This past summer my entire social media feed was filled with “Euro Girl Summer” related content. This included aesthetic pictures in Greece, food guides in France, packing hacks — the list goes on. Due to this seemingly abundant available content at my fingertips I, like many girls, wanted to experience this “Euro Girl Summer” for myself so badly. Luckily for me, the various covid lockdowns had repeatedly canceled my family’s Europe trip. . However, my dad refused to give up hope and had rebooked everything to be in full swing for this summer!
Our trip was a week in London, followed by a week in Paris. Of course it was as amazing as I had hoped, and definitely worth all the money I had spent. However, there are a few minor details all the media content had forgotten to include. These details being the not so glamorous parts of the trip.
First off, the smells. This alone gets its own category. As I walked my way down the streets of Paris, I experienced the smells of fresh french baguette and croissant, or the floral aroma from a perfume store. However, I was also slapped in the face with the smell of urine. Yep you read that correctly … human pee. Now you may think, “Oh that wouldn’t be pleasant, but it can’t be that bad ”. Guess again. The odor was so pungent that I would actually throw my head back sometimes due to my nose being hit so hard by the smell.
Another element that I never saw covered throughout all those tiktoks was how much I’d end up spending. Because I am on summer mode, I enter a state of refusing to do any sort of math. Due to this, for a concerningly large portion of the trip, I had refused to do the conversion of pounds or euros to Canadian dollars. I’m sure you could believe my surprise when I had checked my bank account to see how low of a number was remaining. After the initial shock I had begun the stages of financial grief. I obviously thought it was fraud, and so I checked all the statements. Apparently the thief in question had made all the exact same purchases as I did but spent nearly double the amount I had thought I spent. If you haven’t caught on, it was me, I am my own thief.
Finally, the amount of walking that Euro Girl Summer entails. Don’t get me wrong, I am a strong advocate for hot girl walks and I did plan to acquire record breaking step counts, but I hadn’t planned for the inevitable death of my thighs. Because of the heat, trying to avoid chafing by wearing pants wasn’t feasible, and due to the high fashion standard, visible bike shorts were a big no. Therefore, the duck waddle almost every girl knows did take place on many accounts.
Now that my legs have healed and I’ve been back to work to get my bank account back up to the usual standard, I wouldn’t change a thing. Even though many of the social media content I had originally seen glamorized many aspects of it, they didn’t falsely advertise. I experienced all those amazing parts, just with balance. You’ll always have good and bad in every situation life throws at you. Although, I am very content that out of all the problems to have in the world, that was as bad as it got.