Twenty-Five

I always know its time to write a blog when I start getting random spikes of viewers.  I imagine little heads popping around the walls to my apartment asking, "Where's the blog, Ali?  WHERE'S THE BLOG??"

Okay, its here, calm down.

I both have tons to cover in this blog, and very little.  I'll start with this last weekend.

It was my birthday!  YAY!

I'm twenty five whole years old how.  I feel so grown up.  I've already had that lovely moment where some girls were talking about tanning in class and I strongly suggested against it.  They brought it up because I had mentioned being Californian, so naturally, sun tans.  I told them not to do it, that I've seen plenty of people my age who have tanned every summer since sixteen and their skin looks old and tired already.  They looked very confused until I told them how old I am, to which I was immediately greeted with choruses of "I would never have guessed" and "you don't look twenty five at all!" and "I figured you were our age (19)!" And I just, "oh bless you," with a little hand flip and hair twirl.  And then I proceeded to get woefully lost in grammar, since they've all just studied it in a-levels and here I am, eight years since I touched grammar.  *headdesk*

Anyway, I'm going to say that this birthday took second place to my twenty first birthday party, when Maureen and I went to San Francisco, ate amazing food at an awesome jazz club, got shortlined and then VIPed within moments at a club, then pleasantly sloshed before going back to our hotel where I'm nearly certain we watched Harry Potter.  Anyway, close second to that amazingness.

I had been planning something for awhile and found out that a group of people I knew were going to the same place on the same night, so it was going to snowball into something awful.  And then some friend of there's went and got engaged and had an engagement party that night, so everyone I knew from that ended up bailing.  I went around to theirs a few nights before my birthday for a movie night they'd been planning, and then it turned out that it had become an impromptu sort of party for my birthday!  Not even, but Lily made me this lovely cake:

so that was pretty awesome.  They sang me happy birthday and we shared the cake and watched a racy movie.  Good times all around.

Well, then came Friday, which was the night before my birthday.  I had big plans.  A big group of us were going to a place called Playzone.  Any nineties kids out there are probably raising their eyebrows questioningly, so yes, it was totally exactly like Discovery Zone.  Not a nineties kid?  Here's a link to it:  http://www.theplayzone.co.uk/.  Turns out they do an "adult" night on the last friday of every month, which was perfect for us. Now, being that we are not in fact eighteen, we all had the foresight to meet up before hand and have burgers and crisps and a few drinks before we headed out to drink and run around like idiots.  I got a few little presents like chocolate (okay a lot of chocolate), and a few pens and a notebook.  Then we each had a drink and took off.

And then we ran around like idiots.  I can't really go into too much detail here, one because it was pretty hectic, two because we'd been drinking, and three because we'd been drinking.  So my memory is a little iffy on it, though I took a video I'll be posting eventually.  I can tell you that we played tag and capture the flag and manhunt.  I can tell you that I was terrified of the biggest slide, which was really just a glorified death trap, but I did eventually go down the slightly less big slide (did you click on the link earlier?  I went on the blue slide, NOT the red slide).  It was crazy amounts of fun and I STILL hurt from it.  Good times.

Then the next day while we were all nursing our injuries from Playzone, we met up, had more drinks, went to Wind Street, which is a street here where there are about twenty different clubs and bars and dancey places and all of the young people go to get inordinately drunk.  Which, of course, is what ended up happening with me.  So here again, I cannot give you many details.  Although I can tell you that at one point a woman sang Happy Birthday for me in Welsh, which was probably the highlight of my weekend.  I can also tell you that for the third time in my life I had a massive hangover the next day, so if you're worried that I was being reckless (I wasn't, don't worry.  I had tons of friends with me and all of my roommates were there as well), don't worry, I won't be doing it again anytime soon.

In all I'm calling it a huge success.  I had friends come out and drinks and stories and bruises and laughter, and I think in general, what more can I ask for from a birthday?  Especially from a milestone birthday like 25.