oh what a night

let me back up and explain this a little. below is a picture of some dancers.. the funniest part of this band (for me) was when andy asked us where we thought they were from and we told him that the song they were playing was called "Mexico! Mexico!" and the song mostly consists of them yelling "Mexico!".


so when i saw these guys, i really wanted to get a shorpy picture with one of the machete guys just for badass sake, but i never really got a chance. so later, we heard that there may be a hotel party with some of the bands and tried to find it. at the hotel, we ran into something even better:


the discovery.


i'm not quite sure how we would have explained this if one of them walked in.


are we human?... or are we dancer?

fun havin's in SoFra

this clown was easily the drunkest person in the whole place.



what could have been the greatest french-american band of all time.

more from the menton citrus festival

man, the menton lemon festival was pretty ridiculous. after we all got grabbed to dance with some russian dancers, we entered the main area, where bands from around the world played on stages built out of lemons, limes, and oranges.

i wish i could post the video for this, but the audio is crap and its shaky (it was fairly late in the night for taking video), so here is just a frame from it. anyway, this was what they consider american music. not only did they not fly anyone in to perform (and most of the time, they were just faking their way through the English), it was also a huge Texas stereotype a la lemon.

American Freedom:

Italy '09

Playing around with the Google Maps feature... this is our proposed Italy trip. Lots of stops in 3 weeks.


View Larger Map

Links to Photo Albums

My mom asked awhile back why we weren't taking very many photos. We actually are, we just haven't loaded all of them up. Until.... now. I think we still have a few more, and of course the Dublin pics... there's a lame link at the bottom of my extra verbal Dublin post. I'll add more as I go.

Dublin, most recently, and most awesome.

Ireland: Andy's Big 3-0

Most everything from the Azure Coast (Cannes, Nice and whatnot).

France: Cote d' Azur

And then further back we went to Germany.

Germany: Germans R Cool

Our first days in Paris

France: First days in Paris

And the catacombs.

France: Paris Catacombs

Who I been talkin to

So right now it's almost 2 Paris time. We're going for round 2 at the Louvre tonight but first headed to the Decathon to get some camping stuff for our Italy trip, which we leave for this Tuesday coming up. More on that later.

Blain has sent me a couple long emails this week that were awesome... it's always good to get news from back home. Angelica finally showed up on Facebook, but she still won't talk to me and I owe phone calls to both her and Nesreen! I talked to Rashed via email a week or two back and I like how he said Mason is handling things while I'm away. :)

I also found some old picture from just before we left.... Some from the going away at Nick and Hillbilly's.

Has anyone talked to Kari lately? :)

Mason and Matt

This one is really just training for drinking in Europe.

I look a little tired

And some from our very last (I think) downtown Happy hour.

My girl Nesmelleen and our old friend Kevin

Blain!

Look at these three good looking guys at Russ's favorite bar... Foundation or something like that.. like you've never seen before! Who's taking care of Russ?

Miss you Russ!

These are just a few... they're a few more on my picasa album.

I also hear from Nick and Efrain every now and again, and I've heard their new band is really good... you guys stick together so I can check out a show when I get back!

What else. I hear Leslie is working her butt off as are Mason and Russ... and so far three friends are talking about coming to Europe, Neesha for sure in May, going to try to meet my friend Kari in Greece in June if my mom isn't here, and Kathy is maybe going to come in the summer?

Sophie emailed me this morning to tell me a snake chased her up her driveway. She heard something in the grass and looked back to see it chasing her. Does anyone else think this is funny? I mean, not if she got poisonous snake fanged or anything.

Run Sophie, run!

dublin' down

"guest" blogger: mike
as carmen said, we just got back from dublin. that place has more pubs crammed into it than you could imagine, with a retarded amount of people crammed into most of those pubs. a truly, truly drunken town.


here we take a taxi-van with limo-style seating from one pub to another. i think that cab driver was the least amusing we had on the trip, as he did not constantly drop f-bombs. i have my doubts whether he was actually irish or not.

on a side note, they apparently deregulated the taxis in dublin and now anyone with enough money can buy and run a cab.. so there are a hilarious number of cabs in that town, mostly driving around empty. there is seriously gridlock all day long, all made up of empty cabs.


where in the world is andy? eatin' chicken wangs!


we saw some outdoors, too. we claimed that rock in the name of testosterone and facial hair.


mummified cat chasing a mummified mouse, both made into jerky in the pipes of an organ 400 years before the Ronco food dehydrator.


street fish and chips.. according to our cab driver "the best fuking fish and chips in the city! ask anyone in the city where the best fish and chips are, they'll tell ya the same!"


ride the tiger! you can see his stripes, so you know he's clean!

Dublin

We flew into Dublin Saturday March 14th. I had packed my heavy coat and umbrella basically expecting Robinhood and Braveheart weather. Not so. Pretty much every day of our stay was sunny, about three of them no clouds at all. It was awesome.

Our cab driver from the airport, like most oldish irish men we met, immediately started yakking away with us, asking questions, telling stories, joking and cussing away. Everyone there seemed so easy going and friendly, relaxed and making jokes of pretty much everything.

Dublin itself is a cool place with so many many bars and pubs. A drinker's paradise, tho after a few days, you start to feel pretty gritty. St. Stephen's Green is this huge (or pretty large) park near the city center. Lots of students there, chilling out after a night at the pubs, laying on the grass and harassing each other in a good natured irish way. Dublin has another park on the outskirts, more than twice the size of Central Park in New York. Pretty impressive, tho from what I've seen of both, I still liked that New York's didn't seem to have quite as many roads going through it and it had more trees I think.

We did a tour of the Guinness Factory.... definitely a little heavy on Guinness glorification (constant cheesy reminders of how awesome the beer is, even if it is), but it was still really cool to see how everything is done and has been developed since 1759 when the brewery was established. Arthur Guinness, the dude who started it, signed a lease with Dublin city back then for 45 pounds a year, not to increase for 9000 years. That's right. 9000.

Anyways, we visited the parks, the Christchurch Cathedral, saw the Patty's day parade, checked out tons of pubs and shops. We went on a couple of day trips to Malahide to see a castle and to Howth (sounds like both), a small town on the sea. Walked up some seaside cliffs.... very beautiful. The pictures from that have ocean and yellow flowers.

I wish we had more time to see more of the country, we're talking about going back again sometime in the summer maybe. Below is a link to our pics... we may have more as our friends load them online.

Dublin Pictures

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Frejus, France

Life gets aquatic in the country of Monaco

Did you know that you can walk across the entire country of Monaco in 56 minutes? I did not know that until just now, b/c I wiki'd Monaco so I could sound smart and informed whilst blogging to my friends and family. I think it took at least 56 minutes to walk from just the train station to the top of the hill where the Oceanagraphic Museum is. The regular city map for this country has to be in 3D. There were public lifts all over the street because the city is pretty much just one MC Escher level after another. Think Sarah in the Goblin King castle. That was us.




Anyway, once we had conquered the mountain, we headed for the ocean museum. Student tickets were half the price of grown up ones, and of course we both have our student IDs on us at all times. The Monaco guard, however, was having none of it. I guess it didn't help that there were real students all over the place making us look bad, but for reals, I could be studying for my 8th masters. He doesn't know. Either way, he wasn't letting us in below full price, and after climbing that goblin hill, we decided to go ahead and pay up. It was the only reason we were in Monaco in the first place. I have a pretty cool video of an octopus, but you've probably seen one already. I leave you with this slideshow instead.

Opry: Barber of Seville

Whilst in Nice, we picked up opera tickets in the nosebleed section of their grand old opera house. Mike and Andy dressed their dandiest for the occasion.

Roller Blade madness

One of the things we decided to do in Nice was.... yes, roller blading. Something I've never done before tho I have ice skated. We were a little wobbly at first, but it seems that most people on the promenade are used to clumsy roller bladers cuz everyone pretty much stayed out of the way, which is a good thing because I never did learn how to use that stopper thing on the back of the skate. we just went really slow in crowds and stayed away from the dog poop.

Back from the Cote d'Azur

So we spent a week down at the coast where we hit up Marseilles, Nice, Cannes, Frejus, and the Lemon Festival in Menton. We've got quite a few pictures, and I'll try to load them up this week. I did happen to break my camera the 2nd to last night we were there. I think this makes 3 cameras in less than a year. Awesome.

Aside from that tho, first stop on the trip was Nice, where Andy had some work to do. It also happened to be Mardi Gras Carnaval, and we made it into town on time to catch the floats. My favorite is the narwhale one.