Are we out of the ghetto yet??

Sooooo, I thought that I should update y'all on the friends we've made here, since so many of you know how few people I actually get along with.....

We've been really lucky in finding people. First was Matt, an Aussie boy who packed his things and moved to London to work for a year. We met him in the laundry room in London, commiserating over the lack of functioning machines. Sadly, he had to check out, cos he found a house to stay in. He was good fun, and the first Aussie we properly met.

Then there's Jacques (although we didn't know that was his name for three days) We met him in the laundry too, after 'someone' - certainly not Matt - started Jacques' laundry cycle for the second time after concluding that the clothes sitting in the machine belonged to some asshole who was too lazy to pick up his washing. So the two boys had to sit with us for about an hour while we waited for everything to finish up, and we all had a lovely chat. Jacques was funny, had a pacman and space invaders t-shirt, and liked pirates and Scrubs. Needless to say, he became our Scrubs buddy, and our first official (and my favourite) overseas friend.

In Paris, we have been soooo lucky. Our roommates, Judy and Beth (a Canuck and American, respecitvely), are completely awesome - just as nerdy as we are and proud of it.

Judy is 30, and lived in Paris a few years ago, so she knows all about the city, and has been taking the three of us on these hilarious walking tours through Montmarte and surrounding suburbs - red light districts 'n all. Beth is 22 and from South Carolina, is very sweet, and says y'all. She's going to Barcelona to possibly teach, but mostly to meet her boyfriend (when we were walking out of the less-nice part of Montmarte, Beth asked if we were "out of the ghetto yet?"...hence the title).

Last night the four of us went to dinner near Sacre Couer at a really nice little tavern; it was Kim and my first 'real' meal since New York, and I have never craved steak as much as I did last night. My French steak was really nice (I even ordered it in French), and I had green beans to boot (I ate all them without complaining, mum), so it was possibly also the healthiest meal Kim and I have had since New York. After our fantastic dinner we carried on with our very loud talking for a while, then headed off into Montmarte for a walk (have to work off that chocolate mousse, and in the others' cases, pastries and nutella). Judy took us into Pigalle, to see the Moulin Rouge and some other dirty stuff.....then we hit the Sex Museum.

Best 6 euro ever. It was freakin hilarious. Apparently there is nothing to bond four women together like 1920s porn. We spent a while hanging around in there, taking it all in (pun intended), and laughing about sex, which is, let's face it, pretty funny. We walked back to the hostel via a bakery, where we all got some more treats (we'd walked a long way....leave us alone), and then headed off to bed.

Today we went for more walks. First was to see the Monets at the Musee l'Orangerie, which were seriously beautiful. After that we went to the Gallery Lafayette where we looked at ridiculously priced handbags and wished for wealthy Frenchmen to sweep us off our feet. We then went to train station to reserve our seats for our Madrid train, where we found out that it was going to cost us an extra 67 euro just to reserve our seats. Kim and I were pissed - stupid STA had told us it would be a few euro extra - and I think we've decided to get a refund on our waste-of-time-and-money eurail passes, and fly everywhere. We did the maths, and it just seems that the eurail pass is a piece of shit designed to rip us off. Although, we are still pretty mad, so we're probably not thinking very fairly. Oh well. A 14 euro flight is a 14 euro flight.

Lastly we went shopping, where I found a 90 euro top that I love!!! But I'm still contemplating buying it....it seems wasteful. But awesome and a size 2. And it's French. Totally worth it. Judy and Beth both bought a few things, and now Kim and I are on the prowl for something outrageous for Kim to buy for herself.

In conclusion, Judy and Beth are the fantastic, funny and awesome roommates. Our hostel is great and I LOVE LOVE LOVE Paris. I can't wait to come back (preferably with a man, in lovey-revolting-cliche), and explore more of France. Paris is beautiful, and I can definitely see why Kim loves it so much. Lots of photos; I haven't figured out how to post any of them yet, but as soon as I do, you'll be the first to see 'em.

I miss you all thhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiiisssssssssssssss much, especially my bed..........oh, and my family and friends. You guys too.

Email me if you want! I love getting emails. It makes me feel special. You do want me to feel special don't you?

Lots of love,

Lis

The Empire of the Dead

Quick update - we're off to dinner so I'll write more later or tomorrow;

Today was Sacre Cour, The Musee d'Orsay and the Catacombs. Awesome, awesome and creepily awesome/scary (That's the Empire of the Dead).

Love,

Lis

Wet Side Story.....

This one is supposed to be BEFORE the Paris one!!!!! READ ME FIRST!!!!!

Ok, so to explain the title of this post, (clearly a parody of West Side Story) it was raining on our last day in NYC. And I mean RAINING. So what do Kim and Lisa decide to do? That's right....we decide to walk to the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which is across the other side of Central Park, and about 20 blocks down (that's a long way, for those who are currently scoffing with disdain our renowned laziness). And in the pouring rain, with only the tiny travel umbrella I gave Kim for her birthday as our cover, it's an even longer way. Especially in our Crocs...which are rubber.....and have holes in them.....and we had socks on.....and jeans. You get the point. We're idiots, and yesterday we were wet, cold idiots. Especially when we walked home, got lost and crossed the park once or twice.....or three times, then got back to the hotel looking for a clothes dryer, which were all taken, and so we had to pack our wet clothes into zip lock bags. Good times.

Oh, sidenote; I have no idea what day we did what, so the following not be chronologically factually accurate.

But let me take you back to a special day, in which Kim and Lisa took a wander through lower Manhattan. In the Soho/East Village area (we can't tell them apart), we wandered into a lovely park in the middle of a busy intersection. There were some couples sitting, some old men reading newspapers, and a couple of middle-aged potential hobos.....oh, and there was also a trannie and statues of same-sex couples. We had accidentally stumbled into a gay hangout. As Kim so eloquently put it in her ever-expanding journal, "Known gay hang out? Black transvestite is clue".

Soooo, accidental-tranny run-ins aside; the next day we were off to do the Circle Line!!! Just like George Clooney and Michelle Pheiffer before us, we set sail aboard America's favourite sightseeing boat, and took in a big dose of New York (and a little Jersey). So we saw lots o'Manhattan (including the State of Liberty; I have a bunch of photos that I like to call the Liberty Series - they all look the same), and lots o'bridges, and also some teeny-tiny NYC Marathon Runners as they crossed the aforementioned bridges. It was long, freezing cold and totally fun.

Afterwards, being Kim and I, we had a fries (Kim also had a hot dog), and then a milkshake - which, unbeknownst to me, was made with cake-batter ice cream. America can do anything. I was violently ill that evening (cake batter clearly has wheat in it), so we decided to see a movie and call it a night. We saw that new Hugh Jackman Christian Bale one. Both hot, hot, hot. Oh, and the movie was good too. Very twisty-ploty.

But one thing Kim and I realised that night was that seeing a movie in a cinema full of Americans can only be likened to seeing a movie in a cinema full of (another Kimism here), "monkeys or children". At each climactic point, they would loudly gasp and cry out in shock, sigh (loudly) in sympathy with the characters, or laugh hysterically. I'm sure it doesn't sound so bad, but Kim and I were extremely weirded out.

Oh, we went to Barneys. It's awful. Unless you're looking to spend a shitload of cash, then I'm sure it's fabulous. To relieve my retail-depression, Kim let me go to Bloomingdales (which was fun), and to Century 21 where I picked up two adorable Calven Klein bras for 40 bucks. My other good bra broke, and I'll be damned if I'm trodding around Europe in hideous undergarments for the next 6 weeks.

Redbank, NJ was another NY highlight. About an hour away from Manhattan, the lovely New Jersey town is home to Jay and Silent Bob's Secret Stash (a la Kevin Smith). So we took a ride out there and spent a little time in Redbank, which is beautiful; lots of pretty trees and lovely people. Not at all the armpit of the nation as some have implied. Would actually rather live there than NYC - or perhaps that's only because we spent about 2 hours there. Either way, it\'s nice.

Next up is Empire State Building, which - despite Kim and my stubborn refusal to believe - is not actually the Chrysler building. I swear it's not what it looks like in movies. It\'s ugly and boring. So after swearing that the sign MUST be wrong, we headed inside and lo and behold, the sign was not. We mixed them up. We're not clever. Then more walking, a great gluten free dinner with brownies, and a fun subway ride home to good ol\' Dexter House. 'Twas a good day.

Anyway, London is great so far. Got a few dirty looks at the station, but were also greeted by a lovely Aussie (made us miss home....I think Kim almost jumped over the desk to embrace the man), and nice cheap internet!!! We made two friends...one Aussie and one mucho handsome South African. Our reservation got mixed up, and we're in seperate rooms for now....my roommates sleep in their underwear. Not pretty.

More adventure updates soon.

Love, Lis

Paris!!!! (said with a French accent)

We've arrived in Paris....and I can finally see what Kim has been ranting about for the past few weeks. Despite the Metro smelling faintly like urine, the rest of Montmarte (where we're staying) is seriously beautiful.

Our flight was short; I slept for the whole two hours, having been awake the entire previous night. And on our arrival, Kim's French was immediately put to the test, as we had to buy two sets of train tickets. Needless to say, she aced it, and didn't even get a funny look from the ticket lady. Her French skills were also handy when putting our photos onto CDs, and she had her first actual conversation in French (cut to me standing there looking all confused), and the shop owners loved her. Damn her.

Alas, Paris is also the city of fine baked goods....all of which I can't eat. So while Kim is gorging herself - well, not really gorging, more like stuffing - I am sticking to the tried and true diet of corn chips, cashews, cheese, and deli meats. Oh, and fries. We loooove fries. So, we're certainly not losing weight, as much as we are possibly gaining weight. But it's Paris weight, so we don't care.

Have to hurry, Kim's computer doesn't have an @ key, so she's waiting for this one - and not very patiently, I might add. Oh, and yes, we had our first fight, due to me being an asshole. Luckily, she's forgiven me (I think, or she's just high in pan au chocolat), and all is right with the world.

More soon,

Lis

I heart NY.....

I don't even know where to start......I guess apologizing for the spelling mistakes.

We're sitting in an unusually dark internet cafe on Bleeker Street, after just having a fantastic lunch at Risotteria's, an gorgeous gluten-free Italian place, with gorgeous gluten-free staff (who offered to be our tour guides...wink, wink). We're going back there for dinner.........to eat, not to look at the handsome men, I promise. But in all seriousness, a real meal after three days of cornflakes, doritos, ham and fries is a welcome change, although I'm used to the cereal diet. Kim did have her first bagel with schmear, which was fun for her, and excruciating for me.

So to recap the last few days:

Our first day in NY was maniacal. Our flights were delayed, and immigration was a nightmare. We had no idea how to find our shuttle from the airport to the hotel, so we just asked some random guy, who said, "Yeah, come with me", without even looking at our voucher. Cut to Kim and I sitting in the back of a family-sized van, huddled together, discussing the darker possibilities, being death, rape, mugging, over-charging, or just being dumped in Queens somewhere. Let me tell you, Brooklyn at night = scary; at least for two suddenly-very-suburban kids from Melbourne. But we made it to the hotel after the surreal and slightly scary NYC driving experience (these people love their horns and their accelerators), we dumped our stuff, went for a walk and got some Maccas - of course - and then slept for a bit.

The next day we hit Central Park, which is amazingly beautiful. We don't know how anyone could hate a city that has such a peaceful and scenic centre. We took photos of trees, squirrels (we were very excited), hobos, Strawberry Fields and pretty much everything in between. But even those pictures don't do the Park justice. It's really beautiful, much more so than I expected.

After Central Park was the American Museum of Natural History, where we saw Dinosaurs and went to the Planetarium to see a movie narrated by Robert Redford, but the highlight was Kim's disturbing self-serve salad of imposter-cous-cous, several un-mixy vegetables, ranch dressing, and someother unlikely contenders. It sounds fine, but it - like Times Square - had to be seen to be believed.

The next day (don't ask me which day it was, we're not even keeping track), we got to MoMA, which was amazing. Cultural overload kind of kicked in, which led to us adopting a more click-and-walk attitude, which meant we got to Starry Night, took a picture and kept on walking.......a mistake we won't make again. MoMA was fantastic, just like I pictured. Van Goh, Cezanne, Pollack, Gaugin, Monet, Matisse, Picasso, Dali...they were all there. I love Pollack, we have discovered.

We took our first subway ride downtown, which actually turned into our third when Kim forgot her camera, and we had to go back to the hotel. We got called "gorgeous broads" by some hilarious old perv on the subway - which in Melbourne would have been disturbing, but here was awesome - and then hit Times Square. I swear, that place cannot be described. It's like nothing else on earth and certainly not like anything in Melbourne. It's massive, and loud, and cold and bright and dark, and busy and a total drainer. Kim and I had our first bicker, caused by stress, overwhelmed-ness and tiredness, which was resolved by going downtown to Grammercy to see the Flatiron building and The Last Kiss - awesome, by the way.

Oh, we got stopped to be called beautiful by some former military guy, who was a little intense and weird. His suggestion was that we met him in the Diamond District and he'd get his friends, and we'd all hang out.....needless to say, we decline the crazy man's offer. Although Kim did think he was cute. THEN, I got mistaken for a New Yorker!!! Very exciting, someone stopped and asked me for directions. It was cool. On the other hand, we were fleeced out of 10 bucks, cos some guy raising money for a homeless shelter was nice to us, so of course we gave him money....at that point we'd have given any nice person money. It's not that New Yorkers are mean, they're just.....busy. Borderline rude, but in that New Yorky way that they're known for, and it's all part of the experience, right?

After yesterday's very full-on-ness we decided that a relaxing day of food and city ambience was needed, and we headed downtown to Soho and the East village, where we had the BEST hot chocolate in the entire world. It's what I imagined the hot chocolate from Chocolat would taste like. But it was so rich that even Kim couldn't finish it - and for those of you who know Kim, you know that's a challenge.

We checked out the Guggenheim, but most of it's closed to renovations, so that only took about half an hour, and that pretty much leads us to here..........

I'll update in a few days, when some more has happened! Tomorrow is the Circle Line Ferry and the NYC Marathon, then Monday we're hoping to head to Jersey, Tuesday is Financial District (WTC site, some other stuff), and then Tuesday is a short day; we fly out at night, heading for London.

More soon....miss you all, miss home already, but having loads of fun.

Definitely coming back, but next time with more money and more time!!!!!!!!

And Erin, have had more SATC moments than I can count.....The Blue Note, the site of Harry and Charlotte's wedding announcement photo, the park where Steve and Miranda get married, and many many more......it's so much fun!

So they say 'stay' instead of 'eat in'.....

It's so weird. This woman said it to us at McDonalds last night.

So kim used up all our minutes writing her blog, so check it out at kimsblee.livejournal.com for all the more interesting details and I'll update mine later, cos right now I'm so jetlagged I could die.

Manhattan Bound.....

So this is the first post of the unofficial Kim and Lisa's Around the World Adventure blog series.....I pretty much have nothing to say right now, but rest assured, there will be much rubbishing on once we've actually been somewhere.

First stop - New York. Home of Billy Joel, the Yankees, the Empire State Building, the Statue of Liberty, Century 21, Barney's, MoMA, and a whole heap of other cool shit.

One day, 17 hours, 14 minutes, and 30 seconds to go...................