Life By Kristen

20Something Blog Swap!

20Something Bloggers is hosting a blog swap! The fabulous Laura & I switched for the day- you can find my post over here on her blog!

Hi I’m Laura and I blog over at Girl in Flight! I’m so excited to be doing a blog swap with the lovely Kristen!

So, childhood vacations…(it feels so funny saying vacation because I’m from the UK and over here we say holiday. Vacation is a much better word!)…what can I say? I have to say the most exciting vacation I had is the first time I ever went to Trinidad.

Trinidad is this tiny little island (and speaking as a resident of the UK, I know about small islands!) in the Caribbean, and it’s warm and lovely and the first time I visited, I was ten years old and it was probably the biggest culture shock ever.

You see, I’m pretty anglicized really. I say bath like “barrrrthh”, I eat roast chicken on a Sunday, I call soccer “football” and if you’d asked me then what an Oreo was, I probably would have said a breed of dog. So when we touched down after a ten hour flight, everything was new: The wave of heat that hit you as you disembarked, the way people stared because for once you were lighter, not darker, than the people around you, the accent, the crazy fast driving and the way the “bathroom” was in the outhouse!

But this vacation made me. I suddenly realised why I didn’t find English curries deathly spicy, where I got my smile from, what it feels like to run barefoot along miles and miles of beautiful beach with the sun beating down and the sand hot between my toes. And of course, most importantly of all, I discovered Oreos. My aunts and uncles and cousins would laugh at the way I almost lunged at the chance to eat one whenever they offered one. For years they would send them over in little packages until, of course, Oreos got the message and hit the UK. My friends were pretty fast to agree I was onto a good thing!

So there is my favourite childhood vacation: I met my family for the first time, experienced breath taking views and glorious weather, and of course found the chocolate cookie goodness that is Oreos. What more could a ten year old child want?!

Did I mention we took a boat ride through an alligator swamp?!