Four massive European twats. Life at College State-side.

Part 1 in my two part series on my travel experiences in Miami. Don’t hold your breath for the second-part in a few weeks time. It won’t be spectacular or anything.

“Going to America”. The crucial thought that got my sack of carbon waste through the first year of University. A thought, that when repeated, liberated me from the crushing difficulties of getting laid (my face had a lot to do with that) and freed me from trendy London kids who, having grown up with fields surrounding me in all directions, provoked me with their cool sense of style (I was wearing bandanas for fuck sake) and bamboozled me with their obscure urban mutterings.

Yes, that simple line, “going to America”, became my mantra of sorts. Repeated in my head like a Hare Krishna tripping on acid, I used it to remind myself that across the pond everything might be better and that I, once transplanted there, would lose my cheap-80s-hair-rock vagina-repulsing physical aesthete.

Needless to say, things don’t always work out the way you plan.

My experiences in Miami? The reason I have no real desire to ever go back to the USA.

Unless I get a casting call for a modern remake of Sweet Valley High or something. In which case I really need to start fellating more TV execs.

Why I’ll Never Go Back

Oral slobberings, now we’re on that note, as I soon learned, are the only way to really get by under the watchful gaze of Uncle Sam. Away from the rigmarole of the 9-5, It appears that everyone and their dog, especially in Miami, has some kind of sideline gig going imbibing overly-viscous man fluid in order to get somewhere better in life.

I was even lucky enough to witness such ascendency one evening when a young Cuban couple “indulged” on a bus that I happened to be riding from Coral Gables to Downtown (no small feat considering the only people that usually ride on Miami-Dade public transport are 70-plus African American women and clueless virgin exchange students like myself). Still, I count my lucky stars. If my exchange experience had been a few years later I might have witnessed a different type of “noshing” entirely (that involving another bum’s face), the result being that I wasn’t wholly turned off by America on the basis of one such event.

No. As grating as that was on my repressed British psyche, it would take an experience much worse than witnessing a public blowie to get me to pledge to never return again.

The experience in question? American College life.

Life as a Brit Abroad in the States

A flag-wavers wet dream: prime British wanker central to the action

Being British at an American college isn’t the pussy-fest a 90′s television diet of Nickelodeon would lead you to believe. Nor is it anywhere near as fun.

90% of the time being mistaken as Australian – enough, when in the wrong mind, to drive the most sanest of men to self-immolate – instead of fending off the advances of loose American women, I was resigned to spend the larger bulk of my time trying to find someone, anyone, who could secure me a fake ID.

So shameful that at 20 years of age, thanks to some fucked up law that has set every American I’ve ever known back about 5 years in the maturity stakes, I couldn’t slam away the beers and lube up socially.

Denied then from doing something I’d had free reign with for the past six years of my life – and marooned with my socially awkward sober state of being – my misery grew. Forced to swap bathroom stalls for library stacks, I ended up sidling up with the geeks, the freaks and, ultimately, the bastion of every poindexters’s school career, the lofty pinnacle of sporting prowess that is the table tennis club.

Throwing Small Balls Around

The one occasion where they let me out of my geek prison to look even more fetching playing badminton

Spending my days playing table tennis, walking to the University Wellness Centre and seeing uber-jocks strutting around near the weight machines, only made me realise how much more I despised my life here in the US more than I did back in England.

Messing around with my paddle, while the gap toothed Asian kid sent his tiny balls flying past my head, I began playing out the scenario of walking down to the University campus river and placing my skull into the jaws of the resident alligator over and over again in my head.

This wasn’t what I signed up for.