10. Cows are everywhere.

9. There’s a variety of landscapes—seas, mountains, cities.

8. Everyone speaks English, except with a thick accent.

7. People are pretty insistent that they’re different from the bigger country they technically belong to.

6. People like stretching the truth.

5. Outsiders make fun, but that’s just because they’ve never been.

4. Football is a big deal.

3. Baptists are everywhere. And they put inspirational Bible verse along the side of the road.

2. It’s beautiful.

1. The people are so ridiculously friendly. A Northern Irish tour guide told me never to ask for directions because “the person will just walk you there themselves. And then they’ll take you inside. And then they’ll wait for you to finish. And then they’ll bring you ‘round for tea. And then they’ll introduce you to their grannies. And then you’re part of the family.”

Which is basically the same as back home. (Hi, Sydney’s Memaw! Thanks for making us tortillas!)

I knew Belfast was going to be awesome when I had this conversation with the clerk at the hostel:

Clerk: So, whereabouts you from?
Sasha: I’m from Canada.

Kate: I’m from Texas!

C: Oh, Texas! I love Texas! Austin is so nice!
K: Yes! It’s so amazing and cool. I’m actually from Dallas.

C: Dallas, hey? I know someone who moved near there to Denton—

K: I’M FROM DENTON

C: —to go to University of North Texas

K: MY DAD WORKS THERE

C: Wow! Small world.

It was an exciting moment.

Little did I know that that’s the kind of hospitality we got everywhere in Northern Ireland. Maybe it’s because it’s the first time I’ve been in an English-speaking country since January, or maybe they’re really that friendly, but I struck up conversations with everyone in Belfast. I miss doing that over here. In Texas (and Oklahoma, to some extent), small talk is just a part of life. You small talk with your waitresses, you small talk with the cashiers, you smile and greet everyone you make eye contact with. If you don’t, you’re rude. It was hard to adjust to that when I moved, so it was so much fun to be back in a country that feels the same way.

We went into Belfast with no plans and no expectations. I knew the basics of the Troubles, and I knew there was a Titanic museum, but that was about all. Unlike Rome and Paris, we had no itinerary.

It was awesome.

The first day, we wandered down to the Titanic museum, by way of a giant fish.

We wandered into the Titanic museum, just slowly strolling along the banks of the river Lagan.

We were, at first, somewhat skeptical of the museum. It was crowded when you first walk in the exhibit, and it cost 9 pounds to get in. But the more we walked, the more I fell in love.

The museum opened in March, and you can tell. Everything is so shiny and new, and it runs perfectly. We took an elevator up to find there was a RIDE. A ride, I tell you! We’re waiting in line for that, and the museum worker—a girl about my age—starts chatting with us. She is very impressed that I’m from Texas (this makes me happy because we Texans are always impressed by the Irish/British) and asks what I think of Northern Ireland. I tell her honestly that it’s one of the most beautiful places I’ve ever seen, and she gets kind of flustered and says, “Seriously?! Awww, bless!”

It made my life, having someone say “bless” to me. It’s like I live in the BBC channel.

After we finished in the Titanic museum (well worth a visit), we wandered around Belfast. I found a Mexican restaurant and ordered a chimichanga, fully expecting it to be gross. It wasn’t. It was 100 percent edible, which means a lot coming from me, the pickiest eater in the world.

And as I ate that chimichanga, I fell in love with Belfast.

I know the city has a reputation. I know that when I told people I was going to Belfast, they thought I was crazy and/or going to get blown up.

But Belfast is more than its history, and it’s more than its walls.

(Which is why I’m not going to show you my wall pictures until later.)

Belfast was clean, gorgeous, and without a doubt, the safest place I’ve visited. It had posh shops, places to watch the Olympics, beautiful scenery, few tourists, helpful street signs, great food, and friendly people.

And if you’re not going to visit because of the Troubles, well, fine. That means more Belfast for me anyway.

More coherent updates to follow

I wrote this before I left, but never published it because I knew I was missing a few items. One of my sweet friends from church is studying abroad next semester and asked for a packing list, and I remembered I had this. Thanks for the idea, Erin P.!

I don’t know whether what I packed was genius or stupid. I don’t know whether I’ll wish I had packed more or less. I do know that I wish someone had put this out there for me to copy.

Is it more than what most sites recommended? A little bit. However, it takes into account the fact that I will not just be hanging out in bars this trip—I’ll be traveling in diverse places that are sometimes fancy and always colder than Texas.

Kate’s packing list

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I’m not coming home.

Well, I wouldn’t be if I had any say in it. My mom joked that the fam is flying over to make sure I get on the plane, and I’m not sure if she knows how accurate she was.

I love it here. Utrecht is my home. And though I miss my friends and family and Mexican food, I absolutely adore exploring this city and learning new things. I love getting to go to any museum in the country whenever I want, I love the way cobblestone streets feel under my sandals, I love the unpredictable weather and canals and Tiger and HEMA and basically just everything. Though there are some things I would change—for instance, my rental agency is incredibly dishonest and I have many frustrations with my apartment—on the whole, I absolutely adore it here.

Even more than living here, I love getting to travel. I think traveling is my favorite thing in this world. I love it more than I love chicken flautas, and that’s saying a lot. I know that I will be completely broke when I get back home, and that’s okay because this is the epitome of living the dream. This is what I want to do forever.

So if you know of a job I can get with a journalism degree where all I do is sightsee and blog, HIT ME UP. I do not want actual work to do. I basically just want to have hotels, airfare, and food comp’d.

I’m sure when I get back to Denton, I will wonder how I did this. I will be all “BARBEQUE AND MEXICAN FOOD AND AIR CONDITIONING WHAT A BEAUTIFUL PLACE.” And when I go back to Norman, I will think, “GAYLORD COLLEGE AND THE MONT AND THE WESLEY WHAT A BEAUTIFUL PLACE,” and I won’t think about how much I miss Utrecht at all.

But that’s sort of hard to imagine now.

Someone asked me recently if I’d consider living abroad again. My answer (as you can probably guess) is unequivocal: yes! A thousand times yes! If I could have my friends, family, and the University of Oklahoma here, I’d never leave.

I’m not going to lie and say it’s been completely smooth sailing since I’ve been here. Sometimes, I’ve been incredibly homesick. Sometimes, all I want is my little red Kia and my dog. But most of the time? I feel like this. I feel happy.

And who wouldn’t want that?

I love Latin.

I love the way it sounds when I speak it, when I whine “fessa sum” or recite poetry.

I love the way it looks, all lowercase and abbreviations. It’s like a secret code.

I love the inspirational prose and the dirty poetry.

But most of all, I loved my high school Latin classes.

My junior year Latin class

I had a wonderful teacher who made learning Latin fun. We played games and chanted songs and read stories. To this day, I can sing my noun and verb charts—my favorite is the imperfect tense, which we sang to the tune of the Mexican Hat Dance.

I had a wonderful class who became like a family. We have inside jokes, we gave each other massages, we bickered over who got to sit on the sofa (answer: ME), we had food days.

I was the Latin Club president. That’s how much I love Latin. I did some pretty nerdy things in high school, but Latin Club probably takes the cake. As Latin Club president, I led important charges, like the charge to defeat the French Club (we taped them in to their classroom) and the charge to watch more Muppets movies in meetings.

Dream big, y’all.

Playing limbo at a Latin Club toga party

Me wearing my 11th grade Latin Club shirt. It says on the front “If you can read this…” and on the back “…get a life.”

One of the things that has really stuck with me as I’ve moved past high school is how much I remember the characters from my Latin book. We used the Cambridge Latin Course, which was based on real people and real events. Book IV took us to Rome, books II and III had us in Britain, and book I was all about Pompeii.

It’s book I that I love.

This is Caecilius, Metella and Quintus, and they are my friends. When they died (spoiler alert!) at the end of book I, my entire Latin class was CRUSHED. We loved these guys. Quintus and Caecilius were always up to some mischief or other, and Metella? Metella was always sitting in that stupid atrium.

CLC had a culture section, which I loved mainly because it was a guaranteed 100 on an assignment every week. That’s beautiful, folks. But it turns out I retained an awful lot of information from those sections, and they’ve made me into the freaky Latin-fixated person I am today.

When I found out I’d be living in Europe, I immediately started planning how to get to Pompeii. I wanted to walk with Caecilius and his family, I wanted to climb Vesuvius, I wanted to see all this amazing stuff I’d studied for so long. It wasn’t enough for me to see Rome or some other Roman ruins. I wanted—I NEEDED—to see Pompeii.

Which of course meant that getting to Pompeii became the most complicated thing EVER.

I initially had planned to go to Pompeii for my twentieth birthday in July. It’ll be my first birthday away from my parents, and I thought, “What the heck? Let’s climb Vesuvius. That’s a good way to celebrate getting older.” I’d planned to do a week-long tour of Italy, seeing Florence, Rome, Pompeii, and meeting my high-school friend Chloe in Sicily.

And then I didn’t have anyone to travel with, and I felt like gallivanting through Italy alone was maybe not the best plan I’d ever had ever.

Per aspera ad astra

And then I was going to go to Italy for a week and a half over spring break, but Sasha had planned to go to Central Europe, and how could I pass that up?

Per aspera ad astra

And then we finally booked a weekend in Rome. I looked up train tickets to Pompeii and discovered it would be 19 euro round trip. “Huzzah!” I thought. “That is completely affordable, and I shall do it!”

The week before we arrived, I looked up train tickets again. They’d gone up to 40 euro each way. And though I completely, totally would have emptied my savings account to go to Pompeii, I couldn’t ask Sasha to do the same as she had no burning desire to go.

Begrudgingly, I Facebooked my aunt (a genius in all things Italian) and asked her about visiting Ostia Antica. I knew my Pompeii dream was dead.

Per aspera ad astra

I’m lying in bed the first night we get to Rome, and here’s what’s going through my head:

Dear God,

What’s up, homie? Hope all is well witchu. Thank you for bringing me to Rome and for inventing gelato and pizza and Italian men. Please, please, please help me be wrong about the ticket prices. Please, please, please let Pompeii happen. Please. Please, please, please. Did I mention how awesome gelato is? Amen.

I really, truly believed that I would not be seeing Pompeii on this trip, and I’d made my peace with visiting Ostia instead. But we decided to talk to the information desk at the train station in Rome, and lo and behold, the tickets had dropped in price to 32.50 round trip. We’d take a train to Napoli, a metro to Pompeii, and we’d be back by 10 p.m. I quietly bought my tickets and left the train station.

Inside, I was turning a million cartwheels. ALL OF MY DREAMS. COMING TRUE. SO EXCITING THAT I CANNOT. PUNCTUATE. CORRECTLY. I would have been turning literal cartwheels, except I would have injured myself, having never successfully turned a cartwheel in my life. 

And when we got to Pompeii? Pure, unadulterated bliss. I don’t think I’ve ever been so happy in my entire life. (No offense to the other happy things that have happened in my life, such as my sister being born.)

Waiting in line at Pompeii Scavi

Part of a house

The Villa of Mysteries

Looking down a street

Pompeii took my breath away. It was simultaneously a really amazing thing to see (it’s so perfectly preserved) and a long-term dream of mine coming true. Walking down the many streets, I could easily picture everything I’d learned about in school. I could see Caecilius running his banking business. I could see the family dog, Cerberus, lounging about in the street. I could hear the ruckus of the forum and the tabernas.

And it was awesome.

I look Photoshopped into this picture, but I really, truly did plop myself down in someone’s atrium, mainly so I could type this sentence: Metella in atrio sedet et Katharina in atrio sedet.

Another life goal accomplished.

Fourteen-year-old Kate, sitting quietly in her first Latin class, hoping against hope that the magister didn’t call on her to recite the fifth noun declension, could never have imagined that this would happen. And honestly, nineteen-year-old Kate never quite dared to believe that it would. But it did.

And through hardships, I really did get to my stars.

This weekend, I fulfilled a life goal of mine: visit Rome. Some people visit Rome because they like Vespas and gelato. Some people visit because they like Audrey Hepburn and the Pope.

I visited because I like old, dead things.

I sort of have a thing about Roman ruins. And when I say “sort of have a thing,” I mean I am straight-up obsessed. I took Latin for four and a half years, up to college-level “proficiency,” whatever that means, and so I studied the Romans. I studied them hard.

Kate, age 16, rockin’ an awesome hat in front of Roman ruins in Spain

My senior year of high school, I translated the vast majority of The Aeneid. (This sounds really cool until you read my translation, which is unintelligible.) At the end of the day,The Aeneidis all about the founding of Rome, and as I got closer to the date my plane would take off, those ancient words I memorized rolled through my head.

Arma virumque cano, Troiae qui primus ab oris…

And then I would realize that I was FINALLY going to the place I had been dreaming about visiting since I was a little girl, and then I would freak out.

I thought about posting every single picture I took, but I took nearly 400 in three days, and I don’t want to crash your bandwidth.

I thought about reviewing every single thing I saw, as I’ve done in the past, but I realized the entry would look like this:

St. Peter’s Basilica: COOLEST THING I’VE EVER SEEN

Vatican City Museum: COOLEST THING I’VE EVER SEEN

Colosseum: COOLEST THING I’VE EVER SEEN

Forum: COOLEST THING I’VE EVER SEEN

Gelato: COOLEST THING I’VE EVER SEEN

You get the picture.

Instead, what I decided to do is write one uber-substantial post about My Biggest Life Dream Ever, and I will do that. I will do that as soon as I finish all this pesky homework, in fact, and you will be able to recognize it from the shockingly high number of exclamation points I plan to use.

And here is what I want to say in this current blog post:

Rome was awesome!!

Everything was amazing!!

ROMAN RUINS!!

I didn’t want to leave!!

Gelato!!

Pasta!!

Pizza!!

Italian men are creepy!!

I almost hyperventilated in the Colosseum!!

I TOUCHED ROMAN RUINS!!

Julius Caesar may have peed here!!

I will be back when I have cash monies!!

I can’t believe I got to go here!!

Here’s a video of me freaking out about Roman ruins!!

That was a subdued reaction!!

And here’s a video of most of the pictures I took. Don’t worry—it’s set to music, so you won’t fall asleep. Just sit back and appreciate my shaky hand, use of iMovie, and love of homophones.

When I was 16 and angsty, I was really into this band called Saving Jane. It was angry girl music, and it was perfect—at least until I turned 17. I recently rediscovered a song of theirs called Far From Home, and it seems to fit my life at the moment pretty well, especially this line:

Please don’t forget that I’m thinking of you—your fingerprint’s on everything that I do.

As I traveled through Paris, I started thinking about the fingerprints that have been left in my life. Obviously, my family has left the largest number. Having raised me, they color the way I look at the world, just like yours does.

In Paris, it was easy to see the influence from Mom’s side of the family.

The Shavers have a proud tradition of being able to sleep anywhere. My mom is usually asleep before the plane takes off, and it really doesn’t matter where we’re going or what time of day it is.

Christmas afternoon is a sacred time of napping. It’s no Christmas party until Gramps is asleep, but conveniently, that happens fairly quickly, and he is followed by the rest of the family. Including the parts of the family that are cooking Christmas dinner. This is why we also have a proud tradition of eating Christmas dinner really, really late.

I have also personally witnessed members of my family falling asleep in the following situations: in an orthodontist’s waiting room, in a doctor’s waiting room, in the middle of a word, while making a shopping list, reading a book, during family reunions.

It’s a gift, I tell you. And that is why I did not feel bad at all that I fell asleep several times in public parks in Paris. It’s just who I am.

I also thought of my dad a lot while I was in Paris. Dad and I are interested in many of the same things: being snarky, changing the radio station so we don’t have to hear commercials, puns, speaking in Latin. We also both really like churches, funky bookstores, and graves of famous people; we award bonus points to things that combine any of the three.

We saw two very famous churches while in Paris: Notre Dame and Sacre Coeur. Dad would have loved them, and I was kind of bummed that he wasn’t here to see them.

Notre Dame is, of course, very old and very famous. That doesn’t make it any less cool. Architecturally, it is fabulous. It’s absolutely gorgeous inside.

We climbed the towers of Notre Dame, which was well worth the 5.50 euro it cost. The view was stunning.

Also, gargoyles. We love gargoyles.

After Notre Dame, we walked through the Latin Quarter, where we stumbled upon this cute bookstore.

We also visited the Sacre Coeur basilica. While not as impressive as Notre Dame, it was still beautiful and a worthwhile visit.

Our last day in Paris, we visited Pere Lachaise cemetery. Is it inappropriate to describe that as super cool?

Lots of famous people are buried in Pere Lachaise, like Edith Piaf, Balzac, Chopin, Moliere, Richard Wright, and Gertrude Stein. My favorite tombstone, however, was Oscar Wilde’s.

It was a good trip, but it would have been even better if my family had been there to share a plate of escargot. Because we would have. We so would have.

Blogs forthcoming!

With my sincerest apologies to the artists in my life, who make art that I actually like.

So, the thing about modern art is I don’t really understand it. Like, at all. I know that it is really rude to say that I could do some of that stuff, but you guys. I could do some of that stuff.

I confronted this at the Pompidou Museum.

The Pompidou opened in the 70s, and it was a super controversial addition to Paris. I mean, it’s a super ugly building, especially when you consider that it’s just down the street from beautiful things like Notre Dame and the Sorbonne.

But I think it’s kind of cool, and because we got in free, we went.

You had to take the escalators that are in the clear tubes on front of the buildings to get to the exhibits.

Can I say something about that? Why do people insist on putting full-glass things in direct sun? It’s hot. It’s just like a greenhouse, actually, which gets hot by design. This is something that Texans LOVE…why?

So we got on the escalator, and I started sweating from the heat. Luckily, it was a warm day in Paris to Parisians and Canadians, but not to Texans. I’m used to 100-degree days in May, so the 80 degrees was manageable…mostly.

The museum itself was super cool on the inside, and I was excited to see colorful art, especially after days of gloomy Jesus paintings.

Some of the pieces of artwork were amazing.

Some of the art was quite frankly inspiring.

This piece inspired me to make a major change in my life. From now on, when I get furniture from IKEA, I’m throwing away the instructional booklet, and I’m assembling it how my heart moves me to. And then, when people compliment me on it, I’ll drop a bomb of truth on them: it’s not just furniture. It’s ART.

Some of the art was kind of dumb.

For example, I watched a video of a woman climbing around her room. It was called “Climbing Around My Room.” It lasts for 10 minutes, and it is quite literally just her climbing around her room.

Someone make sense of this for me.

All in all, though, I really enjoyed this museum. Most of the art was fantastic. Some of the art was fantastic to mock, which is one of my most favorite things to do in this world. There were some great views of Paris:

What’s not to love? It’s well worth a visit, even if you don’t get in free, and I wished we’d had more time to spend in the museum.

The day after we hit up the Louvre, we went to the Musee d’Orsay. I was super excited about this museum because it has a substantial number of Van Goghs. I love Van Gogh.

This (Church at Auvers) is one of my favorite Van Goghs, and it’s in the Musee d’Orsay. I could have stood there all day looking at it.

Well, until someone pushed me into it or stole my wallet or something. That museum is also super busy (but also free).

The Musee d’Orsay is so pretty. It’s in a former train station, so the ceilings are high, curved, and elaborate. The museum itself is like a work of art, and I was bummed that pictures were not allowed inside. The galleries are interesting because of the train-station-y business—they are spread out pretty widely and flow very well. I was able to get so close to paintings, especially when compared with the Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam.

We left when we were kicked out in the evening and sat on the steps outside the museum for an hour, just watching the street performers.

The pianist was amazing. He couldn’t have been much older than me, and he played fantastically.

At first, I was super excited to see a real Parisian mime. I mean, what else could you possibly ask for out of a trip to France? And then I realized that I am actually really freaked out by mimes, and I was terrified that the mime would come over and mime me. So I stopped taking pictures and making eye contact.

That’s reasonable, right?