Friday, February 4, 2011

side note



holy mother of moly
matt smith, yes pleeeease
;)

bonjour, buongiorno, hiya!
recently these holidays i found my self in the lands of france, italy and england. this wasn't just for any old reason, my dad is about to turn sixty and to celebrate we travelled parts of europe for one whole month. now we are living on beans.

first stop: paris, france.


after 24 bloody hours sitting on an aeroplane we finally landed at charles de gaulles airport at the nice and early time of 5:55 am. it was still dark. on this day we attempted to walk through our jetlag but epic failed and ended up sleeping for five hours then going out for dinner and sleeping again for another 12 hours.


our hotel, citadines, les halles

so after our seventeen hours of sleep we were are well refreshed and ready for the day. For breakfasts everyday we feasted on the best ham in the world with the best cheese on baguette yuuu-um. on our first "proper" day we went to the pompidou centre, a modern art gallery, and saw the arman collection. parts of it were rubbish, (litterally one of his focuses was on decomposing rubbish, no joke)

Pompidou Centre

new years eve was the day of our special lunch for my dads birthday. my auntie just so happened to be travelling in france at the same time as well as my cousin living in europe so we all went out to a restaurant called Au Pied de Cochon which translates as the foot of the pig, which my dad actually ate for his main. But before this terrific lunch we went to the musee rodain full of some of the most exquisite sculptures made by rodain and some works of camille claudel. This musee is the home of the famous Thinker.

i'm thinking, i'm thinking



that night we went to the church near where we were staying and saw the performance of The Violins of France who, even though the violin is not exactly my favourite instrument, were absolutely incredible. We then braced ourselves for the crowds of thousands heading to the champs elysees. it was like a mosh pit there were so many people. we walked the length up and back and then walked up to the eiffel tower to see the display. here they had no fireworks just simply lit up the tower and made it sparkle. for me i was quite happy with this as so much money is spent and wasted on fireworks every year, not to mention the impacts they have of the environment. to get home we had to catch the train with 54156563 other people who were also making use of the free metro that night.

le tour eiffel



new years day. today wherever we went we never had much luck with anything being open because it was the first of jan, we tried the grand palais which was open but had a two hour wait in which there was no way we were waiting in, we triedto see napoleons tomb but it was closed and we also tried the shops down in sait michel but most of them were closed as well. what we did do was again walk up the champs elysees which was filled with little stalls all up and down the road. it was here where we ate the mother of all kebabs for lunch, no kidding they were massive.

it's so biiiiiiiiiiiig

one of the many cute little stalls



DISNEYLAND DAY. My cousin and her boyfriend were cool enough to take me and my sister to the wonderfully magical place that is eurodisney which was AWESOME. we started off with space mountain which was the best ride i have ever been on. it was pitch black the whole time but there were holograms of stars/planets/asteroids so it felt you were travelling through space. we went on buzz lightyears laser blast where you had to shoot the evil zurg signs whilst spinning around our own carriage. I scored over 600,000, greta scored just over 100,000 so as a team we lost. then we waited in line for BIG THUNDER MOUNTAIN (caps necessary) which was way better than any of us could remember. the ride went for ages around the mountain as well as inside the mountain where you could not see a thing .

BIIG THUNDER MOUNTAIN

after we braved the phantom manor which was really well done and then went on the double loop-de-loop rollercoaster that was indiana jones..dramatic pause... and the temple of peril which again was awesome.we then found a tree which we thought was Peter Pans but it turned out it was some family called the robinsons but we just pretended it was peter pans. Now was the time that we entered fantasy land where we span and span in mad hatter's teacups after squishing 5 adult size people into one tiny teacup.

lanterns above the teacups

then it was it's a small world which was majorly cute and we found australia who was represented by a kangaroo and an aborigine. before we left we went on space mountain again and watched the parade.
Once back near our apartment it was 11 o'clock and we hadn't eaten since 12 so we had a quick maccas run. in paris we had maccas. it was a brilliant day.

next stop: venice!