Hey everyone, I know I said that I'd write again Friday but, as it turns out, I went to lake Atitlan with a few of the other students. I’m writing this on the PDA right now as travel back to Antigua in a shuttle bus.
It'll take about 2-3 hours to get back, even though distance wise it isn’t that far, roads wind up and down through the mountains.
Anyway, more about that later, Ill start where I left off. The lessons have been going well, in my second lesson my teacher gave me about 75 verbs to memorize, by the next day I had managed to memorize all of them and could fully conjugate all of them. So I turn up the next day expecting an easy lesson because id be able to do all the exercises first time round. 20 minutes into the lesson Cristina said "well done, now we can move on to something else", or something to that effect in Spanish, I can’t quite remember now. Anyway she then gave me every single irregular verb in the Spanish language to remember, which numbers at about 150 verbs. Not only that but irregular verbs have their own methods of conjugation, there are 9 new methods to learn as well as having to remember which rules apply to which verbs on top of the verbs themselves. Needless to say, it's proving difficult.
On the Thursday the school had a trip to the beach, I don’t know the name of it or anything, it seemed to be a place were Guatemalans go for a break rather than travelers. I had a lesson with my teacher for 2 hours, unfortunately she was not well so the lesson relatively unhelpful, the only thing I can think of that I learnt was that arriba means over. The bigger pity was how excited Cristina had been about going to the beach. Apparently it’s a trip the school does every year and all the teachers really look forward to it.
After the lesson we went down to the beach and ran into the sea, the waves were absolutely huge. I wasn’t planning to go in too deep at the time so I still had my vest on. What I didn’t think about was that the tide kept going out to form the waves so the next thing I know I’m hit by a wave as high as my neck. Needless to say I was knocked over and after that, being already soaked; I didn’t see any reason to not go deeper. I got deep enough that the waves were hitting me which was a good foot or two taller than me. It was pretty cool but then the life guard called us all in because the waves were too big.
I'm going to have to interrupt my own story for a moment because... Mirka, who I've been waiting to rant about all weekend, is half asleep and keeps discreetly attempting to rest her head on my shoulder and her hand keeps rubbing up against my leg. The only way I have discovered to keep her from invading my personal space is by putting Led Zeppelin on my Ipod at full blast and then dangling an earphone near her head, it seems to cause her to move the other way. I now have one of the earphones balanced on my shoulder, hopefully that will keep her at bay. Back to the story then, I’m sure she'll get another mention or two later in the post.
After being told not to go in the water we had a football match against the staff, remember these guys were all Guatemalan, which means they are Latin American. Two of the neighboring countries had a war after a contested football match. Anyway we were expecting to play against a team of Maradonas, they were pretty good as it turns out, but not as good as we expected. We were drawing 5-5 after playing for a long while, but we all started getting tired and people started leaving the pitch. But then a load of the staff rushed back on and scored like 4 goals, then declared the match over. They then had the cheek to start calling Bertie, one of my housemates, "Coche" (which means pig in Latin America) because he plays dirty apparently, most of us played much dirtier than Bertie and after they all pulled the little open goal trick at the end I don't see how they can talk. That said, the name has stuck, sorry Bertie.
After the match Carlos, the guy who runs the school started pouring everyone Cuba Libres, using Pepsi so no one bring up the Coca Cola, but the Cuba Libres seemed to have more and more rum every time I went for another one.
Thursday was also Stephanie's birthday (Stephanie is a girl from Minnesota) so when we saw a Mariachi band approaching me and Clint(a 6 foot 7 guy from Sacramento who's Surname is actually Lovelady) went over too them. Clint stood there saying "you play happy birthday... You know feliz (Spanish for happy). I told them in Spanish that it was Stephanie’s birthday and could they sing happy birthday to her, at that point one of the staff ran over and talked to them too quickly for me to understand, but the band went over and started playing. You'll be pleased to know she was extremely embarrassed, ha-ha.
We traveled back to Antigua on the chicken bus (I can’t remember if I explained what a Chicken bus was, basically it's an old US school bus, repainted in bright colors and it’s not uncommon to find locals transporting livestock on them, this one was hired by the school though so no such luck for us. The ride was so bumpy that I may now have spinal damage but I'm sure I'll be fine.
That, night we went out for the birthday girl but first we had a bit of a pre-party on the roof one of the student houses where I taught everyone to play queens, well it was actually a combination of Queens and the American version... Kings. After getting everyone nicely drunk we went to cafe No Se which in Spanish means cafe don’t know and also was a bar not a cafe.
There we got more drunk and I found myself talking to a girl who was ex Israeli air force and Army. So you all know what’s at the forefront of my mind the whole time, well it only took about 3 minutes for me to ask about the whole Palestine thing. I can hear you all cringing but she bloody well deserved it didn’t she. Anyway, this "conversation went on for a good 15 minutes" by the end I discovered that she was fairly liberal when it came to everywhere except Palestine and the other counties surrounding Israel. She also told me her mother was a non practicing Zionist, does that make sense to anyone, I personally can’t see how that works. If you believe in the formation of a Jewish state with Jerusalem as the capital and you already happen to live in the aforementioned state because you moved there, surely you are practicing by default, there isn't much left to actively do is there?
Next we went to salsa club where all the guys had been taking salsa classes could show off there moves, we were there for a while and a live band started playing, when I noticed, I thought it might be a laugh to get them to sing happy birthday and make Stephanie get on the stage. I went up and asked the singer in drunken Spanish (which according to me teacher is better than sober).
The guy called up Stephanie and some other birthday girl and started playing a spiced up version of Feliz complianos (happy birthday). It was funny cos the singer started dancing with Stephanie but she was too embarrassed, imagine a guy on speed dancing round a lamppost and you get a good idea of the scene.
The law in Guatemala is that everywhere has to close at 1am at the latest, so we were kicked out onto the street. We started walking to a place that had an after party when the guy from the band ran out after me and told me that we could get into the after party there for half price. By that time the others had started walking, I don’t think Stephanie liked the idea of another dance with the band.
We ended up going to one which was basically a boom box in someone’s back garden. The woman behind the "bar" rang a bell every half hour or so and you had to run to the bar and hold your mouth open, then shed pour tequila in until your mouth was full, it seemed like an unwise move which makes me think it probably wasn’t her garden. Also I'm calling it a garden, it was more of a courtyard as it was all paved. I haven’t mentioned so far that it cracking flags at the time, we were soaked to the bone as there was no shelter.
Anyway, I woke up just in time for the lesson on Friday, still drunk and headed to my lesson. My teacher found it very amusing and wanted to hear all about it.
We set off for Atitlan at 1:00pm, still tipping down so it made for a nice, stuffy, hung over 3 hour drive.
We got out of the shuttle in the pouring rain, the driver, being a kindly sort of chap, parked with the door directly over a huge puddle.
We went straight down to the dock and caught a boat over to san Pedro. About 300m shy of San Pedro, the boat ran out of fuel, luckily there was some spare on board so we were going again before long. From the dock, it looked like the road up the hill was a waterfall.
San Pedro is a small town built on a hill, it seemed to cater heavily for travelers. Most of the bars were run by westerners where as the hotels and activity type businesses were run by locals. There were a huge number of massage parlors and yoga classes etc. Lots of the stuff seems to have been set up by travellers who arrived there and then never left.
We were quite tired and hung over, as well as extremely damp. We used tuc tucs to get to the hotel (tuc tucs are like mopeds with 2 rear wheels and a cover. Me and Clint both got in the same one, which was silly because we are probably the heaviest guys. It would have been fine if for not trying to drive up a waterfall. Since we were trying to do that, our tuc tuc kept sliding down the hill. In the end the driver pulled into the turning circle and had a run up, once we reached a dryer part we got going. It didn’t take long before we overtook the others and got to the hotel. It was pretty good for 25 Quetzals (about $3) per night.
On Saturday the weather was far better and we went for breakfast in a little cafe overlooking the lake, the view was pretty amazing.
We went off to rent some kayaks after this; me and Clint were given these really crappy which floated really high on the water, making them really unstable. We paddled for about 45 minutes and arrived at a small beach where we stopped and chilled for a while. Clint suddenly remembered he was supposed to be meeting someone at the dock as she was arriving late. He headed off and we carried on paddling away from the beach, after 5 minutes a few people decided that they were going back as it was another 45 minutes paddling to anywhere. This left me, Mike, Tony and Bertie, the plan was for us to paddle over to Santiago. After going for another 20 minutes, the wind had picked up and was blowing against us, big waves were coming at the kayak making mine wobble all over the place. I didn’t realize this but the "water proof" hold was filling with water. The four of us decided that the whole Santiago thing wasn’t going to happen so we headed back for the marina, about an hour in the other direction. I was expecting it to be easy but unfortunately it was just as hard because the waves rather than helping, kept spinning my boat round because it was so light in the front.
When we got in sight of the marina I was with Tony but the other two were a way off. I mentioned to Tony that the Santiago thing was a shitty idea and he said something to the same effect. I lost concentration for a second and suddenly the Kayak rolled, tipping me into the lake, Tony came over and grabbed the Kayak so that I could climb back on, I didn’t have much trouble but unfortunately I hadn’t realized the back was so full up so as Tony let go it flipped again. When we looked closer we noticed the whole back end of the Kayak was submerged. What made it worse was that we could not drain it on top of Tony's kayak because his was an open top and I doubt he wanted broken legs. We couldn’t drag it to the side either because it was too far. The first thing I did was grab the gear out of the hold and throw it in Tony's, then we needed to empty the hold. The whole rear end was submerged though so door into the hold was covered in water. After trying for a while to lift it long enough to get enough out we had the idea of having Tony push down on the front while I lifted up the back and scooped, which isn’t easy with nothing to stand on. It worked and eventually it was possible to scoop out water without it filling up again. By this point though I was unable to hold on to the Kayak anymore I was so tired. I remembered seeing a life jacket in Tony's hold though so I had him throw me it and put it on. This solved the problem of me having air, but unfortunately the wind was blowing Tony and the kayaks one way and the current was taking me another, I rested for a bit and tried swimming back over, but the current was too strong. Tony managed to work out a way of pulling my kayak behind him, the pushed it over too me. After struggling for a while we managed to finish scooping out everything we could and I got back on, it was still unstable however so I had to paddle back very carefully. The only thing I remember Tony saying the, whole way through was "Man, I'm hungry as crap".
We went and got changed, then it was straight to a bar. My arms and legs were in agony so I thought alcohol would help to numb the pain.
The next morning we went horse riding, I only had a pair of flip-flops with me due to a minor packing error in Antigua. I ended up getting trodden on by my horse which was one of the biggest there, it wasn’t pleasant. I’m not sure what the horses are fed on because my one constantly tried to grab leaves etc from the side of the road, at one point it scoffed down a whole maize plant, while walking.
The guides took us to a beach, it turned out to be the exact same beach that we kayaked to the day before, hurray.
No near death experiences that day though, I probably ought to point out that I have been writing this blog over the space of 2 days on my PDA, you’ve probably worked out it’s pretty long already but it was a busy weekend.
I’m sat at the computer in my house right now finishing it off, I seem to have caught a bit of a cold which isn’t nice. By the way, I have bought a Guatemalan mobile, it cost me about £12 and now I can receive international or skype calls for free so just ask if you want the number.
Ok, that’s it for now… Later
Wednesday, 24 September 2008
Tuesday, 16 September 2008
Antigua... Day 2
Hey guys, just finished my first full day in Antigua and im having a pretty good time as it happens.
But before i get on to the good stuff I have some complaining to do as usual.
We arrived (me, Liz and Liz's parents) at the airport at about 10:30-11:00, which gave me plenty of time to get my flight at 1:35am. However when we finally found the queue for check in it was about 100m long, not even exaggerating, it went out the door and down the road. Anyway when i finally checked still had plenty of time left to get through to the lounge, more then i thought as it turned out. I decided to leave through security at about 12:30, thinking that it would take about 45 minutes to get through to the lounge. However, after the 10 minutes of security stuff, instead of finding a ten mile walk through corridors that seem to be longer than the actual airport itself, i find myself in the lounge, meaning that i could have waited untill 1:20 and still made the flight. Not only did I have the burden of knowing i missed out on an extra 50 minutes with Liz, but i had also found myself in an an airport lounge, stuffed full of people meaning i had no where to sit and because most of them spoke spanish, thats the language all the announcments came in first. That wasnt a problem for certain announcments such as "now boarding rows 10-15 " which i could understand. But some of the others where more complicated, so every now and then I'd find myself being trampled by a heard of stampeeding Guatemalans without having a clue why.
Anyway, i finally made it onto the plane where i sat and watched the extrely historically acurate cinematique masterpiece that is "10,000 BC" the new version(what a load of bullshit that was). After this I looked out the window as we flew over what i can only assume was Mexico city, I assume this because of its sheer size, we were cruising at 30,000 feet and it was still enourmous, it looked very impressive at night. After taking in the view I did somthing very rare for me on an aircraft which was fall asleep, I say rare... i've never managed it before. Anyway this meant I missed breakfast, making the meal I had with Liz's family was all I had to eat untill about 2:00pm the following day. When we landed it only took a short while to get through customs and i was met by a strange little man in a wooly jumper at the gate. I mention the wooly jumper because it was about 25 degrees (thats centigrade Americans, dont worry sub zero temperatures arn't a problem here), anyway he didn't speak any english although he did say "ok" a hell of a lot, in a funny voice aswell, just imagive what a chol sounds like saying the word "ok" then speed it up and you'll get the idea.
Anway he showed me to the car and we started to drive. He threw me back a folder which had a map of the city in it and a few other bits and bobs, welcome letter etc.
after a 15minute drive we arrived in Antigua, at that point the ride got unpleasent, Antigua only has cobble streets so as much as I wanted to look round, it was all i could do to hold myself in place and not bounce around the cab.
He pulled up to a building and lead me down an alleyway where he rang a doorbell, he put my bag down inside but before I even put the rest of my stuff down with it he said was out of the door and gone. So Im in this house, somwhere in Antigua without a clue whats going on and on my own. Then I see a little head poking round the corner, it was a little kid, I worried that the school had accomadated me in a home stay program which is not what I wanted. Then I noticed a tiny woman stood behind me. "Tu hablas Espanol" luckily i knew enough spanish to reply with "poquito pero es no bien",she then showed me round the house speaking only in spanish, I understtod everything apart from when she explained how to make the shower hot, I later discovered that you can't make the shower hot, only less cold.
Ok i'm going into too much detail,I havnt even got 45 minutes into Guatemala yet.
I set up all my stuff in the room then decided to just chill for a bit because I was tired, I thought I'd wait for some people to get up so that i could meet my housemates for the next 2 weeks... I fell asleep as soon as I laid on the bed... I woke up again around 11am after 2 hours street, no one was around so I went to explore the city. Its actually quite a small town, I can easily walk from one side to the other in about 20 minutes-half an hour. It was really busy though, mainly because its independance day weekend,. I tried to find the school using my map, unfortunatley the map is difficult to follow and I couldnt see it, I decided to look for the supermarket instead, which turned out to be where it said on the map, so dont start blaming my map reading skills.
After getting back from the supermarket I met 2 of my housemates Bertie and Bridget, I ended up leaving again straight away and we went for lunch and they showed me the school. At 6:we went to check out the festivities in the parque central. It was heaving and we only stayed for about half an hour before going for food. I got a beer with my meal and it actually turns out to be very nice, also every place I have been to has loads of vegetarian options so I wont be eating any butchered animal carcas in Antigua, hopfully it will be a similar deal in Livingston.
I hyad my first spanish lesson this morning, it was 4:30 long and my maestra Christina didnt speak any English to me apart from the odd word that I wanted translating. Not only that but I understood most of it so I may be ok at this spanish thing after all.
I just got back from our second trip to see the festivities as its actually indepedance day today. Yesterday there were loads of people running around with torches, as in torches similar to the olympic torch, not battery operated ones. There were also lots of bangs, I assumed that these were fireworks untill I noticed the man launching motars into the air which exploded at the top of there arch, it seemed pretty silly to me, al it was doing was making a load bang, couldnt he have just hit a dustbin lid or somthing for a fraction of the price. Today the same man was there again but the runners were replaced by big bands playing while they marched round, some of them danced aswell, it was wierd to watch all the drummers perfoming quite complicated dance moves whilst playing at the same time.
Unfortunatley all my photos of the event are pretty poor, i cant get close enough to stuff for the flash to be worth using and i dont have a tripod so night photos come out blurred, Ive had to resort to using a very high sensitivity but they come out very grainy, I may purloin Bertie's photos as he has a proper digital SLR camera and claims his can take good night photos... we shall see.
Ok, thats it for now, maybe I'll write again friday or somthing, if theres anything worth saying.
Later
But before i get on to the good stuff I have some complaining to do as usual.
We arrived (me, Liz and Liz's parents) at the airport at about 10:30-11:00, which gave me plenty of time to get my flight at 1:35am. However when we finally found the queue for check in it was about 100m long, not even exaggerating, it went out the door and down the road. Anyway when i finally checked still had plenty of time left to get through to the lounge, more then i thought as it turned out. I decided to leave through security at about 12:30, thinking that it would take about 45 minutes to get through to the lounge. However, after the 10 minutes of security stuff, instead of finding a ten mile walk through corridors that seem to be longer than the actual airport itself, i find myself in the lounge, meaning that i could have waited untill 1:20 and still made the flight. Not only did I have the burden of knowing i missed out on an extra 50 minutes with Liz, but i had also found myself in an an airport lounge, stuffed full of people meaning i had no where to sit and because most of them spoke spanish, thats the language all the announcments came in first. That wasnt a problem for certain announcments such as "now boarding rows 10-15 " which i could understand. But some of the others where more complicated, so every now and then I'd find myself being trampled by a heard of stampeeding Guatemalans without having a clue why.
Anyway, i finally made it onto the plane where i sat and watched the extrely historically acurate cinematique masterpiece that is "10,000 BC" the new version(what a load of bullshit that was). After this I looked out the window as we flew over what i can only assume was Mexico city, I assume this because of its sheer size, we were cruising at 30,000 feet and it was still enourmous, it looked very impressive at night. After taking in the view I did somthing very rare for me on an aircraft which was fall asleep, I say rare... i've never managed it before. Anyway this meant I missed breakfast, making the meal I had with Liz's family was all I had to eat untill about 2:00pm the following day. When we landed it only took a short while to get through customs and i was met by a strange little man in a wooly jumper at the gate. I mention the wooly jumper because it was about 25 degrees (thats centigrade Americans, dont worry sub zero temperatures arn't a problem here), anyway he didn't speak any english although he did say "ok" a hell of a lot, in a funny voice aswell, just imagive what a chol sounds like saying the word "ok" then speed it up and you'll get the idea.
Anway he showed me to the car and we started to drive. He threw me back a folder which had a map of the city in it and a few other bits and bobs, welcome letter etc.
after a 15minute drive we arrived in Antigua, at that point the ride got unpleasent, Antigua only has cobble streets so as much as I wanted to look round, it was all i could do to hold myself in place and not bounce around the cab.
He pulled up to a building and lead me down an alleyway where he rang a doorbell, he put my bag down inside but before I even put the rest of my stuff down with it he said was out of the door and gone. So Im in this house, somwhere in Antigua without a clue whats going on and on my own. Then I see a little head poking round the corner, it was a little kid, I worried that the school had accomadated me in a home stay program which is not what I wanted. Then I noticed a tiny woman stood behind me. "Tu hablas Espanol" luckily i knew enough spanish to reply with "poquito pero es no bien",she then showed me round the house speaking only in spanish, I understtod everything apart from when she explained how to make the shower hot, I later discovered that you can't make the shower hot, only less cold.
Ok i'm going into too much detail,I havnt even got 45 minutes into Guatemala yet.
I set up all my stuff in the room then decided to just chill for a bit because I was tired, I thought I'd wait for some people to get up so that i could meet my housemates for the next 2 weeks... I fell asleep as soon as I laid on the bed... I woke up again around 11am after 2 hours street, no one was around so I went to explore the city. Its actually quite a small town, I can easily walk from one side to the other in about 20 minutes-half an hour. It was really busy though, mainly because its independance day weekend,. I tried to find the school using my map, unfortunatley the map is difficult to follow and I couldnt see it, I decided to look for the supermarket instead, which turned out to be where it said on the map, so dont start blaming my map reading skills.
After getting back from the supermarket I met 2 of my housemates Bertie and Bridget, I ended up leaving again straight away and we went for lunch and they showed me the school. At 6:we went to check out the festivities in the parque central. It was heaving and we only stayed for about half an hour before going for food. I got a beer with my meal and it actually turns out to be very nice, also every place I have been to has loads of vegetarian options so I wont be eating any butchered animal carcas in Antigua, hopfully it will be a similar deal in Livingston.
I hyad my first spanish lesson this morning, it was 4:30 long and my maestra Christina didnt speak any English to me apart from the odd word that I wanted translating. Not only that but I understood most of it so I may be ok at this spanish thing after all.
I just got back from our second trip to see the festivities as its actually indepedance day today. Yesterday there were loads of people running around with torches, as in torches similar to the olympic torch, not battery operated ones. There were also lots of bangs, I assumed that these were fireworks untill I noticed the man launching motars into the air which exploded at the top of there arch, it seemed pretty silly to me, al it was doing was making a load bang, couldnt he have just hit a dustbin lid or somthing for a fraction of the price. Today the same man was there again but the runners were replaced by big bands playing while they marched round, some of them danced aswell, it was wierd to watch all the drummers perfoming quite complicated dance moves whilst playing at the same time.
Unfortunatley all my photos of the event are pretty poor, i cant get close enough to stuff for the flash to be worth using and i dont have a tripod so night photos come out blurred, Ive had to resort to using a very high sensitivity but they come out very grainy, I may purloin Bertie's photos as he has a proper digital SLR camera and claims his can take good night photos... we shall see.
Ok, thats it for now, maybe I'll write again friday or somthing, if theres anything worth saying.
Later
Saturday, 13 September 2008
California Part 2
Now here's part 2...
I managed to purloin Liz's laptop again tonight, she isn't happy though, it means that she doesn’t get to read Dlisted tonight. For the benefit of all the lucky people out there who aren’t aware of Dlisted, its a celebrity gossip blog, it also happens to be the bane of my life, reading it comes just after plucking my nasal hair with rusty pliers on my to do list. Anyway, Liz loves it so I'm running quite a risk by writing this post tonight.
For those of you who have got this far and have yet to read the previous post, get a clue and read that first, this post has part 2 in it for a reason. Just scroll down and read the post below it first, you can come back to this one later.
Hopefully everyone reading this part should now have read the last post, so you'll know we're starting off from Friday of last week which is 7 days ago.
Friday we went up to a much bigger lake where Liz's parents rented a speed boat, it was a pretty big one though. I think the name of the lake was the New Mahoneys or the New Maloneys, something like that anyway. We had a big inflatable raft that we dragged around off the back of the boat. Basically one or 2 of us sat on the raft while someone drove the boat around the lake, trying to make the people on the raft fall off. It was brilliant, me and Liz went on a few times together and I went on once on my own. I also had a good go at getting Liz's dad to fall off the raft, I didn't quite manage it though, driving the boat was pretty cool though and I managed to keep it intact in the process which is always a bonus.
Me and Liz went off on our own again the next day on our trip down the coast. We started off by going to San Francisco and staying with her Aunt and Uncle, we didn’t go into the city on the first day as we didn’t have time, setting off from the cabin at about 3pm. So on the Sunday we went into the city and saw all the sights down the embarcadero. Alcatraz etc, we didn’t go over to Alcatraz because we didn’t really have time but I'll do it some time.
Unfortunately the Golden gate bridge was covered in fog so I didn’t really get the chance to see it, the rest of the city was clear though. It wasn’t that bigger deal, most of you know me well enough to know that I don’t care about touristy stuff so much.
At about 2:30 Liz's Aunt and Uncle came to pick us up to take us to a sneak preview of the California Academy of Science, it wasn’t due to open for a while but Liz's Uncle Mark had tickets to the sneak preview. Unfortunately the organizers picked just about the best day possible to hold the event. There were chocolate tasting events and Chinese Moon festivals going off left right and centre and the city was rammed with traffic as well as the swarms of pedestrians milling round stuffing there faces with chocolate and buying dragon charms (I’m speculating there, the only pedestrian I payed attention to was the guy crossing the road while being totally off his tits, he preceded to collapse in the middle of the road while cars drove round him, luckily he managed to get up and haul his intoxicated arse off the road before getting squished).
After like an hour and a half of driving through traffic we got to the building , there was no parking there though, it had obviously filled up with the charm buying chocoholic people. Someone from the Academy approached the Car and asked if were there for the event. He then told us that there was no parking so we should dive to this car park not far away and a bus would bring us back. On a normal day that would have been fine, but we only had a short time left to get to the event and the traffic was so thick we would have been there for hours getting to the parking area, let alone waiting on the bus to get back. For this reason we went home.
On Monday we got up and drove to Monterey, Monterey is a little seaside town , you'll probably have heard of it, it's where the pebble beach golf course is at. Also I believe John Steinbeck wrote a book about it, so there’s a little titbit for you mum.
When we got into town Liz was n a bit of a panic because nature was calling and had been doing so for quite a while up the road with no toilet in sight. I directed her past 2 petrol stations, both of which she failed to pull in at, she proceeded to drive around frantically, unable to find somewhere to go, I finally got her back to the petrol stations, she missed both again and refused to waste time going back to them. She then randomly turned onto a road which went up to a military facility. We were turning round when she spotted a portaloo by one of the buildings, we parked and I had to stand and guard the portaloo while she went and I was constantly being glared at by military types who obviously were puzzled as to why we were there, we jumped in the car quickly and drove away pretty fast.
The manager at he hotel greeted us with the information that he was sorry, we couldn’t have our room because he over booked, he then apologised for the fact that he was going to have to upgrade us to a suite with a Jacuzzi and a brand new bed. It worked out pretty good.
We went down 17 mile drive on the Tuesday while on the way to Morro Bay, 17 mile drive is a scenic drive around the coast of Monterey Bay. Id describe it but you wouldn’t get a good idea of what it's like (and i'm tired so i’m leaving stuff out) so you'll need to wait and see the pictures.
We got into Morro Bay that evening and went out to the big rock to see the sunset, unfortunately it was cloudy over the coast at the time so we didn’t really see it, I got a few nice photos of orange clouds though, and a few of the waves coming in etc.
After a night in the hotel we went down to the promenade to check out the shops etc, we left for Bakersfield at about 3pm and arrived here about 6pm. since then we've just been chilling out. I made curry for everyone last night and they're all still alive which is obviously a good thing. It went wrong but they seemed to like it and don't seem too ill today so I'll mark it as a success anyway.
Well I’m off to Antigua tomorrow night so everyone wish me luck. Not sure when I'll next write but make sure you comment on my posts this time you lazy bastards, 2 is a poor show, It's not to bad here but what about when I'm in Guatemala and, heaven forbid, this is my top source of entertainment. Get your acts together people!
Later
PS. can’t be arsed to load any photos into this post tonight, maybe another time
I managed to purloin Liz's laptop again tonight, she isn't happy though, it means that she doesn’t get to read Dlisted tonight. For the benefit of all the lucky people out there who aren’t aware of Dlisted, its a celebrity gossip blog, it also happens to be the bane of my life, reading it comes just after plucking my nasal hair with rusty pliers on my to do list. Anyway, Liz loves it so I'm running quite a risk by writing this post tonight.
For those of you who have got this far and have yet to read the previous post, get a clue and read that first, this post has part 2 in it for a reason. Just scroll down and read the post below it first, you can come back to this one later.
Hopefully everyone reading this part should now have read the last post, so you'll know we're starting off from Friday of last week which is 7 days ago.
Friday we went up to a much bigger lake where Liz's parents rented a speed boat, it was a pretty big one though. I think the name of the lake was the New Mahoneys or the New Maloneys, something like that anyway. We had a big inflatable raft that we dragged around off the back of the boat. Basically one or 2 of us sat on the raft while someone drove the boat around the lake, trying to make the people on the raft fall off. It was brilliant, me and Liz went on a few times together and I went on once on my own. I also had a good go at getting Liz's dad to fall off the raft, I didn't quite manage it though, driving the boat was pretty cool though and I managed to keep it intact in the process which is always a bonus.
Me and Liz went off on our own again the next day on our trip down the coast. We started off by going to San Francisco and staying with her Aunt and Uncle, we didn’t go into the city on the first day as we didn’t have time, setting off from the cabin at about 3pm. So on the Sunday we went into the city and saw all the sights down the embarcadero. Alcatraz etc, we didn’t go over to Alcatraz because we didn’t really have time but I'll do it some time.
Unfortunately the Golden gate bridge was covered in fog so I didn’t really get the chance to see it, the rest of the city was clear though. It wasn’t that bigger deal, most of you know me well enough to know that I don’t care about touristy stuff so much.
At about 2:30 Liz's Aunt and Uncle came to pick us up to take us to a sneak preview of the California Academy of Science, it wasn’t due to open for a while but Liz's Uncle Mark had tickets to the sneak preview. Unfortunately the organizers picked just about the best day possible to hold the event. There were chocolate tasting events and Chinese Moon festivals going off left right and centre and the city was rammed with traffic as well as the swarms of pedestrians milling round stuffing there faces with chocolate and buying dragon charms (I’m speculating there, the only pedestrian I payed attention to was the guy crossing the road while being totally off his tits, he preceded to collapse in the middle of the road while cars drove round him, luckily he managed to get up and haul his intoxicated arse off the road before getting squished).
After like an hour and a half of driving through traffic we got to the building , there was no parking there though, it had obviously filled up with the charm buying chocoholic people. Someone from the Academy approached the Car and asked if were there for the event. He then told us that there was no parking so we should dive to this car park not far away and a bus would bring us back. On a normal day that would have been fine, but we only had a short time left to get to the event and the traffic was so thick we would have been there for hours getting to the parking area, let alone waiting on the bus to get back. For this reason we went home.
On Monday we got up and drove to Monterey, Monterey is a little seaside town , you'll probably have heard of it, it's where the pebble beach golf course is at. Also I believe John Steinbeck wrote a book about it, so there’s a little titbit for you mum.
When we got into town Liz was n a bit of a panic because nature was calling and had been doing so for quite a while up the road with no toilet in sight. I directed her past 2 petrol stations, both of which she failed to pull in at, she proceeded to drive around frantically, unable to find somewhere to go, I finally got her back to the petrol stations, she missed both again and refused to waste time going back to them. She then randomly turned onto a road which went up to a military facility. We were turning round when she spotted a portaloo by one of the buildings, we parked and I had to stand and guard the portaloo while she went and I was constantly being glared at by military types who obviously were puzzled as to why we were there, we jumped in the car quickly and drove away pretty fast.
The manager at he hotel greeted us with the information that he was sorry, we couldn’t have our room because he over booked, he then apologised for the fact that he was going to have to upgrade us to a suite with a Jacuzzi and a brand new bed. It worked out pretty good.
We went down 17 mile drive on the Tuesday while on the way to Morro Bay, 17 mile drive is a scenic drive around the coast of Monterey Bay. Id describe it but you wouldn’t get a good idea of what it's like (and i'm tired so i’m leaving stuff out) so you'll need to wait and see the pictures.
We got into Morro Bay that evening and went out to the big rock to see the sunset, unfortunately it was cloudy over the coast at the time so we didn’t really see it, I got a few nice photos of orange clouds though, and a few of the waves coming in etc.
After a night in the hotel we went down to the promenade to check out the shops etc, we left for Bakersfield at about 3pm and arrived here about 6pm. since then we've just been chilling out. I made curry for everyone last night and they're all still alive which is obviously a good thing. It went wrong but they seemed to like it and don't seem too ill today so I'll mark it as a success anyway.
Well I’m off to Antigua tomorrow night so everyone wish me luck. Not sure when I'll next write but make sure you comment on my posts this time you lazy bastards, 2 is a poor show, It's not to bad here but what about when I'm in Guatemala and, heaven forbid, this is my top source of entertainment. Get your acts together people!
Later
PS. can’t be arsed to load any photos into this post tonight, maybe another time
Friday, 12 September 2008
California tbc...
Ok, I finally managed to find time to write a post. Before any of you start complaining about how long it has taken for me to write on here, first understand that the only way that I have made time to do this is by nabbing Liz's laptop before everyone went to bed. I’m now sitting here at 20 past midnight trying to remember everything that we've done over the last 2 weeks, so don’t give me any hassle about it.
I set off for the airport at stupid o'clock in the morning which was not fun and arrived with plenty of time to check my bags and get the flight. However, even though I had already checked in online, they refused to check bags until I produced evidence I was actually leaving the
"Are you here to check in"
"No"
"Check in's over there"
"I’m not here to check in"
"Ok"
"I need you to print my E-ticket for my flight to Guatemala on the 14th of September from LAX"
*Typing Typing Typing* "At 2:30pm?"
"No I think it's about 1:35 in the morning"
*Typing Typing Typing* "There is no flight at that time"
"Yes There is"
"No there isn’t"
"Yes there is, if there isn’t why have you taken my money for it"
"There isn’t"
"There is"
*Typing Typing Typing* "Oh hang on, are you sure you don’t mean the flight to Guatemala at 1:35am"
"That’s what I asked for isn’t it"
"Name?"
"Richard Ives" (I’m getting frustrated at this point and thinking that this guy would be far more suited to a job like electric eel juggling food tasting for Russian dissidents, maybe not suited but the customer satisfaction would be very high at least)
"Hmm you aren’t on this flight"
"Yes I am"
"No you aren’t"
"You told me it didn’t exist a minute ago"
"Yes but now I’ve found it and you aren’t on the list"
"Well why did your company E-mail me with my E-ticket'
"I don’t know"
"Try it as Richard Thomas Ives, Virgin attached my middle na...:
"I cant"
"Why"
"We don’t have details of whose on the flight"
(amazingly that answer didn’t really shock me after the rest of the conversation)
"How did you know I’m not on it then"
"How should I know whose on it, we don’t have access to that"
"why"
"we cold share"
"what does that mean?"
"It means that we cold share"
"yes but what does that mean?"
"We cold share"
"I heard the cold share part, what is cold sharing?"
"we cold share with another airline"
I think you get the jist of what the rest of the conversation might have been like, basically it ended in me not getting anything apart from extremely stressed.
I’ve spent ages writing and have yet to leave the airport let alone arrive in the US so I'll skip the part where the pilot arrived 45 minutes late with no excuse, I get pestered every 5 minutes by an air hostess attempting to ply me with cheese wraps, the extremely chatty woman in front and to the right keeps interrupting the women in front from watching sex in the city and gives me a headache and when customs guy refused to explain to me what he meant by "left hand" when I was trying to get through customs (he meant me to scan my finger print but who knew). Ill even leave out the part where my loving girlfriend neglected to met me at the airport (I’m joking, it wasn’t her fault, the traffic in LA was terrible).
So now I have skipped to the Sunday after my arrival and we are having a party at Liz's house with all her family there. I was a bit silly, finding myself on my 6th beer and 2nd Margarita while everyone else I was sat with finished there 3rd beer. We then started to play beer pong (look it up, I can’t be bothered to explain, this post is long enough as it is) I was on a team with Liz's cousin Tyler and we beat everyone. In fact I was undefeated until my last game after
Me and Liz set off for her parent's cabin in the mountains the next day; it was about an hour drive which didn’t bother me. What did bother me was Liz's habits with the radio, I don’t think I heard to the end of one song she flicks back and forth so much. Although she did find it amusing to leave it on all the bible thumping stations just to wind me up. "Gawd neyds yew ta send owl yer muny to the cherch o' the saycred blydn' hart o' Jeyses chriyst" or something to that effect seems to come up on every other station.
Anyway we got to the cabin and it's very nice, there are deer everywhere and amazingly enough there is still plant life up there without any help from the magical orange rope suspended on garden cains (most of you wont get that joke those of you who are familiar enough with my back garden or my Grans gardening habits will). Id try to describe the cabin to you but I don’t think I'm good enough at descriptive pros to get it over to you so you'll have to just rest safe in the knowledge that it's very nice.
On Tuesday we went to a national park called
Wednesday we went pinecrest lake and went out on a pedelow (no idea how to spell that, you know the boats you peddle and they go at like 2.5mph) we took lunch and stuff out with us so it was pretty cool. I hope all fishermen get swallowed by giant carp now however due to the number of them who sped past are boat and nearly knocked us over in their wake.
Liz's parent arrived that night and in the morning we went to "Big trees" national park, guess what they have there. Incase you didn’t get it, its a park which has sequoias in it, some of the trees were over 100m tall. Basically they were pretty damn tall, ill let the photos do the talking.
That brings us up to a week ago, I’m getting tired now so I’ll post this and do this week tomorrow probably.
To be continued...
PS. I can't work out a way to put photos on the post properly so if they look sloppy or dont show up then it sucks for you i suppose.
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