Giselle gave me a challenge!

I had kind of given up on writing these but Giselle challenged me to write a couple more:

1) write about how it was travelling from Europe to the USA and a list of everywhere I went
2) take picture of every corner on the block I live on in America.

So here it is, it'll be a long one, but I've been to a few places in between Assisi and Denver.

After finishing work in Assisi, which was easily the best job I've ever had and can't wait to go back next year, most of the crew made the journey to Florence, most for only one night but I stuck around for another couple of nights to check it out properly.

The crew!

Il Duomo!

After my days in Florence it was on the train and up to the beautiful city that is unlike any other, Venice! Spending a couple of nights here, meeting awesome people and getting completely  lost in the labyrinth that is the main island.

Grand Canal!

Then it was time to return to Rome. This time with the influence being on sight seeing, as the last trip was more of a social trip. I ticked off some more must sees but have left the Vatican for my trip there next year!

Trevi Fountain!

This marked the end of my Italian adventure, for now, and was time to head off on the next adventure, America, but of course I needed a few days break in Lisbon, Portugal. 5 days there with a cold meant I didn't do much but did find an awesome town about 40 minutes away, Sintra!

Sintra

So it was time to navigate the Lisbon Airport and figure out how to get some medicine to help me deal with this cold. Managed to find a pharmacy where they spoke enough English to figure out what I needed, and it made my flight a lot better than I expected. I was a little under prepared when I arrived in Newark airport but with a little assistance from mum back in NZ, I made my way to my hostel in New York and got ready to start my American journey.

The journey started the next day with a trip into the heart of New York, Time Square and then on to Grand Central Terminal to meet up with a friend and explore the city.

Time Square

Next on the agenda was a 5 day stay in Washington DC, so hopped on the bus and went off to the Nations Capital to stay with a friend and check out some famous landmarks. Capitol Building, Washington Monument, Lincoln Memorial, The White House and a few others. While I was there just walked across the boarder and into Virginia to check out Arlington National Cemetery and the Pentagon.

The White House!

Then it was time to head back to New York to meet a couple more friends and explore some other parts of the city (Central Park and China town), before meeting some other people for some drinks and a couple of birthday celebrations. After relaxing in the hostel for a day I decided it was time to move on and check out Boston. Exploring the campus's of MIT and Harvard and walking the Freedom Trail.

Freedom Trail!

After exploring Boston it was time to move on from the East Coast and head inland more, and onto Chicago. Had a friend pick me up from the airport and back to his place for a bit before heading into a baseball game with some of his friends and another of mine. The next day walked around the city in the rain. Its a nice place so want to head back on a nice day.

Cubs game with DJ

A very short stay in Chicago but was good fun and was time to move on down to Champaign-Urbana (the town that the University of Illinois is in) for 4 nights. An awesome town and was there as the university was just starting up for the year. Met some awesome people and had a great time. Saw Kansas play live and sweet corn festival, a community dinner at a mutual friends place, 4 great nights out with different people and biking all over town at random hours of the night. Had a great time and hope I can go back there again.

Thats bringing this to the end of the intensive travel part. I caught a plane from Champaign back to Chicago and then on to Denver which has been home for the past month. Living with 3 awesome people. Adam and Jessy who I lived with when they came to Lincoln on exchange and Mike a friend of Jessy's. Having a great time living here. Football on Sundays watching the Denver Broncos win (5 -0 so far), a camping trip into the mountains, kickball on Friday nights, rock climbing every once and a while.

Will be moving out of here in a little over a month and out to the mountains where I will be working as a lift operator at Beaver Creek for the winter . Will be working 4 days a week so I can spend the other 3 on the mountains. The company I;m working for has multiple ski fields and gives me a ski pass to all of them so looking forward to that.

And that's about all. Not sure when I'll do the next challenge but I'll hopefully get it done.

Hope everyone is well :)

The Daily Grind

OK so I'm not a huge fan of the format I've been going with. Which was basically writing what I did each day so I thought I'd do something a little more generic. I'll still do some day by day ones when I do something particularly note worthy but on the whole I'll do more like this.

So I thought a good place to start would be a typical sort of work day. I'll try a not make it too long and boring for you.

I'll skip all the boring pre-work routine but I will mention the nice walk I take every morning to get to work. Assisi itself is set on the hill and my accommodation is about a 1 km walk above the office so every morning I get to walk down with a great view of the valley below looking out over Umbria and on towards Tuscany.

Every morning starts with a couple of meetings, the first at 7.30 for the management team and the second at 7.45 for everyone working, just to run through the details of the delegations that are coming through on the day and any updates from the previous day.

In between these meetings I have to run down to the restaurant and tell them how many students are coming on the day so they can make picnic lunches. No-one in the kitchen speaks English so this can often be an interesting exercise but it usually works out.

From then until about 9 am its a fairly relaxed morning. I have to enter all purchases into our budget to make sure we aren't spending ridiculous amounts of money on anything and then its just checking emails and catching up on the news of the world. Then at about 9 am I'm called to the presentation room to run the morning shop, where the students can pre-order their photos and purchase t-shirts. This is the busiest time of day as I have to process about 30 - 60 students in 15 to 20 minutes.

The Shop!

The Presentation Room

 After restocking the shelves and packing up the presentation room I'm back in the office by about 10 am and from then on I'm call this whole time to do a variety of random jobs, from putting toilet paper in the port-a-loos to running ice packs to the crew if someone hurts themselves. But there is nothing major that I have to do until about 1 pm when I collect the memory cards from the cameras at the tower and drive down in Santa Maria, about 10 minutes away, to get the pictures printed.

Where I get the Photos printed,
with my car in the foreground.

Tower the students abseil off.
(100 feet high)

Once I get back to the office with photos I have to put them into folders, as they get a team and individual photo. Once that's all done its just waiting around for the call to come down to the presentation room for the afternoon shop, in case any of the students decide they want to purchase the photo and also to announce who gets their photo for free.

After that the students head off and continue on their trip. I have to count all the sales and make a record of how we did on that particular day then the crew comes together for an end of day debrief outside the presentation room and then back to the office to update the sales spread sheet.

And that's my day done. Of course there is whole bunch of other stuff I do during the day, such as answering phone calls, sending emails, impromptu meetings/discussions with other management on different things that arise each day but on the whole, what is above is the general flow of my day.

Hope that makes it a little easier to understand what I'm actually doing over here, on the other side of the world!

2 Nights in Rome!

So I'm kind of stepping out of chronological order here, but I can't seem to get ahead so I'm going to skip about 2 weeks and hopefully I can fill that blank in a little later on.

So I somehow managed to be roostered off for 5 days so I figured I should probably get out and see some of Italy. The obvious place to start with was Rome. So on Saturday I hopped on Train and headed south . I had a few issues with trains. Mainly missing one, one not running on Saturdays and not being able to figure out which other trains I could catch. So I had a bit of a break down at the train station and almost gave up on the idea of going to Rome, but managed to survive that and finally caught a train a little after 4pm and arrived in Rome about 6.30pm.

I had booked my hostel online and had managed to get one about 5 minutes from the train station so a nice short walk which made it so much better. Checked into the hostel and ended up in a room with these two Canadian guys, one of who just slept the first night and the other was talking about a pub crawl, so "when in Rome do as the Romans do" so me and the Canadian guy went on the pub crawl, and met a whole bunch of different people. Met 3 other kiwis on it as well which was cool.

We stayed out until about 3.30 dancing in different bars and having a good time. Then came the fun job of finding a way home. Buses in Rome run all night and the guide for the pub crawl told us which one to catch, so we just had to find our way there, well we thought it would be that simple. Me and an American guy managed to find the bus alright so we thought we'd be fine but the bus broke down outside the Colosseum, so we had to get out and walk. It was the first time I'd seen the Colosseum.

Not a great photo best I could do at 4am.

Somehow we managed to find our way back to the hostel, and we walked through the set of an Italian TV show which, I don't get why but they were filming at 4 in the morning, just seemed a little crazy to me.

Anyway we made it back and I crashed into bed and woke up about 10.30am and just hung around the hostel, in the nice air conditioned room. Temperatures have been up in the mid 30's so to have air conditioning was a life saver.

That afternoon I had organised to met up with Ben, one of the guides I'm working with this season, outside the Colosseum, so thanks to my walk the previous night a now knew how to get there. I met up with Ben a little after 2pm and we walked around the Colosseum and Palantine Hill,. We tried to go to the Roman Forum but it was closed by the time we got there so just wandered the streets looking at the performers and could see bits and pieces of the Forum from there.

We head back about 5.30 and went our separate ways. I was pretty tried from the night before so was keen to go to bed early so went out and had some dinner and got back to my room. My room mates were there so we thought we'd go for a few drinks at the hostel. Then went for a walk across town for them to find some dinner and eventually ended up back in the hostel bar about 10.30 and there were some people from the pub crawl there so we hung out with them and ended up going to to a couple of other bars about 30 minutes away that the barman recommended.

I ended up leaving a little after 4am because I had to catch the train about 11.30 the next morning, but the others stayed out until about 7am. I woke up in the morning and met up with Ben again and we caught the train to Assisi on another scorching hot day, got about to about 37C.

A little disappointed I didn't get to see more of the attractions in Rome but met some great people. I plan on going back and doing more of those touristy things.

*I'll add some photos from the Colosseum later, I left my camera up in my room and don't want to walk up and down the hill in 30 degree heat just to add a couple of photos

Buckingham Palace

Day 2 and 3

So the 25^th was a long day, lots of walking. Me and couple of guys from the hostel decided to walk to Buckingham palace, about 5 km away, for the changing of the guard, have never seen so many people in one place before. It was packed, it was a Saturday after all and a whole lot of Germans had come to London for the Champions league final.

After that, we headed back towards the River Thames, passing Big Ben, Westminster Abbey and the Houses of Parliament along the way. Quite spectacular buildings, as are so many in London. Everything is so much older than back home in little old NZ, so you just have to stop and look at the buildings as you walk, even if they aren't a famous building, it’s just so different so I stopped lots along the way as well.

We then headed across the river and started walking towards the London Eye. We queued briefly for tickets but decided it was going to take most of the day to get on it so kept moving down the river. We stopped by a street performer, one of many along the river. Not the best busker I've ever seen but still entertaining.  Further along we came to Tate Modern and walked around in there for a while, and then we passed Shakespeare’s Globe Theater on the way to London Bridge.

 After stopping at London Bridge we headed back towards the hostel to complete our kind of triangle of the bottom half of London. We had a couple of beers at the pub by our hostel and watched the Champions League final. I was completely worn out after that so went to bed.

The 26^th started off a little slower, didn't leave the hostel until 10.40, and headed down to the tube stop near my hostel to meet up with Tony and Bry. We caught the tube to Convent Garden and had a wander around there and headed down to Trafalgar Square. We called into the National Gallery and had a look at some paintings. Came out and there was another street performer, they’re everywhere during the weekends from what I've seen, but it might just be the good weather we had yesterday and the today.

Anyway we moved on, walking down Paul Mall, once again the buildings are all incredible and completely different to back home. We found a pub along the way and called in for lunch.  Afterwards we worked our way to Hyde Park and walked along the outside for a bit then went down to one of the main roads and found our way to Harrods. We had a look around there, found some crazy things, like a watch for 275,000GBP.

Then we headed to the Natural History museum to look at dead animals. Was interesting but we were all getting pretty tired so went to a convenience store to buy a few beers and headed to Kensington Park to enjoy the sun and have a drink. It was quite strange being able to go into the equivalent of a dairy and buy singular bottles of beer and be able to drink them in the open, but at the same time it was really good. Got back to the hostel about 7.30, got some dinner then was in bed by 10. Long days out walking are making me sleep well though.

Tower of London and London Bridge - 24th May 2013

*I envisage that these will get shorter and less frequent as time goes on

I had planned to make the first one of these while waiting for my flight in Hong Kong, but as flights do they don’t always arrive on time. 30 minutes late wasn't too bad for an 11 hour flight, but 2 hours wasn't really enough time to write anything when you spend an hour trying to find a shower and fail to find one, then it was on to finding some food, chocolate pastry and a pack of chips.

The flight itself wasn't bad at all. 11 hours really did fly by. Managed to get through half a book, watched a movie and a couple of TV programs. Meals were pretty average but can’t complain, it aeroplane food. The next flight wasn't too good. The little in flight entertainment screen kept playing up so couldn't really be bothered with it and was too tired to read my book so just had to sit there with my eyes closed hoping I would sleep. Struggled to sleep, maybe 2 hours out of the 13, so writing this nearly 12 hours after getting off the plane, no decent sleep for almost 44 hours, feeling pretty tired.

Managed to get onto to the underground system and figured it out pretty quick. Was about 7am when I hoped on so the carriages filled up pretty quick. Found my first stop easy enough. Then I had to find my way to the next platform to catch a different line. That one was almost jammed packed so a guy with a massive backpack made it even more crowded, luckily I was only on it for a couple of stops. Then I had to surface and figure out where the hell I was going. Started going the complete wrong direction for about 5 minutes until I realised so turned around and went back the right way, only to take about 3 wrong turns along the way but managed to find my hostel in the end.

My hostel, The Dictionary, isn’t flash but that’s mainly due to most of it still being under construction because the bits that are done are quite nice (Hopefully get a picture to show you). They held onto my large bag for me and gave some breakfast, which I get every morning but wasn’t expecting it today, corn flakes and a muffin. Had a chat with a couple of people there who were leaving today but everyone seemed friendly.

Tried to get up and leave, got outside even but then I managed to convince myself not to go out. To hang around the hostel even though I couldn’t check in to my room until 2pm and it was about 9am. Sat in the bar which I get free wi-fi in and had a chat with mum and Kate on Facebook and Angela on viber, got to love technology! After that I decided I really should go out and do something.

I decided on London Bridge and tower seeing as they were pretty much directly south of the hostel so easy to get to. I was going to walk the whole way as I wasn’t exactly pressed for time but the weather was pretty miserable, rain, wind and cold, Nothing extreme just not a nice combination. Had a look at the buses going passed and one said London Bridge so hopped on that one and off I went.

I Had a walk along the river down towards London Tower. I had a look at the outside and the debated with myself whether I should bother going in. Then I decided I should so went a bought my ticket and went in and had a look around. Probably should have taken more time to read the signs and understand the significance of all the different areas but at that point was 30 something hours without sleep so the attention span was a little short. But Enjoyed the walk around, the fresh air and the old buildings, plenty of them in England.

I decided I had enough of that at about 12pm so headed on out to find somewhere to have lunch, tried to find a pub which had the cricket on (turns out the cricket was rain delayed anyway), but nothing really on my way, so walked to a tube station and hopped on the one that comes closest to my hostel, about a 10 minute walk. Got some lunch from a convenience store and took it back to the hostel to have in the kitchen.

Finally got to check in about 2.30, a few other people got here before 2 as well. Had a few issues with the key card at first but finally got it working and then the highlight of my day. SHOWER! Hadn’t had one since leaving Auckland so really needed it. And that’s about it.

Now im writing this at 4.30pm on 24 May. I probably won’t get round to posting this for a while but that bit is just so I know where it all fits