40 the first night on drink lol. It was really funny, the people from the other college campus (who we didn’t know) were playing kids’ games like ‘What time is it Mr Wolf?’ and they weren’t even drunk, although we didn’t know that at the time! One of my friends got really upset though, and started crying hysterically, at which point loads of French people came out of the hotel to complain. However, my friend Tom (he’s the one doing the meerkat impression on this layout, lol) managed to talk them out of it, as he speaks great French and lots of other languages Then my other friend started crying, and we ended up talking till about 4am (we were sharing a room), which wasn’t great because breakfast was at 8. I was thinking, so much for coming on this trip to relax and de-stress!
30th June
Spent a while looking round the Somme and at loads of graves from World War One, which got really depressing after about 30 seconds. Some of the graves were really, really close together – those were the ones were they couldn’t untangle the bodies to bury them, so they had to be buried together. There were also graves which said ‘An unknown soldier’ which I thought was really sad too. Then we travelled to Belgium, which took forever. We had dinner at some restaurant with horrible food, and the guys at the bar leered at two of my friends when they went to get drinks which was disgusting. When we got to the hotel where we were staying, we’d increased our group to about 12, 2-3 of which were mad people from the other college. The teachers told us we had to meet them in the hotel bar (which was closed) at 11:15pm. So we went to the bar, and only a couple of us stayed sober. Everyone drank loads more than they had done the night before. Then about 11 we went back to the hotel, and my friend who was crying the first night was throwing up all over our room and our bathroom, and it was just mad. One of my other friends was crying because of that, and two of my other friends were crying for some reason no one knew (although I have my suspicions). Anyway, at that point, this girl from our college that we don’t like came up onto our floor and saw the people from the other college (who were quietly drunk) coming up the stairs and was like, ‘God, the people from that college can’t hold their drink’ (!!) Which I thought was just about the most ironic thing I had ever heard. Anyway, we were totally panicking, especially me, because I was with 2 sober people, one of which was completely hyper all the time, and both of which I’d literally only known for a few hours. Plus, we had actually lost some people in our group. We decided to go get the teachers from the bar. It was about 11:20pm at this point, and we met them coming across the road. They were pretty drunk too, and we were like, ‘Oh shit!’. My old English teacher actually shouted to us, ‘You’re going the wrong way!’, and we were like, Thanks. That’s sooo helpful. Anyway, they quickly sobered up when we got to the hotel and we told them what was going on. Our room looked and smelled disgusting. In the end, Hannah and Alice both stayed in it with one of the teachers, as Alice was still throwing up, and Laura slept in our friends’ room across the corridor. I ended up sharing the teachers’ room with Shelia, who was really nice but it was still freaky lol. It was chaos for a few hours after that, especially with the people from the other college who didn’t want to go to sleep. At one point I was in my nightie (which is really an oversized t-shirt), and I was in the teachers’ room with Tom, who was updating me on the current events and asking me if I was okay, when my old English teacher walked past and saw me. I was really embarrassed lol, but he didn’t seem to notice. I had fun listening to Shelia’s conversation with the other female teacher, Sarah, when they thought I was asleep. As you can imagine, the things they said about Alice and Hannah weren’t too nice lol. However, Alice and Hannah we really pissed off because they had to pay about 30 euros in damages to the room, but they were convinced that Sarah, the teacher who stayed in with them, threw up on the floor as well. Eww.
1st July
When I woke up, I felt awful, but because I’d actually had more than a couple of hours’ sleep, I did feel quite refreshed at the same time. The teachers’ room was also much nicer than our ones, so I had a great shower and borrowed Shelia’s hairdryer. Surprisingly, only the teachers had hangovers. Oh the joys of being young . Got on the coach, and saw graves of all different nationalities that day. We also visited a very Irish part of Belgium, with the Ulster tower, although we stopped for lunch there and I didn’t actually go in because we had literally 2 minutes left and I couldn’t be bothered lol. We went to see the statue shown on the right of this layout, and had a huge arugment about what it actually was, lol (it’s officially a stag or something). We also did meerkat impressions for our photos. These random Irish guys asked they could be in our photos, so we agreed and took pics of them too haha. We visited the famous Flanders Fields (poppies). We also went to see a German graveyard. It was much smaller than the others, and there were at least 4 bodies in each grave. There was also one (small) area with bushes planted on top, which our tour guide said had 25,000 bodies inside. All around the edge were stones with the names of the soldiers on them. It was horrible. We also visited so many other places – parks, trenches, mine craters etc. that I can’t even remember what days they come in on. We did loads of stuff though, as you can guess, getting up about 7am and going to sleep about 3am. That night, we all decided to stay in and play random games and stuff. It was really fun, and no one got drunk. I really didn’t want to sleep in our room though, because it still smelt horrible. When the teachers came up and told us to go to bed, no one wanted to go, so about 8 people hid in the bathroom which was hilarious. We would’ve got away with it as well if people hadn’t made so much noise straight after the teachers left, lol. Laura, Hannah, Alice and I were planning to have an early night, but Tom and James came into our room and broke the wardrboe. Twice! Lol. We were making so much noise the gay guy (Evil Simon) in the room next to us got out of the roof (there was a flat roof outside our window) and told us to be quiet, lol. Laura started Tom laughing, and he was trying to be quiet so hard he started snorting which was even funnier. None of us could stop laughing. In the end, they probably went about 3am.
2nd July
We went to this cool vending machine before we left. It was floor to ceiling outside, covered a whole wall and had everything from frozen pizza to wine and cat food. It was amazing, lol. This metal thing went to the thing you wanted, and carried it back to the deposit box thing. It was just so great haha. We went shopping, and attempted to speak a few words of Flemish (a sort of Dutch-French), which is what they spoke in the part we went to. Then we went to Ieper, and spent about an hour shopping which was fun. Unfortunately, my friend Ellen accidentally pushed over this railing, which in turned pushed over about ten others all down the street lol. So as you can see, we caused destruction everywhere we went. We like to be consistent. Then we had the long coach drive back, which wasn’t too bad although the ferry was delayed for about an hour and no one knew why. At the service station, I bought Cosmo and Mad Kirsty bought Shout (a magazine for 10 year olds), because my sister bought the issue before and it had a problem on the problem page about a girl who was laughed at because she told her friends she believed in unicorns. However, it turned out to be a different ‘summer special’, which was all those flow chart quizzes. We had a laugh on the coach with those, especially because I did ones on Tom such as ‘Which Busted boy would you date’, and ‘What kind of girl are you?’ We also made up our own x-rated flow chart to send in for the competition, haha. The journey back seemed much faster, and it took away some of the sadness of going back to everyday routine, although I must say I missed fresh fruit and veg., and my bed, and it is good to be home.
All I can say is, I can’t wait till the Florence, Italy trip! I hope there is one lol