A Girls' Night Out for Valentine's Day

I haven't posted for a week and there's a very good reason: I haven't felt like it. Okay, so maybe that's not such a good excuse after all, but still. In short, I've been negligent to my readers, all four of them.

Yesterday was Valentine's Day, as many will find it hard to forget. For the nineteenth year in a row, I was single on Valentine's Day...and to be perfectly honest, I didn't care! You don't need to have a significant other to enjoy Valentine's Day. I went out to a nearby mall with a couple of my new friends from class, and we spent a day browsing around the shops and having fun. It was great to get to know the other girls and to see firsthand how the English city celebrated Valentine's Day. They went all out here! Vendors were selling flowers and balloons on the streets, and there was even an organ grinder...without the monkey. Vendors at the farmer's market were offering unbelievable deals for produce, including out-of-season fruits such as strawberries and blueberries. My personal favorite was being able to browse around Waterstone's, which is the biggest bookstore in Kingston. Some things never change.

That night, many of the girls in the Kingston Study Abroad program went out for a Girls' Night. We met at the Odeon Rotunda, where we all bought tickets to see He's Just Not That Into You. If you haven't seen it yet, it is a truly enjoyable experience and a great movie. It was funny and touching and really insightful, too. It was a good Valentine's Day movie, whether you're single or not.

I'll admit that after watching the movie, I turned in quite early, though many of the other girls had talked about going out to a pub. They had not spent the entire day at the mall or out in the fresh air, and they surely weren't carrying a bag full of tomatoes from the farmer's market. I wasn't the only one who left early and after a day of activity, there was nothing I wanted more than to spend a quiet night at home. All in all, not the most romantic day for Valentine's Day, but I wouldn't change a thing.