wow i haven't posted in long time

ok people how are we all???? good??? YEAH LETS GO!!!!!!

ok so someone has been on contiki a little too long...
this trip is insane, i've only just had a chance to breath let alone use e-mail so im sitting in florence in an internet cafe carefully watching the clock for when the local tour guide starts. this trip consists of a lot of countries (the first day we went from london - france - belgium - amsterdamn)

so let me give you a breif rundown so far...

AMSTERDAM. so we get the ferry from london to france, drive through belgium and stop in the netherlands for a clog making demo (the guy was REALLY hot and heard me say that to one of the girls... ooops) and a cheese making demo. from there we went into amsterdam, got settled in the hotel then went to the red light district. we went to a live sex show and i got pulled up on stage along with a few other people and the woman made us eat a banana from her. i wont go into details but let me just say that was WAY too close for comfort. so we dabbled in amsterdams other offerings and went back to the hotel. the next day was just sight seeing and drinking a LOT on a canal cruise before going back to the hotel to keep drinking in the bar. i made friends with 2 really nice south africans (update later) and a few aussie people.

SWITZERLAND. unbelievably beautiful and oh so bloody cold. but i saw snow for the first time. the bus driver came out while i was standing in awe in the snow making fresh prints like sarah said was satisfying and found... yes it is. he threw a snowball at me and then it was on. we had snowball fights all day and night while other people randomly came, joined in and left... we kept going. we had a swisco (swiss disco) in the lobby of the hotel cos we were 7000 m up on this mountain at a hotel and you can only go up and down during the day. so during the swisco i'd walk outside and he'd start throwing snowballs then we brought it inside and all hell broke loose. very funny though. i cant get over the alps though, it was one of the most amazing things i've ever seen. oh and 3 guys did a nuddy run in the snow at 2 am. so funny.

AUSTRIA. surrounded by the alps aswell so it was also amazing. added bonus that is is pretty damn cheap. we saw the christmas markets which were cool and some strange man followed me around for 40 mins but i ended up loosing him by doing a james bond stunt. back at the hotel we drank a hell of a lot and i picked up a local. you gotta mingle with the locals after all its all part of the experience.

VENICE. once again.. amazing. i love water so this was perfect for me. we went on a gondula ride and our dude sang.. so funny. made a lot more friends by this stage too so we took over the bottem floor of a small restaurent for dinner. the cops came in and we were taking photos with them (i swear calvin clien does the hiring for police and security guards over here) we drank a lot, sang a lot, the restaurant owner loved us and handed out free ciggerettes before we left. went back to the hotel and drank in the bar until the owner said we had to leave or we wouldnt get breakfast. some idiot thought up a great game where they call your name and bang on the table until you skull an entire glass of wine. i got so drunk i fell out of the shower... thats right, i didn't fall IN the shower.. i fell OUT of the bloody thing. it was a bath with a shower head in the side wall (horizontal instead of vertical) and i just fell backwards and over the side of the bath. i didnt hurt myself and i was laughing for 10 minutes but the next day i felt it.... who falls OUT of a shower????????

ROME. arrived in rome late so the first experience was at night. we went to the treve fountain and few other sites. had dinner and while it was great, rome isnt my favourite place. the next day we went in early for the vatican and went through the whole thing. st peter's church thing there.. is breathtaking. i was so overwhelmed when i walked in there and the pope was there when we were as well. i didnt get close to him though, it meant too much to other people so we stayed back.

i am currently in Florence and am about to go see the sites... a few little other things

1. there are 2 guys i'd go for on this thing. the bus driver and a south african (not the previously mentioned one) however this will not be attempted till the END Of the tour and probably only the south african

2. people are starting to piss me off. one guy on the tour was swearing and going off the the guy at the desk didnt speak english.. WE ARE IN ITALY!!!! and also is complaining about the time spent on the bus and only a day or two in each country. that was all on the itinery stupid you picked the damn tour.

3. they play the darkness 'i believe in a thing called love' every morning.. he he i love it!!

gotta go

love you all nat

going once, going twice...

*singin* 'all my bags are packed i'm ready to go.. i'm standing here outside your door, i hate to wake you up to say goodbye. so kiss me and smile for me, let me know you'll wait for me. hold me like you'll never, let me goooooooooooo. cos i'm leaving on a jet plane, i dont know when i'll be back again...'

so i'm leaving the states and i REALLY don't want to. who wants to go to europe anyway with their dozens of languages and cute men with accents and... cute men with accents... DAMMIT... ok so I do but not yet! i can't change the date on my contiki tour though so i have no choice. if i can afford it though i'm coming back here for christmas. i should sell myself for marraige to someone to fund the trip. if you marry me you get both italian citizenship and an EU passport and australian citizenship. you can't get any better than that! so there it is, an offer on the table. if you know of anyone willing to pay me for marraige then give them my e-mail address, highest bidder wins.

all dressed and ready to go

i got up this morning at 10am.. yay for me. i was all dressed and ready to go, had breakfast, did my hair, brushed teeth etc, put my shoes on, put my coat on, looked up what station i had to get off at for the air and space museum, opened my mouth to say bye to jamie and peter and was more suprised then anyone else to hear myself say 'screw it i cant be bothered' instead. well i never! my brain was over riding me but then who am i to defy my brain. so i walked across the road to starbucks and got coffee, which is next to a video store so i got a colin farrell movie i've never seen, which is next to a takeout store so i got a chicken pesto sandwich and went back to the house to morph myself into a peice of the furniture. at least i succeeded in doing something today. i morphed better than you've ever seen anyone morph.

i leave for london tomorrow, i have one night there and then i'm on a 2 and a half week contiki tour so if you dont hear from me for three weeks, im not dead i'm just having a really good time.

i think i might go to starbucks again, and i saw the takeout store has ben and jerry's icecream... (drool)

im depressed and pining after the colin farrell guy in montreal... icecream will make it feel better.

does anyone read these still???

i just had a moment where i thought no one reads this site anymore... but im still doing it anyway cos it means i dont have to keep up with my travel diary which i cant find.

im back in washington DC as of last wednesday. people are amazing in this country, did i ever write about the police man in NY on my first visit who was sittin there like... 'oh you have the cutest accent. come home with me darlin and we'll cook some shrimp' or something like that. this was while i was lost in chinatown asking him for directions and i hadnt slept in 3 days and had been walking for about 5 hours already. my answer to him was 'thats nice how do i get to housten st'. anyway.. same kinda thing here. i was at the art museum and i was asking the security guard how do i get to the contemporary section.

[me] excuse me can you tell me how i get to the contemporary section
[him] you're so pretty
[me] your meant to be helping me... not hitting on me... can you tell me which way to go?
[him] yeah but you gotta stop looking at me with those eyes
[me] ugh.. ok thanks *start walking away*
[him] ok nah, here you all the way... etc etc but it takes a really long time and you only have another 10 mins till the museum closes.
[me] oh ok... ill do that side another day then
*he proceeds to follow me around giving me a walking tour and throwing in random comments too*

kinda funny, but annoying when you're trying to get somewhere

so last night i went drinkin and made friends with a guy who worked for NASA and ended up at his friends bar for the after hours stint... did you know bars around here close at 1:30??? shocking i tell you!!... so we're still drinkin at this bar at 4am and i dont have to pay for any of it and they've invited me out tonight as well. this travelling thing is great.

its raining and miserable today i think i'm going to nurse my hangover on the lounge and do nothing. the air and space museum can wait.

this is a really quick update.

so... on saturday i arrived in washington DC. jamie picked me up at the airport and we went to a lesbian party... it was fun. after that we went to the bar where he works and got very very drunk. that was fun too. i picked up a guy named ray and convinced him to come to the next bar we were going to which i think happened to be a gay bar, but he said yes. i think he liked me. so we get there and spend half the night kissing. that was extra fun. we said our goodbyes and jamie and i went to a friends place that lived just around the corner where we drank even more excessive amounts and got home at 5am. that didnt feel as fun the next day when i felt seedy and stayed in bed till 2pm. i went for a walk around DC later that day and it was a beautiful day, one of the best here apparently. i saw all the famous stuff, white house etc then had dinner with some of jamies friends back at the house. i didnt drink so much that night.

on monday jamie and i got the bus to NY which is where i am now. i went out last night to a straight bar while jamie and his friend went to a gay bar. i beat a guy at pool twice in a row to which he said... 'i dont like you anymore' and left. i should stop doing that. i went to a few other bars and had a good night. this irish girl and i convinced the pizza shop guy to give us free slices, our accents made it easy. i didnt get to do the pub thing in NY last time so i made the night worth it. i got back to the apartment we were staying in at about 4 and got up feeling seedy again today. i should stop doing that too. i keep getting my address plasted on me somewhere like a 5 yr old as well. oh but thats not the worst of it, jamie made me walk around with a kerry sticker on me all day even though the election is over... and bush won. so now i look like a stoopid tourist who doesn't have a clue whats going on, but he gets such a kick from it that i couldnt take it off.

i'm off to Poughkeepsie now to visit the woman that saved my ass from the street the first night i was in NY a month ago. then back to washington tomorrow.

i think i'm getting a little tired... or that could just be a continuous hangover. i should stop doing that.

oh yeah!

ive had 2 great nights since i got back from toronto. the first was my 'im leaving in 2 days' drinks night. we went to dinner at a really nice greek restaurant and had a massive yet incredibly cheap meal... and a bottle of wine. it was BYO and inga had run across the road to the bottle shop to get it, came back and told me how cute the guy was, that he chose the wine for us and that he spoke the cutest french, musical french i believe she called it. so after dinner we went back and invited him to come out with us, believe it or not he actually turned up. but more on him later. once at the jello bar we met up with some people and were having an ok time but it wasnt very busy. when i spotted these 2 guys at the bar who were young and cute we decided to send them a glass of olives (an option on the martini menu). strange i know but incredibly funny. so one of them comes over to say thank you and he was SO gay!! i was like, yeah thanks no problem, have a good night. later on he got his "friend" to come over with his phone number and i was getting very confused so i went to find out the deal. he has a restaurant (in the gay village), he was flirting with me (or it could have just been the 2/3 of the bottle of wine and 4 cosmopolitans), and invited me to his restaurant the next day (huh?). maybe not gay after all.


so this is when french (proper french not canadian french - hence the musical french) bottle shop guy turns up and we all go to a pub/club called thursdays. you cant turn your head here without someone hitting on you. the french guy started out really sweet and funny, he was trying out his english but it was very limited. but every time guys would try pick us up (there were 3 girls) he'd get annoyed. an hour or 2 later we are all on the dance floor, these 2 guys are dancing with inga and her friend camilla, i was dancing with him, something went bad with the 2 girls (ingas boyfriend turned up and kissed us all) and they grabbed me to leave the floor. when i turned around, the french guy had disappeared. he got his coat from coat check and everything and just left. he had warned me that he gets possessive. after that, camilla and i are going nuts on the dance floor and we would walk off the floor, grab random good looking guys that would be walking past and pull them on the floor with us to dance... and they would! so it was us 2 girls with about 5 guys surrounding us. then i spotted the most perfect man in the world. i kid you not, to start with i just thought he was drop dead gorgeous but it turns out he is perfect in every way. he looks EXACTLY like colin farrell - tis true and even his workmates call him colin. a 20 yr old version of colin farrell with a completely shaved head. he was unbelievably gorgeous and i walked off the floor, grabbed him by his gorgeous black shirt and pulled him onto the floor with me. he seemed to like it. a few of the other guys left then, i gave it a few minutes dancing to make sure i had his attention and took him off for a drink. he has his own graphic design business - albeit its small but he's getting there, he plays hockey, he is smart and interesting, opened a car door for me and shut it behind me (i let him drive me to the station), he offered to pay for my train ticket, and he was an amazing kisser. and did i mention he was a dead ringer for colin farrell?? as i said, perfect in every way. and now im leaving and i'll never see him again *sobs uncontrollably*

next night was the tea party concert. they played an amazing set and the crowd was great as well. i met some people and they said they were going to hang around to meet the band and said i could hang out with them. hmmm... OK. one of the girls runs a fan website and the drummer JB found out about it and gave her 2 passes for the vip meet and greet. she tried to get us all in but when they realised we didnt all have passes all but her and her mum got kicked out. we were trying to find another way in, the rest had gone ahead without me when i saw this guy sticking the passes on some people. i ran over, he said no, i looked at him all sweet like, said 'but i came here from australia' and batted my eyelashes at him. he looked at me for a sec and said, really your from australia?? well here you go darl and stuck the pass on my chest (me thinks he was just trying to cop a feel as opposed to just being nice) but who cares i had a pass. i got to meet JB, we had 2 beers (which he got me) and he teased me relentlessly for being australian, he autographed my ticket and i got a photo with him before he kissed me goodbye. stewart the bassist/keyboard player/god knows what else was about 2 inches from me but always deep in conversation. i didnt want to be pushy so i drooled from where i was. he didnt seem to be in a great mood though. jeff martin the singer was only around for a few minutes and i didnt get very close to him. sux, but still i had 2 beers with JB *giggles*.

2 last great nights in montreal and in 2 hours i'm off to Washington DC.

the men... by god the men

so i took a little trip to toronto which included a day trip to niagara falls but more on that later, i'll start with toronto.

not a bad city but not the best either. it got a little pretty but nothing fantastic. i went to Casa Loma which i really liked. its... let me give you the hostels description "Casa Loma - is a genuine twentieth-century castle built by a genuine eccentric millionaire, who later went genuinely broke and died in genuine poverty". it was genuinely cool. so i got lost in there for 5 hours the first day then went back to the hostel and met a lot of really nice people, including 2 brazilian guys and 1 really arrogant bastard that was trying to hit on me. now this guy was tall, gorgeous and sounded like denzel washington - so far not a problem but then he opened his mouth (de ja vu) but let me tell you i would have preferred a high-pitched OKAAYYYY but instead i got a guy so full of himself it made me sick. he was the type of guy that was doing you a favour by letting you be near him. i also had the feeling i was last in a long line of the days attempts at picking up. he tried everything from singing to me to war stories and doing the whole 'i just need someone to hold me' type of shit and when he realised it wasnt working he called it a night but parted with a sigh and "well im in room 201 - just come up ok - 201" to which i reply 'dutiably noted' and then he turned to the brazilian guy and said 'she's a lot of work' but he thought i didnt hear. then he had the audacity to come back 30 mins later and said 'so are you coming?'... HELL NO!!!!! i stayed up so late playing cards with the brazilian guys that i didnt wake up for the niagara tour the next morning and at 8:25 the tour guide is banging on my hostel room door sayin everyone is on the bus. so i run out in the rain with shoes and socks in my hand and jacket over my arm. off to niagara!!!

it was raining and miserable but it wasnt too misty at the falls so we got a good view. i went in the tunnels but the maid of the mist stops operating at the end of october so i missed that by like... a day! it was beautiful though. then we went to this little town that was out of hollywood perfect. im talking, you walk down the street and there is one perfect house after another and its raining but youre not really getting wet it just sounds pretty and the trees line the street and the autumn leave are falling and all over the ground - cue cute possum to run across the footpath and run up a tree (i shit you not it happened twice). then we went wine tasting... this was a GREAT part of the trip. they are quite generous with the portions so i was singing on the way back in the bus - as were a lot of people. i tried the ice wine which just means they pick the grapes when they are frozen in the middle of winter and it makes a really concentrated sweet desert wine that is really really expensive and really really really damn good. only canada can make it every year, some european countries can make it but the winter isnt always cold enough so they arent consistent.

i got back to the hostel that night to find a sign on my rooms door saying 'all residents of this room must change rooms immediately - please see reception' turns out the room had bed bugs or something and they wouldnt give us a new room until we washed every single item we owned which meant there goes my plan of having a nap before hitting the bars - i get to do laundry instead! and because i had to wash my jacket and sneakers and couldnt put them in the dryer i couldnt go out because they were all wet! so i got drunk and played cards and drinking games with the brazilian guys. i kinda got with one of them (i feel like im 16 again) and it sucked that i was leaving the next day but eh... we'll see if we stay in touch, i hope we do i wanna go to brazil.

before i got the train back today i went and saw toronto's walk of fame which is a very small scale hollywood thing. the plaques on the sidewalk thing. i went to a show museum cos i figured you dont see THAT in many countries - it was cool, a few other little sites and came home to find out that inga was leaving the apartment for the night as the shit hit the fan after i left. apparantly its my fault for not being here and keeping her sane and she cant study and she needs to get work done so she left... hmmm...

oh but before i go i have to say to the girls... oh my god the men. the guys in toronto are all so gorgeous, its so unfair. but the good news is there are hardly any good looking girls so we could totally clean up here! i think its something you should all consider. i had this plan where you all come over and we round them up and take them home with us and leave the ugly girls to breed with the left over ok looking guys and then australia will have a better looking generation to come for our children. i think its something we should invest in for the future of the kids - bugger this clean air crap!