The majority of UK students that do a year abroad at university turn 21 while they're out there: you start university at 18, and in your third year, which you start aged 20, at some point over the year will become the point where you reach pontoon - 21.
This was the boat I found myself in towards the end of March, nearing the end of my eighth month in Italy. How do you celebrate your 21st birthday? How do you celebrate it in a foreign country? I couldn't have a big party for my friends because most of them were back home. I had a couple of really close friends in Verona, but it doesn't make much of a party with a mere handful of people.
A solution was reached in that I was to have lots of little birthday parties: breakfasts, dinners, movie nights etc. It's like getting lots of little presents instead of one big one. That said, it is always nice to have a big present, and I did get one. My parents came out to see me and asked what I wanted to do. I said I wanted to go to Venice: they'd never been and I could think of no better place to spend my 21st birthday than the canals of arguably the most incredible city in the whole of Italy.
So we went. And it rained. Incessantly. Still, Venice is Venice and it was beautiful despite all that. We got to Piazza San Marco and I accounced that I wanted to jump (not that I lacked jumping pictures in Venice). When I made my announcement, I didn't realise that I'd still be trying to fulfil my wish fifteen minutes later.
The light was terrible and every time we'd take a photo the flash would go, but not at the same moment as the previous attempt. We had hundreds of pictures by the end, but none of them had me airborne. I was actually accumulating quite a crowd because people thought I was either famous, or it was a peculiar flashmob.
Anyway, if you don't try, you don't succeed, and we got there in the end:
Happy Birthday to Yah!
Venice, Italy, 2010
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