This article in today's Guardian made me laugh. I was trying to think about my first parent-free holidays. Then, shockingly, realized that the first one in my life was pretty early, maybe I was 4. I went on holiday with my grandma. When I was in primary school, I went on holiday to Belgium with my grandma's friends. Alone. We visited their friends, and also my friend, Nicola, who was a Belgian boy. We used to play together, but he spoke French, and I spoke German. I don't remember it at all.
The first proper trip must have been to Hamburg. I was 13, my friend, Yasmin, was 12. It was under the condition that we travel together. We went to see friends in Hamburg, Aggi and Jasmin. I stayed with Aggi, while Yasmin stayed with Jasmin. The purpose of this trip was to spend some time with our penpals. We were all completely obsessed with Take That at the time. It was a very boring trip, we watched Take That videos all day and Aggi and I, with our shared love for a certain Take That member, were drooling over photographs and so on. But, at least we didn't go out, get laid and got pregnant.
The second, proper trip was London. At 15 or 16, Judith and I spent a week (or was it 10 days?) in London, pretending to be cool! We stayed in a B&B in Hither Green, just past Lewisham, and took the train into the center every day. We bought all-zone travel cards every day, even though we didn't need them (we just did not know!) and we gave every beggar a pound.
Our B&B was run by a Mum. One without children, one, who thought it was fun to mother us. We didn't like it one bit.
One night we were hanging out at Trafalgar Square and met these two guys. They were so handsome. I mean, at the point we thought so. One was just extremely hot. Until we were 20 we still talked about this guy. All of a sudden they were gone and we had missed our last train back to Hither Green, so we spent the night in London. Just hanging around. We didn't do pubs, or clubs really. We had much more fun sitting at Leicester Square's Orion Cinema. They were playing Men in Black and there was a massive poster display. As we were eating Oreo cookies, we decided to take some action: We put the white bit on the Men in Black's sunglasses, then added a small piece of black cookie in the middle of it. People took a lot of pictures of that, we felt quite proud.
We hung out in Camden, we bumped into Liam Gallagher (somewhere I have a photo of me with him) and we spent money on bootleg CDs (you know, those live gigs) and funky flares. We lived on Chinese Stir-Fry and coke. The drink that is!
Yeah, we weren't cultural at all, but it was fun. Freedom!
