I sat in the waiting area of Birmingham airport
with five of my best friends. It was two o clock in the afternoon, and I was wearing
a Bart Simpson shirt teamed with a pink sparkly party hat whilst drinking from
a can of Fosters. There I was, the moment I’d been counting down to for the nine months prior to it. I was eighteen years old in precisely ten hours,
and I’d never been more ready for adulthood.
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| The Party Starts Here |
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| Happy Birthday to Me |
I woke up on the morning of my birthday, naked and
sweating with sick in my hair and a ringing in my ears. When we arrived the
night before, our hotel informed us that there had been a mix up with the
bookings, and they were going to have to move us down the road. That’s how we
found ourselves living for the week in what can only be described as a dingy,
dirty slum with broken air con and a shower so small that our travel-sized
shampoo’s took up the majority of the room. But, we were in good spirits,
despite the agonizing hangovers and the disagreeable living conditions. After
washing ourselves to the best of our ability and scrubbing the sick off Becky’s
bedsheets, I decided I wanted to try out the ‘cultured, mature and sensible’
side of being eighteen, so we headed off to explore big, bad Zante in the day
time. Armed with sun cream, cigarettes and Kindles a plenty, we left the hotel
in hopes of finding the nearest beach.
The strip at night, through intoxicated eyes, looked
strangely magical. The clubs were lit up by neon signs and everything was alive
and buzzing. Music and people filled the streets, spilling out from buildings,
excitement was in the air. The strip in the day time however, was a different
story. Everything was a little bit broken, and a little bit sad. The clubs
looked dirty and the tattoo shop’s falling down sign was much more obvious in
the light. Dried sick covered the pavements, and there were a pair of ‘I LOVE
ZANTE’ pants that had been trodden into the dirt.
The
first glimpse of peace we found on our trip was when we finally arrived at the
beach. Yes, there was constantly large Greek men in floral swimming trunks
coming over to try and sell us £10 fake Beats headphones and handmade
bracelets, and loud groups of teenage boys with prominent Essex accents and
iced-gem haircuts chanting ‘LADS, LADS, LADS ON TOUR’, but the sea was
glistening and we put in our headphones, lay back and cooked in the 40-degree
heat.
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| Beach Bar |
When
we returned to the hotel after a long day of burning my pale British skin to a
crisp and sipping cheap mojitos, we had our first introduction to the hotels
barman – or perhaps better known as the worst human being I have ever had the
displeasure of coming into contact with. At first, we all agreed that yes, he
was rather attractive. Not attractive enough however, for it to be in any way
acceptable to drag Jess into the back room of the bar, attempt to shove his
tongue down her throat and call her his ‘pretty English rose’. Later in the
week I came to despise him even more, when I drunkenly returned to the hotel at
4am with a 21-year-old barmaid I'd just met and was told ‘no, no, she no allowed in
your room. Gay is no okay.’ This, of course, was after we turned down his
not-so polite offer of a threesome.
Our
second experience of Zante nightlife was slightly more of a success than the
first, in that this time we managed to reach the end of the strip with no tears
and no projectile vomiting. This could be seen as a positive; however, it also
meant that we reached the very last club – Waikiki. Waikiki was a dark, dingy
club right next to the beach. In Waikiki, there were around 500 men, and six
girls. Those six girls were us. Now, I don’t know if we didn’t get the memo, or
if it was a well known fact that this club is a haven for creepy older guys,
but nothing prepared us for the amount of ass-grabbing and awkward grinding we
endured for the short amount of time we braved staying in there. It wasn’t all
bad though, because we found our favourite club that night too. Cocktails and
Dreams, and yes, it was as cheesy as it sounds. With the same sing-a-long
playlist on repeat and a wide range of shots for just 50 cents each, this was
drunken teenage girl heaven.
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| Cocktails and Dreams |
On
the third day of our holiday, we splashed out 100 euros and went on a boat
party. We’d all been told this was a must, and none of us were up for missing
out, so we put on our nicest bikinis and floral kimonos and headed out for a
day-drinking extravaganza on the Mediterranean Sea. We decided to go all out
and bought a bottle of champagne each when boarding the boat, and spent the
next few hours feeling like royalty. Well, if royalty was to down champagne
straight from the bottle, take shots from random people’s belly-buttons and
attempt to slut-drop whilst ‘House Every Weekend’ plays loudly in the
background.
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| VVIP Boat Party |
Somehow, the next day we ended up on a coach to
a beach on the other side of the island to do ‘watersports’, even after I spent
hours informing my friends that ‘I do not do sports.’ They laughed at me and
told me ‘watersports isn’t sport!’ which I said was quite frankly ridiculous-
it literally has the word ‘sport’ in the name. But despite my attempt at
persuading them otherwise, I found myself, and my hangover, clinging on to an
inflatable lilo-type object for dear life whilst being violently dragged around
the ocean. Cheers for trying to broaden my horizons guys, but nearly drowning
for ‘fun’ just isn’t my cup of tea.
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| No thank you |
When the end of the week came around, we were
all only about 25% alive. All we’d eaten all week was slightly undercooked
burgers and chicken nuggets, as this was the only food they sold at our ‘hotel’.
We’d also drank our body weight and more in cheap spirits and mixers, slept for
a maximum of four hours a night, and two my friends got into a very aggressive
fist fight because one of them told the other that she wasn’t her best friend
anymore. Drama central. Some of us were golden brown and glowing, and the rest
of us (me) resembled a hot and bothered lobster with a peeling face and an
inability to move my right shoulder due to the pain. My hair had also somehow
turned into dreadlocks and it felt like straw, and all I wanted was my king
sized bed, some deep conditioner and a shit tonne of after-sun.
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| They made up eventually |
We arrived back in Birmingham at four in the
afternoon. We were barely even speaking to each other, because all we could
focus on was not passing out until we got home and into bed. But after sleeping
solidly for a good few days, waking up in my cosy bed in my cosy room in my
cosy house just didn’t feel right. Why didn’t I have to squeeze myself into the
shower? Why wasn’t I violently overheating? Why wasn’t I cramped into a tiny
hotel room with five of my best friends? I was left alone, with a ridiculous
henna tattoo, an uncountable number of bruises and an overwhelming longing to
go back and do it all over again.
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