Legends can be told about my journeys from Bulgaria to the UK. There’s hardly a time when everything has been unproblematic in my return to Aber. The first time I came to Britain I missed my train, I had to buy a new ticket, and I spend the entire day running around train stations, desperately trying to reach a platform with only few minutes remaining. Other times I’ve missed the train by simply not staying at the right place. And of course there’s the nightmarish 4-day journey through Europe when a certain volcano decided it didn’t want its lava anymore. This time was no exception. Fortunately, I was flying from a different airport where there was no fog, unlike the one in our capital, so my flight didn’t get cancelled. Landing in London Luton, getting my luggage, no problem with that. My friend and I were supposed to get a bus to Milton Keynes where we had to get a train. The bus of course was 10 minutes late, and when we arrived at Milton Keynes, we thought the train station is right next to the bus stop. Oh, poor naive us (I wished for not being naive and this is what I get). We entered something resembling a train station that turned out to be a mall. After losing about 10 minutes in there, we asked a guy for directions. The man was kind enough to offer us a ride to the station, since it was nowhere near us and our train was leaving in 10 minutes. So we decided to ignore the rule “Don’t get into the car of strangers” and got on. His two little daughters summed up the situation like this: “This is so scary, on so many levels.” Scary or not, we reached the station, and the running began once again. Right at the stairs leading down to the platform, out of nowhere appeared a crowd going up. And here I am, once again with a big heavy suitcase and a backpack, trying to go down through a wall of people that didn’t seem to have an end. And right when I got down, the train left. At that point we were on the verge of crying, imagining how we finally have to spend a night at the train station. There was another train for Birmingham leaving in 20 minutes, but that wasn’t the problem. The problem was that at Birmingham we had to catch the train to Aber, the last train for the evening, and instead of half an hour we had no more than 5 minutes. I’m definitely not religious, but I believe someone was watching over us, because the lady on the train, the ticket-collector, was kind enough to check where the train leaves from, and told us that we could get off on the first stop in Birmingham, instead of on the one we had to. The thing was that the train to Aber happened to be leaving from that first stop, and since all the platforms there are at one level, it would be a lot easier to find ours. So we prepared for a lot of running, each of us grabbed a handle on the suitcase, and as soon as the door opened, we launched outside, got into the elevator, went on the other side of the station, down the stairs…. and we even had time to wait in the train. But we made it. Had we gotten off at the other station, we would have missed it, without a doubt, because when the train got there, it was 2 minutes early, and left 2 minutes early. And we could have missed it by those 2 minutes. But we made it. It cost us a lot of energy and strength, and my palms still hurt from dragging the damn suitcase, I limp when I walk from all the running and exhaustion… but I’m home. Now I’m looking ahead of studying for 3 exams, writing another report, having to find a job and an entire second semester waiting for me to screw up. And I admit that there are times when I want to just give up and quit everything, but I’m gonna make it. I keep going, no matter how hard it is. I certainly haven’t reached the point where I’ll draw the line, not yet. And having said that, it’s time to study, I wasted a lot of time writing here and procrastinating.
