And now, ladies and gentlemen of the internet, we enter the very last week of my time in the US (eight days. It’s actually eight days, I know. Stop being pedantic. You’re always criticising me, internet). But we’re not going to talk about that, because that’s hugely depressing and this isn’t livejournal (look, a blogging platform joke! How niche), so we’re just going to stick to talking about how, for the last month and a half, I’ve been roadtripping around the East Coast with my own personal Jesus (my flatmate Saskia, who may have had some level of control as to what she is referred to as in this post).

I wish to discuss this, because, as it turns out, it’s next to impossible for one to do a roadtrip such as this, particularly when on an unreasonably low budget, without emerging from it a changed person.

You may scoff at this, saying things like “don’t be so overly dramatic” and “you’re exaggerating” and “get over yourself, it’s only a roadtrip”, but to that I say two things: firstly, if you had been reading this blog religiously, as I expect you to have been doing, you should have realised that everything I say, aside from being inarguably witty and adorable, is largely overly-dramatic self-indulgent babbling, and you should be used to it by now. Secondly, unless you yourself have experienced budget travel for an extended period of time, you can’t understand my pain. I’m sorry. You just can’t. Never fear, though, because I fully intend to explain them in depth.

Are you sitting comfortably?

Let’s start with the physical changes, of which there are many. Despite being a decidedly peely-wally Scottish girl who has never shown the tiniest suggestion of skin colouring in her life, I have ended up with incredibly defined tan-lines on my shoulders, thighs, and, bizarrely, my lower calf, due to my very exciting Nashville purchase of cowboy boots. On top of that, we’ve come away from Louisiana (which, despite insisting on referring to itself as “the pelican state”, is quite clearly the man-eating-swamp-monster state. Seriously, the place is overrun with mosquitoes, cockroaches, alligators, and countless other unattractive beasties that want nothing more than to feast on my flesh) with an interesting dot-to-dot puzzle of mosquito bites all over our (beautifully-tanned) skin. Surprisingly, I managed to escape relatively undevoured, compared to Saskia and my sister, who both have bites akin to some kind of plague victim (Saskia would like it to be clarified that, despite these bites, she still has excellent legs, and is both attractive and eligible, as well as being a non-smoker with a good sense of humour), but this didn’t save me from constantly clawing at the mountains of itchiness on my calf. Now factor in the yards of visible natural-hair-colour emerging on my head (if you’ve seen me in person since the age of fifteen, you’ll understand that this is a very rare occurrence), the irregular weight fluctuations from a horrible diet of street vendor food, and the fact that, due to having walked the length of pretty much every major city on the east coast, our legs are truly spectacular, and you can begin to scratch the surface of the dramatic transformation we’ve undergone in the past couple of months.

Then, perhaps most powerfully, there are the psychological changes. We have developed, for example, an almost hound-like ability to sniff out free food. Living on a food budget of around ten dollars a day (we haven’t stuck to it even a little bit, but we do try), we have taken to stealing as much food as is possible from our hostels (our hostel in New York charged us for internet, but gave us free bagels for breakfast, so we, quite justly, stole an appropriate amount of bagels every day. It averaged around five bagels each per day, and that did us two meals) and roaming the aisles of supermarkets looking for 2 for 1 offers and really, really cheap pasta (really, really cheap pasta is disgusting and I refused to finish it because, though I am a penniless traveller, I am a penniless traveller with standards, goddammit!).

And that’s just the tip of the iceberg of our spiralling loss of sanity:

I’m completely convinced that never again will I be able to fall asleep in a bed that isn’t preceded by “bunk”.

Due to living in hostels for so long, it has been deemed totally acceptable to approach a nearby stranger and attempt to start a conversation about where they’re from and what their direction in life is.

“Privacy” has become a fantastical myth.

I have lost all sense of fear or disgust regarding public transport, even the greyhound (due to the fact that, on being released from prison, you are given a free greyhound ticket to wherever you need to go, every greyhound bus is choc-full of murderers and crime lords. In fact, on average, you will be one of three people on any given greyhound bus that has not, at some point in your life, killed a man with your bare hands and worn their skin as a cape).

I’m almost taken aback when I pass a homeless man and he doesn’t either proposition me or make some kind of bizarre comment regarding my hair, my legs, or my “bazookas”.

It’s become largely socially acceptable to wear the same socks, underwear, or t-shirt for two days at a time (up to five days for socks).

To summarise (this is how I was taught to end essays when I was in high school and, even after three years of an English degree, haven’t managed to break the habit), budget travel has taken us, two fresh-faced and innocent British girls, and it has broken us down, until we emerged as brand new, stronger, more tanned, much less mentally stable, seasoned travellers. It’s been an experience. Just… don’t ask us about that night in Virginia.

Quick question for you. Say, hypothetically, you have been living in the USA for ten months under a visa, and are now travelling around the country on that same visa? What, in that situation, would be the worst possible thing you could do?

The correct answer, of course, is getting shot in the face. Seriously, even if you can miraculously afford the health care service in this country, you’re pretty much guaranteed to die anyway. You keep your brain and stuff in there. Don’t get shot in the face in a foreign country. Nobody’ll come to your funeral if it’s all the way across the Atlantic.

The second worst thing you can do, however, is to lose your passport. Seriously. Identity fraud problems aside, you’re going to have a fun time in the airport as you try to leave the country you’ve been living in for ten months, and both your passport and visa have somehow vanished into thin air. Scary notions like “being taken into the little windowless room” and “calls to the Embassy” and “rubber gloves” and “all of your money being spent on getting out of the little room” loom ahead of you. Of all the things you may do in your hypothetical time travelling around the USA, do not lose your passport. Duct-tape it to your thigh if necessary. Just don’t lose it.

So guess what I did while travelling through the US?

That’s right. I lost my passport. (If you didn’t guess that, then you really did not understand this game). I somehow managed to leave it at reception in the hostel my boyfriend and I were staying in, due to a combination of the receptionist’s incompetence and my own unwavering stupidity. Due to having to get up at mental-o-clock in the morning, I didn’t realise the absence of my single most important travel document until I was on the bus to Boston (reason #376 why Susie shouldn’t be allowed to do dangerous things like international travel or using scissors unsupervised).

Once in Boston, I managed to get in touch with the hostel to clarify that they still had my passport, and to see if they could please forward it to the place I was staying in Virginia. No. No, they could not do that. Please arrange it with FedEx. So I tried to open a FedEx account. Nope. I don’t have an American credit card. No FedEx account for me. So I stole my friend’s card and opened an account, and, after a long and very expensive phonecall with a woman who blatantly couldn’t understand my accent, I finally arranged for them to bring my passport from New York to Washington DC, where I was staying for a few days. This was followed by a celebratory McDonald’s coffee and a quick frolick around the Smithsonian. Foolishly, I thought my passport drama was over. 

After a couple of days and still no passport, I called the hostel once again. Turns out FedEx had decided that my passport wasn’t really that big a deal, and hadn’t bothered to show up to collect it.

(I would like to briefly interrupt this story-telling in order to request that all six people who read my blog please send hate-mail and parcels of animal poo to FedEx. They are bad, bad people, and we are not talking to them).

Eventually I was forced to ask myself the question that everyone has to ask themselves at some point in their lives: what would Mr. Darcy do? And, of course, the answer, aside from “being inexplicably rich and making a lot of pompous comments”, is that he would haul himself from whatever fountain he was currently frolicking in (and I’m not going to pretend I haven’t frolicked in at least a couple of fountains over the past few days. Give me a break, it’s hot and I’m Scottish), leap on his horse, and go collect the passport with his very own hands. And, as someone who already resembles Colin Firth in many different respects, I decided to follow in Darcy’s footsteps.

(Once again, I must interrupt this story, this time to assure you that I do not, in fact, resemble Colin Firth. That would be ridiculous. It’s a generally accepted fact that I kind of look like Justin Bieber).

Unfortunately, despite being able to buy Obama bobble heads and Girl Scout cookie-flavoured lip balm (of course I bought some. Everything tastes of thin mints now. It’s great), it’s next to impossible to purchase a decent horse in Washington DC, and so, disappointingly, I had to take the bus instead (my feelings for Megabus, despite its utter inability to show up anywhere on time, are the complete converse of my feelings for FedEx. I’m going to flood Megabus HQ with love-notes and drawings of me and them holding hands and smiling, surrounded by glitter-pen love hearts).

After a five hour bus journey, during which I got chatted up by a pro wrestler (I googled him, he’s legit), I got to New York, sang loudly at strangers on the subway, and got back to the hostel. The guy at reception asked to see some ID, and, refraining from saying something along the lines of “you have my ID, you tit, that’s why I’m here”, I instead emptied out the entire card section of my purse onto his desk, handing him student cards and bank cards and even my donor card. I then proceeded to describe the passport in great detail, a reasonably embarrassing process that involves using the words “two years younger, with long purple hair”, at which point the guy pulled out a UK passport, examined the picture, and went “no, that’s not it”. He quickly established from the expression on my face that his joke was not a funny joke, and that he shouldn’t attempt to make funnies to girls who have had a week’s worth of stress and 250 miles of bus journey over that passport. He gave me back my passport, and I did a small dance of joy right there in reception, and then he gave me a large drink of water and sent me on my way.

And so here endeth the Saga of the Passport, with me sitting on a bus on my way back to DC, with my sanity considerably diminished, but my mood decidedly improved, tired and unshowered and full of Starbucks, with my passport sitting snugly and happily in my bag, ready to get duct-taped to my thigh when I get back, never to be parted again.

Roll credits.

This is a short warning post.

For the next month and a half, I will be travelling around the country with my best friend, flatmate, and occasional lover, Saskia (and various others at various points). As such, this blog is going to descend into tales of how we frequently get lost, our many food-stealing attempts, and reassurances that, despite our inability to perform basic human tasks (I had to help Saskia get dressed yesterday), we are not yet dead.

Enjoy that, guys. Enjoy it.

Well this is it, Urbana-Champaign. It’s been a blast. We’ve had some good times. We’ve had some horrific times as well (let’s not talk about the three-day-old Chinese food incident), but the good ones largely seem to outweigh it. You introduced me to people - some were dicks (not you, though, whoever’s reading this. You were wonderful. You were my favourite. Don’t tell anyone), and some were among the best people I’ve ever met. You taught me things. You taught me about drinking games that involve skill and very little actual drinking. You taught me that people can get oddly vicious over the distinction between “soda” and “pop”. You taught me that 90% of the world’s population is from the suburbs of Chicago. You taught me peep jousting and Mexican food and Mountain Dew and Thanksgiving, and for that I thank you.

I’ve been approaching this last week with an attitude of “if I ignore it hard enough, it’ll leave me alone”. While this has meant I’ve only had a couple of mental breakdowns (on that note, I apologise profusely to the recent U of I graduates that are forever going to have a bad-tempered Scottish girl in a hoodie photobombing their graduation photos), it does also mean that, four hours before my bus leaves, I still haven’t finished packing. 

(On the note of packing, turns out that, despite being unable to do almost any other straightforward task (I burned my arm trying to cook yesterday), I am really really good at packing. I ruthlessly threw out four bags of stuff. I no longer own heels. I sacrificed my duck socks (it’s hard for me to explain quite how huge a deal this is. I really liked my duck socks). I can roll up a t-shirt to fit into the palm of my hand. Essentially, I’m a packing god.)

Anyway, once I’ve gotten round to actually finishing my packing, and cleaning the kitchen, and getting lunch, and printing off my bus tickets, and maybe putting some clothes on at some point, I’ll be off on a month-and-a-half long adventure around the East Coast and South, during which time my flatmate and I will try desperately not to get mugged, arrested, murdered, kidnapped, sold into white slavery, as well as attempting not to starve to death on our tiny budget. We will be eating a lot of raisins. 

In the meantime, and without getting too gushy, farewell U of I. I’ll miss you and all of your people, some more than others, and some much more than others. Illinois, I’m fond of you. 

supereffectivelinny replied to your post: A very short open letter regarding pasta.

This is what I feel about Irn Bru. Now do you understand?

I think it’s a native thing. If you were brought up on neon mac and cheese, it’s a comfort food and you’re ok with it, but if you’re introduced to it 20 years on, it’s luminous and scary. I’ve been raised on irn bru, whereas you had it thrown into your life, all orange and weird-tasting, too late in the game for it to be normal for you.

Dear America,

I’m not going to deny it. I’m very fond of you. Over the past year, I have grown to love you and your people and your delicious inauthentic Mexican food. As a place, you’re one of my favourites.

But seriously, guys.

Macaroni and cheese? Not supposed to be neon.

I’m not kidding, whenever I eat that stuff, I’m terrified that I’m ingesting some kind of crazy radioactive junk that’s going to turn my insides to mush and give my future babies extra toes or something. And sure, I could stop eating it, but, let’s face it, the stuff’s delicious. It’s the full-body hug of meals. Frankly, if it was possibly, I’d happily live on solely mac and cheese and go through my life feeling fulfilled and happy.

This is not something I can do if, every time I eat it, I’m filled with an intense discomfort that I’m eating the pasta results of a nuclear fallout.

Please get on that.

Love, 

Susie.

Recently, I ventured into the very scary realm of Susie’s Final Month In Urbana-Champaign. As well as the looming prospect of having to say goodbye to a lot of people, this means I’ve begun giving away my stuff (does anyone want my stuff? You can have my stuff. I’ll give you my kettle), studying for exams, writing the traditional ten thousand essays, and having at least one emotional breakdown a day. 

Without getting all gross and mushy (I know how we all hate gross and mushy), I genuinely didn’t think I’d get so attached to a place in less than a year. I was pretty much committed to loving and living in Glasgow forever, eating its chips and drinking its cider and napping in its classrooms and cheating at its pool tables and dancing in its clubs, and loving nowhere but Glasgow forever. And don’t get me wrong, while I was pretty much sold on Urbana-Champaign from the get go, it was no Glasgow. I was having the time of my life, yeah, but I was always fine with the knowledge that I’d go back to Scotland eventually.

Then something weird happened. I stopped taking my camera with me when I went out, and I started having conversations that didn’t solely consist of people giggling at my accent, and I stopped saying things like “going for a pint” and “getting juice from Tesco” and started saying “having a beer” and “buying soda from the gas station” (N.B. Wording aside, these are still my top two favourite pastimes). My friends were suddenly all Americans, and they introduced me as “This is Susie, she’s my roommate/friend/in my class/don’t talk to her, she’s unstable” rather than just “this is Susie, she’s from Scotland”. Yeah, I still drink my body weight in tea, and get a weird little jolt of happiness every time an American says “mirror” (Midwesterners say it like “meeear”, and it makes me happier than almost anything ever could), but, somehow, at some point, I’ve gone from being a tourist to being a person who lives here. 

I don’t even crave irn bru that much any more. (Disclaimer: I still miss irn bru. I’ll always miss irn bru. I want that stuff on an IV into my blood. But I’m no longer quite as reliant on it as I once was). I drink mountain dew. And my junk food of choice has gone from a fried pizza supper to bad Mexican food from Burrito King (I mean, that’s still pretty much in the realm of fried-stuff-with-grease, but you can’t literally feel your arteries thickening as you eat). I drink beer instead of cider (unless you’re a police officer, in which case I drink neither. I drink lemonade. Lemonade and justice), and I drink it from bottles instead of pint glasses. My default excuse for not knowing how to do something is still “I’m foreign” rather than just “I’m crap”, but people no longer accept it as a legitimate reason.

Oh, I’ve also taken to speaking in a fairly broad American accent whenever I drink vodka.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m still deeply besotted with Glasgow to the extent that I feel almost guilty for enjoying Urbana so much. I feel like I’m having an affair. A sordid, passionate affair punctuated with burritos and lite beer. We’ve all had that kind of affair, right? Right?

Either way, I’ve pretty much doomed myself to spending the rest of my life wanting to be somewhere else. If I stay in Urbana (which, by the way, I’m completely open to if someone offers to marry me for green card purposes. Seriously. Someone marry me. I’ll give you my kettle), I’m going to pine for Glasgow, but my time in Glasgow will be spent muttering about how things were better in Urbana. My loyalties are forever split, so that I can never again hold a meaningful and committed relationship with a single city. Maybe I should just ditch both and move somewhere I’ll hate. Somewhere awful. Somewhere where I’ll be so dissatisfied that I’ll never feel guilty for liking it too much.

Guys, I’m moving back up to the North-East.

(Disclaimer: The North-East thing is a joke. Please do not get offended if you really super love Aberdeenshire. I’m not disrespecting your homeland. I like some of it, honest. I like my parents, I like my friends, and I like the pub).