hello the southern thing readers! i am so happy dara has been gracious enough to let me take over her blog for the day!! i have always thought that guest posts are the best when they are stories, so today i am going to share with you the story of my last night on my study abroad.
i had just spent six weeks in london, going to every play imaginable, every shakespeare play at the globe, seeing every tourist sight on the list, and was nearing the end of my study abroad. the church i attended while in london was filled entirely of brazilians. there, i met a very fine brazilian man named paulo. he was nearly 12 years older than me and a body guard {i turned 21 on my study abroad, he was 32 and turned 33 shortly after my birthday.} i saw him at church the sunday before i left to go home. i was leaving on friday morning. we had hung out several times and had been to a few clubs together to go dancing, and i had brought friends with me each time. he taught me a really fun new type of dance that was brazilian that i have already forgot the name of, but it was really fun to go to a club where everyone did the same dance all together!!
when he learned i was leaving, he asked me out for thursday night. i was so excited!! i had been dying to go on an actual date with him the entire time i knew him! he told me he would pick me up at the tube stop closest to my apartment. the days leading up to our date, i was so anxious and excited and couldn’t stop talking about it.
when the time came for our date, i walked to the tube stop and waited. something that i had learned about brailizans from spending 6 weeks with them, is that they are always late so i wasn’t surprised when i got to the tube station and he wasn’t there. i waited 10 minutes, 15 minutes. my friends arrived at the tube stop to go out on their last night in london. i gave a shy and embarrassed look at them that i had possibly been stood up. a half hour passed when finally, i saw his friend. not him, but his friend. he waved over at me and had me follow him outside. i was confused. weren’t we taking the tube? he took me outside and escorted me into a very nice car. he sat in the back, and i slid into the passenger seat {on the right side!!} next to paulo. i was so disappointed. this wasn’t a date!! his friend was with us!!
paulo took the long way to the brazilian dance club so i could see some parts of london that he wanted to show me. when we got to the club, i decided to not be bothered that his friend was with us and have fun on my last night in london. by this point, paulo had taken me to so many clubs that i knew the dance by heart so i danced with others, he danced with others. it was fun! after a while, paulo started dancing with me and his other friend came up to us and they started speaking rapidly in portuguese.
a new song started and paulo pulled me to a corner of the dance floor, which happened to be right against the glass wall that was the entrance to the club. he was dancing really close. like really close. but you see, i had already given up on this being a date, so i was completely oblivious as to why he was so close. i thought to myself “the only time a guy has ever been this close to me is when he is about to kiss me. weird. i wonder why he is this close.” well, i’m an idiot that i didn’t see it coming because then he kissed me, right in front of everyone. and then i thought “oooooooohhhhh!!!!! okay then!!! he was that close for that reason!!” dumb, lauren. real dumb.
i won’t go into the juicy details because it doesn’t feel right talking about the details of another boy’s kiss now that i am married, but it was a good one. we left the club and paulo drove his friend home. then we went to club, to club, to club and made a mockery of ourselves in each one. paulo knew every bouncer. we never paid for anything, i never had to show id. this happened the other times i went to clubs with him. when we went with my friends a few weeks prior, they wouldn’t let my friend in because she forgot her id at our apartment. she was leaving when he got there, and when we told him why she was leaving, he said ‘no no no, i’ll be right back.” he came back in like one minute and had taken care of it because he knew the bouncer and vouched for her. she got in. we got in everywhere.
after all the clubs, i said that the only thing i had wanted to do in london that i hadn’t was to take an iconic picture at abbey road and pose like the beatles. so there we went. there, he picked roses from someone’s garden and at the gas station he got me chocolate. lindt, the good chocolate. we had an emotional parting and he dropped me off at 3 am and i left to the airport at 6 am, back to america. since then, he has gotten married and divorced and i have gotten married. but i will always remember paulo, the brazilian hunk who gave me the best farewell any girl could get. it was something out of a movie, yes??
stop by my blog for more crazy stories!!
{my friends and i one night we went dancing on our study abroad}