London, England
Spring 2014
19 years old
This is my Classic Mess Up. My First Ever Travel Mishap. And for some reason, it’s also the misadventure I look back on most fondly.
Jet-lagged but irrepressibly excited, me and two other girls who would soon become lifelong friends piled into our first black taxi cab and pulled away from Heathrow towards our homestays.
Of course we were nervous–would we get along with our families and roommates? Would we be able to find our way to our school the next day? Would our fake British accents get any better?–but the nerves could wait. We were in London!
We were all basically strangers, but as we drove through those cobblestone streets of Harrow-on-the-Hill, I could feel a bond growing in our speechless gazes. We were experiencing the same kind of magic, after all.
But man, I wish the magic had stopped before my suitcase disappeared into thin air.
I’d like to think I’m a one-in-a-million type of girl…so of course if someone was going to lose her luggage inexplicably on her first day in a foreign country on her first big trip abroad, it would be me.
We were all perplexed, to say the least. The three of us were sure the case was loaded into the cab (our best guess is that the driver unloaded my suitcase to get to my friends’ and then forgot to reload it after we dropped her off). I did not let that suitcase go gentle into the good night, of course. Instead of dedicating myself to the vigorous research of Cadbury, as I had hoped to do, I spent my first few days in England checking on the taxi company and riding almost the entire Piccadilly line to the lost baggage claim at the airport. But with no luck. My suitcase was destined for the Great Baggage Carousel in the Sky and to become the focus of many conversations over a pitcher of Pimms at the neighborhood pub (the friends stuck around a lot longer than the suitcase).
To this day, I have no idea what happened to my suitcase, to that chiffon skirt I wore as a bridesmaid in my friend’s wedding, or that handmade necklace my grandma gave me before I left. I like to imagine whoever has them came by them honestly or needed them more than I did. After all, like my mom reminds me, sometimes the events in our lives aren’t about us at all–they’re about someone else.
But things turned out all right. I dove wholeheartedly into the excuse to frequent the many thrift stores of London, and I learned to be a little more resilient. Life goes on.
I’m still in the market for a chiffon skirt, though.
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