Family vacations with my parents are more or less the same. We go. We see. We conquer. And then we Chinatown.

Chinatown: verb – to spend an inordinate amount of time wandering the streets of a city’s Chinese district in search of Chinese restaurants and marginally cheaper goods than one finds in his respective Chinatown. Synonyms: agonize, excruciate, torture.

Mom, in particular, is a big recreational Chinatownist. Some people buy trinkets and souvenirs on vacation; Mom, in her inexhaustible hunt for the best bargain, buys dried mushrooms.

In places with particularly lively Chinatowns, she’ll go from herbal specialty store to herbal specialty store fastidiously inspecting the dried food stuffs that line the walls in giant glass jars. A well-seasoned, cross-continental Chinatownist, she bargains with shopkeepers for ginseng she has little intention of buying. She just wants to see what good ginseng goes for these days.

On the way back from Toronto a few summers ago, the border patrol inspected the family minivan, which at the time was conveniently packed with bags and bags of discounted dried mushrooms. My parents had discovered them on sale at Big Land, a Chinese grocery store outside Toronto, and hoarded them into our van’s trunk like … well, illicit drugs.

Dad, with his clip-on aviators rolled up above his lenses like a spore smuggler, tried to explain to the stone-faced guard that we were on our way back from a 500-mile grocery store trip. Mom mimed several cooking gestures with her hands, and the guard, exasperated with the Chinese family smuggling ‘shroom look-alikes, let us cross the border.

This summer, I’ll be studying abroad in England for two months. I’ve never had much individual inclination to go out and Chinatown, but the more I think of it, the more and more curious I am to go. Outside of the dried herbs, I really want hear what kinds of accents the Chinese-Britons will have in London.

As I make my preparations for the United Kingdom, though, my growing list of must-do’s is shaping up to be just as eccentric as Mom and Dad’s typical vacation goals. I swear I have no intention of bringing back mushrooms, though.

That being said, I’m channeling my inner scholar, taking advantage of my eight-week stint at the University of Cambridge. Following the dreams of my fantastically, unabashedly nerdy self, I am hoping to meet Sirs David Attenborough and Salman Rushdie.

Chances are, you aren’t familiar with their names but you might have heard one’s voice or read the other’s work. Attenborough is the scratchy, hushed-voice narrator of the BBC’s “Planet Earth” nature documentary series. Already a connoisseur of PBS “Nature” documentaries, I swallowed the entire 14-part “Planet Earth” series over the course of three days on DVD. A wisely chosen Christmas gift if I ever saw one.

Meanwhile, Salman Rushdie is a British-Indian author, whose book “The Moor’s Last Sigh” I decided to read for a final senior literature project because my teacher told me he was a major assassination target by radical Islam. Death threats aside, I’ve never thought it could be so cool to be a writer. Plus, being able to say that I enjoy reading allegory sounds so damn intellectual.

The working plan is to e-mail these two graduates of Cambridge, woo them with accolades from a 19-year-old American student exploring England, and then encourage them to drop their busy schedules to come and spend an afternoon with me. I’m picturing the three of us enjoying high tea in Chinatown.

More than anything else, I am just purely excited about going abroad. I have never traveled alone, let alone gone to a Chinatown alone. In England, I’m going to figure out how to fake an English accent; I’m going to run laps around the Stonehenge; I’m going to see what the fuss about British cuisine is all about; I’m going to drive a shopping cart into Platform 9 3/4.

As the semester draws to a close, summer in England dominates my thoughts. Forward ho, I say, to Britain we go!

Henry is a freshman in Business. If you know where or how to reach David Attenborough or Salman Rushdie, please let him know. He can pay you for information in dried mushrooms.