'If adventures will not befall a young lady in her own village, then she must seek them abroad.'

At the start of this summer I went on a travel. Only a mini travel. Only two cities and only seven nights, but still, it was a travel. A travel that was planned to satisfy both general curiosity and long distance frustrations. 

I generally refrain from posting about my relationship in any non-personal online forums, i.e my Twitter or my blog; any boyfriend based content is strictly reserved for either my Facebook or my Instagram, both of which are private.
A quick update for any readers whom may not know me in a personal context: I am in a relationship, and have been for more than four years, the majority of my teenage life. That's all there is to it, really. 
Long distance relationships that haven't been long distance before are hard, everybody knows that and therefore I won't bother boring anybody with any form of explanation, but this trip was certainly something to which we both looked forward during an extremely long second term of A Levels and First Year. 

Amsterdam

Our first (air)port of call was Amsterdam. I wish I could provide you with a really detailed and adventurous journey story at this point, but doing so would be a complete fabrication. The truth is, we drove the fifteen minutes down the M42 to Birmingham Airport, (open invitation right there to figure out where I live), checked in, had breakfast and got on the plane. It was about seven minutes delayed. That's it. Forty minutes later we were in Amsterdam. 

The first thing to note about Amsterdam would be how small the city centre is; a walk from our point of arrival, Centraal Station, to the Museum Square which are on the opposite extremities of the city centre took less than half an hour. 

It wasn't long before I found myself taking the first of many clichéd pictures.

I should probably note right now that the majority of my holiday pictures don't actually include myself or my boyfriend. Neither of us particularly enjoy having our photo taken and we were also too scared to hand our phones to strangers in foreign cities. The photo album is basically a collection of photos of other people doing the things that we also did. 

Apart from this one, I didn't climb the 'IAmsterdam' sign because my legs were too short. 

 Museum Square was where we encountered the first of our problems, not only is it absolutely massive, which in itself wasn't that much of a problem, but it resembles a spider in layout: lots of spindly legs coming off one, hairy, tourist packed body.

Stupid, semi-ignorant me thought that speaking French alongside a little German would be enough to get me by in Amsterdam, and would have proven to do so if I had actually known the place to which I was headed.  Tip Number One: Know where you're going and know how to spell it.  There was a highly confusing situation involving two streets, one of which was named the Larreisestraat and the other of which was named the Leiderstraat. Those two words sound remarkably similar in Dutch when spoken properly. We were offered directions by several lovely locals but our confusion and terrible pronunciation meant that we were being sent from one street to the other and then back again.    What ensued was a sweaty and swear-y march around the entirety of the Museumplein, trust me, that is no small feat.  A museum guide, with the help of Google, eventually saved us. Thank you, Museum Man. 

This neatly leads me on to Tip Number Two:  Do NOT go city travelling during Europe's warmest week of the previous decade. That hour with the suitcases was uncomfortable enough, but the only thing that even remotely tarnished the week for me was the heat, there was only one day where the temperatures dropped below 36 Celsius during the day. Sweaty, tired and lost was not the best of combinations.

Amsterdam was quite simply beautiful, and, not meaning to conform to stereotypes, the most relaxed place I have ever been to in my entire life. My experiences of capital cities so thus far had all been busy and rushed; London, Paris, New Delhi, places full of people who are seemingly all running five minutes late for the train to the place that they should have been twenty minutes ago. Amsterdam could not have been any different.  

I won't bore you with a day by day blow of every single thing that we did on every single day because that will just get repetitive and boring because there are only so many adjectives that one individual can use. 

However, I will say these few things: 

Don't buy a tram ticket or a travel pass. If you're even remotely healthy there is simply no need, nothing is more than a twenty minute walk from anything else at any one point. We didn't buy a single one during the whole time we were there and never regretted the decision. 

Do go on the canals as well as along them, canal pedal bikes were definitely money well spent.    If you're truly offended by marajuana then don't bother.  Although there is in no way, shape or form pressure to smoke it you will be surrounded by shops selling it and people smoking it on the streets, just like you would with alcohol or tobacco in any other city. I heard quite a large number of Western tourists complaining about the smell and advertisements. Why let something that you can't prevent and something that is perfectly legal ruin your holiday?

Don't plan to do absolutely everything in a day. The city and the people are so relaxed that you can't help but love just sitting and enjoying the place. The Vondelpark and the Museum Square in particular were two of my favourite places. Honestly, I think that by rushing around you would miss so much of what made this city so wonderful. Sit, drink & talk to people. You'll have a much better time than if you were running to keep up with a schedule that went out of the window three hours ago. 

Anne Frank Huis: definitely something that should be done, but go early in the morning. I joined the queue at 8.30am and it still took me 90 minutes to get to the front door. By the time that I came out at 11am the queue was more than 4 hours long and the temperatures were above 35. Still, it was the one thing that I really wanted to do in Amsterdam.                                         

Finally, food. Find Ellis Gourmet Burger, even if it kills you. I don't have any photos just because I ate the thing too quickly but it was incredible. Admittedly a burger in toast was a new experience, but now I can't believe that I have never done it before. It's right on the canal, between the Anne Frank Huis and the city centre. Eat their food, drink their beer and thank me later. 

Honestly, the people and the atmosphere made Amsterdam, any trip that discounts either of those things will, in my opinion, have been a trip wasted. You will have still paid through the nose for a beer, but you will have done so and not enjoyed it, that just sounds silly. 

 

 Can I get a 'Horray!' for my terrible formatting skills? An editor, I will never make. 

Paris

After four days in Amsterdam we moved on to Paris. 

Again, I have nothing of any remote interest to say about travelling. Nothing happened, we got on a (fully air conditioned) train in Amsterdam, which was a luxury in itself, and then three hours later we got off in Paris. There was nothing to it, really. 

We stayed in the 10th Arrondissement, above the Louis Blanc Metro station and between the Gare du Nord and the Gare de l'Est. Normally, I wouldn't make a big deal of the exact location of a place in which I've stayed, but in this case I feel like I should. Pompous travel guides and anxious travellers will always tell people to stay away from the 10th, it has a name for itself as being violent and unpleasant. That is all a load of waffle. The hotel was cheap but still perfectly pleasant, neither of us ever felt threatened in either the metro stations or on the streets late at night, the shops, bars and bakeries were a lot cheaper than in the city centre and we were only about a 6 minute Metro ride from Operà and The Louvre - otherwise known as, the very centre of Paris. 

Stay in the 10th, it's more than safe to do so and anybody that says otherwise has either never been to Paris or hasn't been since Napoleon was in charge. 

My boyfriend was nowhere near as keen on going to Paris, he thought that it was going to be lame, clichéd, busy and full of tourists. 

It was. It was absolutely all of those things and I loved it. I think that, maybe, by the end, he might have been won around as well. 

We did all of the tacky things that you would expect, so, once again, I'm not going to bore you with an intricate blow by blow account of every minute of every day but just the surprising or mildly interesting bits. 

                                                                                                    

I'm sorry, but Disneyland was a non-negotiable. I wanted to see Mickey and I wanted to see some fireworks. I behaved like a child all day, I went on rides and I pretended that I was a princess. You have to do it, you simply have to. 

As tacky as it sounds and is, I really wanted to put a love lock on to one of the bridges. I knew that this was mainly done around Notre Dame, so we headed in that direction. Every single bridge was full of padlocks, not a single one had any empty space. Although I'm glad that I did it I wouldn't do it if I was going to the city after this summer purely because all of the padlocks are being removed from all of the bridges. Parisian authorities are asking people to take selfies instead (come on, seriously? You couldn't think of anything better than that?) and soon all of the locks will be gone. I would say that all of the romance has gone from the world, but there is a chance that I could be yelling that whilst hundreds of tourists are screaming from within the waters of the Seine after having been on a bridge that's collapsed under the weight of thousands of €2 padlocks. Romance is kind of dead, but don't worry, health and safety is well and truly alive. 

The Eiffel Tower had to be done as well and was ridiculously cheap; being under 25 years old my boyfriend and I paid €4 each to climb it. It wasn't a ticket right to the top, we could only climb to the second floor, and it wasn't a ticket to use the lift, we had to climb the 800-ish stairs both up and down, and it was very sweaty and very long, but, having been to the top before, I can tell you that the views are just as good. I feel like it would be cheating to take the lift to the top, you can't do absolutely none of the hard work and then still get the good stuff and the champagne at the top, that's just not fair. Also, a queue of more than an hour on the second floor to get the lift to the very top? No thanks, there was cake that needed eating. 

I'm sorry, I can't just leave that there. Somebody please make a really unintelligent and immature innuendo based around me climbing the most phallic object on the planet and complaining about it being 'sweaty' and 'long'. Please do it, someone, please. 

Also, on the subject of cake: Patisseries. Whenever you're in Paris, or just France in general, make sure to visit a patisserie. Don't opt for the macaroons, though. Although nice, they're both more expensive and more sickly than the cake. Eat the cake and eat lots of it. For the price of ten macaroons you could buy, like, three French cakes. Go for the cake, always go for the cake.  

                                                                                                  Now I'm on the subject of food, Chartier is something that I have to mention. It's a restaurant, close to the Opera House, that's been established in an old train station. The inside hasn't been changed at all, there are still rail signs hanging from the wall and storage rooms for your luggage and your coats but the space has just been filled with, no joke, hundreds of dining tables. The place is so busy that you're sat on a table alongside people that you've never met before, weird at first, but pretty cool if you get talking like we did to the lovely ladies from New York. The waiters then write your order on your table cloth, run off and appear ten minutes later with your food.  The food is amazing, the people were lovely and everything was stupidly cheap. Less than €10 for the food and €7 for a bottle of wine. Why would you not go to this place? Just find it, just go and find it and eat and drink. 

Paris doesn't have to be as expensive as some people like to make out, yes, admittedly it was more expensive than Amsterdam, but by no means were we struggling for money or places to eat and yet we still managed to do everything that we would have wanted to. 

I've been to Paris two times previously and one place that I have to visit every time I go is Montmatre, it is by far my favourite area of Paris and probably one of my favourite places in the world. Paris, admittedly, can be very busy, confusing and crowded, it's much like London in that sense, but Montmatre is always so laid back, especially in the evenings when its full of artists and musicians lining the pavements between the bars. I could sit for hours in Montmatre and that's exactly what we did this time. Food, drinks, sunset and jazz music. I loved it, I really, really loved it. 

All of this, of course, whilst I had the words of Ewan McGregor spinning around my head: 'Suddenly, an unconscious Argentinian fell through my roof, followed by a dwarf dressed as a nun' alongside a mental image of a massive, sparkly elephant. 

As young Jane once said: 'If adventures will not befall a young lady in her own village, then she must seek them abroad.'

General Election Reflection - An Open Letter to Britain's Government.

(Post written June 26th 2015, post published July 7th 2015)


This post has been in my drafts for a long time.
This post has been in my drafts for approximately seven weeks.

It's often said that it is impolite to discuss either income or politics. I don't think so, I'm not shy about my political affiliations, I will quite happily declare my affinity to the Labour Party; I discuss politics online, I discuss politics in person, I discuss politics on paper. One of my worst habits is getting myself involved in online arguments with supporters of UKIP or Britain First, but then again, I just can't help myself; I am drawn to stupidity like a magnet and can't help but scream 'what the trumpet is wrong with you?'.

This was not published when it was first written, and has in fact been rewritten several times since: I started writing this post on May 8th, the day after the General Election.
I decided not to publish at the time because the days immediately following the election, both in reality and in cyber space, were tense.
From the moment the exit polls were announced, a game of socio-political tennis began in Britain; tweets, that turned into Facebook statuses, that turned into blog posts, that turned into news articles, from both sides of the political spectrum, as people began turning on their opponents, (How stupid does that sound? 'Opponents'. This is a democracy. However, the sad fact is that I cannot think of a more appropriate word at this point), both in Westminster seats, and on their sofas at home.

Right wingers were accused of a lack of compassion, as well as a lack of a mandate, with only 36% of the popular vote.
Whereas left wingers were accused of idealism and opposition to democracy.
Both of these are ultimately flawed arguments: The Tories did have a majority, they have just as much legitimacy as Blair did from '97 onwards, and, in some ways, more of a mandate than he did in his final years as PM, having beaten his 2005 winning percentage.
Equally, how can people that are arguing about mandates, people that have voted, be opposed to democracy? These people are democracy, they are political participation.
Supporters of the Left were accused of vandalism after releasing flares along Whitehall and eloquently tagging a national war memorial with 'F*ck Tory Scum', whereas several elected Members of the Right were accused of incompetence after several newly elected or re-elected politicians caused online confrontation with their constituents.


Some of the arguments that were floating around in the days following the election were frankly ridiculous, the whole thing was a mess.

In hindsight, I'm not sure what's worse: a sore loser, or a bad winner.


I didn't really want my opinion on this to be lost in the eruption of online voices at the time, a response to such event would have been based purely on emotion, badly thought through and inevitably my grammar would have suffered.

Anybody who knows me, can in no way doubt my political affiliations: I am a socialist, and I'm a gobby one at that. I was, however,  unwilling to make myself look an idiot thanks to a badly written piece, or leave myself open to being made to look like an idiot by somebody with a differing political viewpoint.
Hence, this post remained unshared, gathering cobwebs in the horribly organised Blogger 'Drafts' section.

Last weekend's #EndAusterityNow protests, however, led me to reconsider this dormant collection of words.
I'm not stupid, I know what the recession was, I know what the recession still is, I accept the fact that cuts had to be made somewhere; their extent and relative effectiveness, however, is a whole other matter, one to be discussed later on.
The important thing that I took from last week's protests were the fact that they were peaceful, fairly reported and represented by news agencies, and supported by fairly positive social media reaction: suddenly, it was okay to wield one's political voice again.

This is an opportunity that I am taking.

I believe that I can summarise my political feelings in the following sentence: I do not hate the economy, I do not hate democracy; I hate the fact that your future is decided depending on whether or not you sit in your high chair being fed caviar with a silver spoon, or ALDI baked beans with a broken plastic fork.

Quite simply, the elitism within this, and the previous, Conservative government is undeniable, and, I believe, has been allowed to thrive under the veil of austerity. Unless you are a white male, over 40 years old, living heterosexually in a nuclear family unit and earning more than £35,000 a year, then there is simply no care for you. 

You are unimportant. 

You are thrown to the gutter. 

Not only is there the obvious favouring of a certain demographic, but the media and educational infrastructures have been warped in such a way as to encourage us to denounce, scorn and spit upon any individual that does not fit that 'mould'.

It is not the fault of the government that you cannot get a GP appointment for your elderly mother, or that you cannot get your toddler into your local primary school because of a lack of staff and spaces and funds across the British public sector, but instead it is the fault of the teachers, the doctors and the nurses.
If they spent less time on strike and more time sat down in their offices and desk chairs as they should be then your children would be sat in school and your mother would be in her hospital bed.

It is not the fault of the government that poverty is at an all time high and that food bank usage is at unprecedented levels. If those people worked hard enough then they would be more than capable of funding their own livelihoods.
Disabilities do not prevent a person from working. Parenthood does not prevent a person from working. Family commitments do not prevent a person from working. Mental health does not prevent a person from working.
Anybody that is not working is lazy and therefore undeserving of assistance or attention.
Why should the government provide assistance to the lazy and undeserving. Doing such a thing would only encourage laziness.

It is not the fault of the government that education is becoming a reserve of the rich and the famous.
£9000 is no amount of money for anybody that has worked hard enough and got themselves into a well paying job. If you cannot afford an eduction then your parents should realise that they should have worked harder. They have failed their children through their own laziness.

Meanwhile, Tory donors, big bankers, bigger businesses and personal friends and relations of those in ministerial seats have been allowed to avoid billions of pounds of taxes, have begun to profit from our public services and are publicly laughing in the faces of those less fortunate.

Hatred is spreading like wildfire across the UK, fuelled by greed and ignorance, as the right wing press stand with the smouldering match between their thumb and forefinger.

This is not me pleading poverty, I am fully aware of my privileged position: The only child of two teachers, I attended one of the best state schools in the country and am now enrolled at a UK Top Fifteen University, enjoying the opportunities and privileges that have been afforded to me by living in the correct postcode. I will always be able to afford my education, I will always still be able to afford my rent, and I will always be able to fill my fridge with food.

However, that does not mean that I am blind to the rest of the world
I cannot sit back and watch this any longer, this voice may mean nothing, but equally, this voice may mean something.
I encourage any and every single person reading this to do something, anything, to help.
Give a few cans to your local food bank, offer to babysit the children of the neighbour who can't find the time to go to that job interview, offer some words of support to those who are feeling quashed by government underfunding.

This voice may mean nothing, but equally, this voice may mean something. This is my voice, and it is saying 'no' to any more hatred. I will not fall for your tricks. I will not believe the press, I will not victimise the poor, I trust and adore my public services, and I will do everything in my power to defy the blatant criminality of those in Britain's elite.

I am fed up of complacency.


Yours Sincerely,
Caitlin Doherty, aged 19.