09/07/01
Ready to Come Home
Hey folks.
I’m tired and i’m ready to come home.
My trip has been amazing, wonderful, entrancing, culturually uplifting, full of delight, surprising, enchanting and yeah…exhausting too. Two toe blisters to show for it.
I’m in cambridge now, the home of the tattoo princess, a friend of mine from highschool days who is having a bath and who, with her husband,must be the only pair in all of europe with non dialup based internet access. To you bloody europeans out there, a couple of things to note.
Number one, take a bath.
Number two, remember to use soap.
Number three, no, I’m not a Japanese tourist, i’m a bloody irrepressible American, got that?
Number four, yeah…you got churches older than California has had a pulse but you’re all on frickin dialup you heathens.
I actually paid $30 US for an hour on 24K modem dialup at a hotel business center while strugglin with a french keyboard to check my email. How utterly primitive. So yeah…sorry for the lack of updates & such. I flaked…but not for lack of trying.
Anyways, I’ve taken nearly 900 photos (no exageration there) with the amazing power of my digital camera which has taken a brutal beating during this trip, and alas not a single one of those pix includes my celebrity sitings.
Quick quick summary of my trip so far:
Airfrance fricking cancels their flight.
Stupid Alitalia makes traveling a nightmare
Cranky babies are we all as we fly into geneva.
Lausanne in Switzerland is fricking amazing and not just because our hotel was a palace.
Ferry boat ride to Evian (where I drank a diet coke)
Driving through the swiss vineyards in montreax and seeing a real live castle on lake geneva known as Chateau Chillon.
Flying to Nice and doin day trips to St. Paul de Vence, Monte Carlo & the palace of Monaco, and then a few days in Cannes sitting by the pool. (Enrique Iglesias was in our hotel)
Paris and catching a cold, lunching on the eiffel tower, seein notre dame, sacre coer, and a day trip to Giverny which is Monet’s old home (spotted Jane Seymore Dr. Quinn Medicine Woman there). Musee d’Orsy & the Lourve. Mona Lisa? Yuppers. Plus some other amazing pieces that I adore. Not to mention walking around in the grand palace at Versaille. Oh yeah, and Elizabeth Hurley was having drinks with Denis Leary at the table next to us one night.
London: Big Ben, Westminster Abbey, Houses of Parliament, Harrods, Covent Garden, South Kensington, eating oysters under a disco ball, live jazz music, cooking dinner for friends, learning the tube, getting lost in shoreditch, the victoria & albert museum, the british museum — all of it, and st. paul’s cathedral too.
Can you see how I could be a little pooped?
Yeah…and that’s the dazed gloss over version.
I haven’t even gotten into my dissertation on the varieties of Japanese tourists here, getting stalked by a aggressive eyebrow korean lesbian couple, or the run away fiancee episode, or the princess baby that we were traveling with that goes Woah woah woah woah wooooo when we see big sites, having a sweet old man stop dead in his tracks and call me beautiful while i carried roses through the streets, watching a man watch me as a character study over coffee, wine, and a cigar… he is, I think, a writer whom i think i recognize from Poets & Writers magazine about American writers in Paris, amazing hot chocolates, thefting tons of hotel soaps and jams, what hot dogs mean in Europe, getting proposed to by the hotdog guy with ugly teeth, Cute boys oliver the german drummer boy & alexandre the cute italian hero, and having a button pop off my shirt at the noodle bar tonight. Oh yeah, there is such a delight in hearing a brilliant english accent come out of a cute asian eyecandy boy’s mouth. Yummilicious. For real.
Oh, and let’s not forget the fact that I had to get orthotricycline (the pill) fedexed to me and then replaced when the cleaning staff accidentally threw out the envelope. Yeah. Crazy. And the invention of the new hit single “Croissant crumbs in your armpit” Of course my singing skills do nothing to make up for the loss of fellow Detroit gal Aliyah. Prayers go out to her family & friends of course. But in the meantime, I still have a few days to muck around here in London and maybe catch up on doing some writing. I’m just exhausted though. Tomorrow fish & chips and the day after will be English Tea.
Breathe breathe breathe. The whole trip has been one huge run on sentence.
Coming home next week. Missed you. Did you miss me? Yeah halfling, I missed you too. Sorry i lost your address so couldn’t mail a postcard to you.
Min Jung