Hot VPN Summer
Hot VPN Summer
Three months of watching Love Island UK, inside, with friends.
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The Love Island UK finale is tonight. You know where I’ll be. —Kate
It's March 2020 on Twitter right now. With the D*lta v*riant tainting the promised Hot Vax Summer, everyone is mourning the international travel, sweaty parties, and jam-packed concerts we thought would be returning with gusto. Everyone, I guess, but me.
This summer, I got to go to The Docklands with my friends. Or at least, that’s what we’ve called logging into the Express VPN app to watch the newest season of Love Island UK together.
VPNs—virtual private networks—will teleport your computer to anywhere in the world, and they're used, among other things, to watch local content from other countries. If you want to browse as someone in the U.K, Express VPN allows you to choose between four locations: The Docklands, London, East London, and Wembley.
The specific location doesn’t matter because all locations are within the boundaries of ITV2, the channel that airs Love Island. The alphabetical default, though, is The Docklands, an area along the riverfront in London, and it has become part of my friend group's regular vocabulary. “I’m going to The Docklands,” one of us would say, which just meant: “I’m watching Love Island right now.”
Love Island airs six days a week, but my friends and I meet once a week to watch whatever the most recent episode had been. Usually, we don’t start watching until about an hour after the five of us have come careening into the living room, claiming spots on various couches and updating one another on everything that had happened in our lives since we saw each other the week before.
Last summer, this is all I ever wanted. Instead, I met people on stoops and in courtyards, masking up to use their bathrooms and canceling whenever it looked like rain. In one moment of desperation, wishing so badly to just watch a movie with my friends, I brought my laptop out to my front steps. We put blankets and pillows on the ground, not five feet from the trash cans outside my apartment building, and managed to watch all of Mamma Mia before my laptop died.
So no, I did not go to any raves this summer. I did not go to any concerts. I did not take a plane. I did not find freedom from the ways Covid has changed our lives. But I did see my friends, in person, inside, every week, and we went to The Docklands to watch a stupid, beautiful reality show that was not able to film in 2020.
Maybe next year, I’ll be ready to visit the Docklands in person. Vaccination card in hand, I'll eat at The Narrow, which is apparently one of the area’s best restaurants. Or go to, uh, the Old Royal Naval College? I’ll be honest, there doesn’t appear to be much to do there. Maybe I’ll just watch the next season of Love Island—as long as my friends come, too.