chamonix

So a couple of friends of mine were going to Chamonix the week before I was headed down to Italy to visit my friend Dan. By some miracle of my ever evolving school schedule, I was able to go without too much damage to my class attendance record. That and I found an overnight train ticket for 40 euros.

It was my first overnight train and I didn’t know exactly what to expect except that for 40 euros you get a seat that “reclines”. In my mind I picture the reclining seats on airplanes that go back about 5 degrees. Which could be trouble since I have a hard time falling asleep sitting up and my plan of getting in more than one day on the slopes of Chamonix hinged on my getting a decent night sleep.

Fortunately the seats actually recline back like 35 degrees and there’s a foot petal that lifts your feet up as well (think Joey and Chandler’s recliner chair from Friends) so I was able to sleep ok. That and nobody in my car snored which was pretty damn lucky given the train was completely full.

Anywho I arrived in St Gervais at 9 the next day where enjoyed the view that accompanied my 6 dollar cup of coffee while I waited for my train transfer.

Arrived in Chamonix around 11 (after, I might add, a beautiful train ride up the mountain with powder so fresh and untouched it reminded me of the Claymation of Rudolph the Red Nosed Reindeer Christmas Special).

Headed to my friend’s apartment and before setting out the meet them decided to have lunch first.

Big mistake. Why? Because when I finally made my way to the snowboard rental place they were closed for lunch. For three hours.

Kicking myself for having should’ve known better and making such a rookie “living in France” mistake, I fortunately saw a dude smoking across the street in what looked like another rental place. I asked him if he could rent me some gear and he agreed. I chatted with him for a bit and turns out he’s originally from… wait for it. Rouen, France. Through this connection I managed to get myself a 3 euro discount.

By this time it was around 1:30 and I still had to find my way to the gondola, buy a lift ticket, and get up the mountain before everyone got tired and wanted to go back to the apartment. I hauled ass wearing my snowboarding boots and carrying my snowboard up what was an unfortunately super steep and super slippery hill to get to the gondola. It was not pleasant. But the gondola ride was.

I finally made it up, found my friends, and commenced sucking at snowboarding. The weather was pretty crap however and visibility was almost zero and there was talk about going back to the apartment which really sucked for me because of all my effort to getting up there.
And then it started to clear up and it was gorgeous. J’etais tres content.

who am i?

So on the cusp of my “Every decision I’ve ever made in my life has been wrong” meltdown caused by some girl whom I’ve never met nor will probably ever met, I happen to have a vacation the following week. And not just any vacation. It was a vacation that begins with snowboarding in the French Alps then a stop to Venice, Italy for the last night of Carnivale, and ending with attending a ball at the Imperial Palace in Vienna, Austria.

I know. Who am I? And when did I get so fabulous?

Actually I just did my budget. I know exactly who I am.

A broke ass hoe.

vday meltdown

So I’m sitting in the cafeteria the day before vday mooching internet off the school as usual and looking at a friend’s wedding website (after, I might add, having spoken with two friends, one who whom just got married and is now preggers, and the other who is about to get married) when I come across the following words in the matron of honor’s bio:

“When I was young and foolish I moved Hong Kong hoping to see the world and it has been the biggest regret of my life.”

The words “BIGGEST REGRET” jump out at me like a popup ad for internet porn.

The flood gates open and all my insecurities regarding every decision I’ve ever made come pouring out.

I freak out.

Looking for a safe place to unlease my crazy, I scan gchat for someone who could help me. I settled apon an old co worker of mine. I sent him a message that looked something like:

“ALLMYFRIENDSAREGETTINGMARRIEDORHAVINGBABIESANDANDIJUSTREADABOUTSOMEGIRL’SBIGGESTREGRET WASMOVINGTOHONGKONGTOSEETHEWORLDANDTOMORROWISVDAYANDI’MDOINGLAUNDRY. HELP”.

His reply: Huh?

Annoyed he wasn’t understanding the dire situation I slowed down and splained myself. After he was all caught up I let loose the crazy.

Me: What if it’s all a big mistake? You know the story of the ant and grasshopper? I’m a grasshopper. And we all know what happens to the grasshopper at the end. IT DIES IN THE FREEZING COLD BY ITSELF. ALL ALONE.

Him: Is that some sort of fable?

I wanted to scream. Of all the people I decide to pour my heart out to, I get the one person that doesn’t know the story of the ant and grasshopper? How the hell am I suppose to freak out properly if I have to catch him up to speed every other sentence?

I accuse him of ruining my meltdown.

He accuses me of being irrationally dumb.

I equate my future dating pool as slim pickings after a huge after Thanksgiving Day sale.

He tells me to go cry it out.

I further lose faith in my decision making skills having picked the world’s worst person to help make me feel better.

I tell him he is bad at this and brace myself for a question regarding my monthly cycle. Instead the words I’ve been looking for appear.

Kelly, you’re awesome.

That’s all I needed. Crisis averted.

25 things

1. I love lists.
2. I love the smell of fabric softener on a guy.
3. Sometimes I get mistaken for a pre-pubescent girl. That’s on a good day. Usually I get mistaken for a boy.
4. I talk in my sleep. I’ve also been known to sing rounds or burp.
5. I don’t hear an “inner” voice and think people who do are weird. Except for JD. He’s cool.
6. I choose my own name when I was eleven, Kelly, which won out over Adora.
7. I love watching bad reality television especially when the people on there don’t realized how awful they’re being and think how they’re acting is normal.
8. People usually think I’m a bitch when they first meet me but in my mind I think I’m being friendly at the time.
9. If I’m around British people for more than an hour I inherit their accent even though I know how pretentious I sound.
10. I’m crap at languages and get really sick of people telling me how I should be good at them because I’m bilingual.
11. When I was younger I had the Marsha Brady complex with my sister and when a teacher asked me to name something I did better than her I thought for a while and then said “cartwheels”.
12. I think my sister is the best.
13. I enjoy being enthusiastically bitter.
14. The celebrity most people say I look like is Michelle Kwan. I don’t find this flattering.
15. I failed pre-algebra in the 7th grade and had to take summer school to go on to the 8th grade.
16. I prefer the radio to choosing my own music because I have no idea what I like and am too lazy to figure it out.
17. I don’t believe the Mc Knights are really identical twins.
18. I am blessed with a great metabolism.
19. I have two nieces and can say without biased that they are the cutest.
20. If I don’t have meat in a meal (excluding breakfast) I don’t feel full.
21. I learned how to take a compliment when I was 21.
22. I have never hugged my dad. The mere thought of it to me is weird (but I’ve hugged everyone else in my family).
23. When I was younger I looked exactly like my mom. Now I look like my dad.
24. I lose things all the time and have no sense of direction.
25. I am actively procrastinating.

the effects of glamour and cosmo

So when Brooke came to visit I called dibs on whatever magazines she bought for the plane ride over to Paris. Which happen to be Glamour and Cosmo. Confining myself to my room over the weekend to tackle projects with looming deadlines, they were my only source of procrastination since I have no t.v. or internet in my room and I was out of books to read.

I devoured them.

And then weird things started happening, or rather, strange thoughts started to pop in my head. Like when I went to get dressed, I changed clothes three times because what if what I had one was one of those things in my closet that could make me look chunky? Or maybe I WAS stuck in a rut and not experimenting with color enough preventing me from being a “fun” and “fearless” female.

When I finally got myself presentable and outside I couldn’t help but judge what everyone was wearing. Was it a Do or a Don’t? Was it Sexy or was it Skanky? Steep or cheap?

And when I went to put food in my mouth I wondered what kind of fat was in what I was eating. Was it monosaturated fat (a definite DO!). Or saturated or trans fat (A definite DON’T!). Or maybe this was one of those times where I should be “free to be me” and indulge myself.

And then I started to want a boyfriend so I could keep him, ditch him, impress him, delight him, tantalize him, satisfy him, understand him, not cheat on him, know him, blow him, stroke him, poke him.

You get my drift.

Someone send me a book. Stat.

sour service

So my friend Brooke came into Paris over the weekend and me and another friend of hers (Nancy) came into Paris to hang out. I arrived in Paris at around 8pm, dropped off my bags in our hotel, and together we roamed the cute little area our hotel was in. We found a quaint alleyway with small shops and restaurants and decided to drop into one of them for some cider and crepes.

Brooke got apple crepes and Nancy ordered lemon crepes (I didn’t order anything since I had just stuffed my face with a Mac Tasty and wasn’t feeling particularly hungry).

So we’re sitting and chatting and their crepes arrive and they chow down when Nancy realizes that her crepe has no lemon flavor to them. The following occurs:

Nancy [to the waiter]: Do you speak English?
Waiter: Yes.
Nancy: Ok. I ordered a lemon crepe but I don’t think there’s any lemon in here. [I have to note here that Nancy is speaking normally]
Waiter: WHOA LADY, RELAX! [whilst throwing hands up in a defense manner and speaking in a tone usually reserved for women in hysterics]

Brooke, Nancy, and I look at each confused like dude, what’s that all about. In the meantime he goes over to the counter, grabs a lemon container about the size of Snapple bottle, comes back to our table and then proceeds to dump about half the contents of the lemon container on to Nancy’s crepe. He would’ve dumped more had she not stopped him. Her crepe is now drowning in lemon syrup.

Waiter: Good?
Nancy: Um. Yeah.

Now I’ve heard about Parisian jerks before but this was my first experience with such an extreme case. For the next half an hour we tried to dissect what had occurred but still could not figure out why he was behaving in such a way.

After Brooke and Nancy finished with their crepes he came to take the plates away and made it a point to politely ask Nancy if she’d like another crepe. She declined.

C’est bizzaire.

le 19 euro billet

So as always I’m plotting my next vacation and managed to get myself invite to Chamonix, Bologna, and Vienna for the one week break I have towards the end of February.

This time around booking stuff was a lot more difficult because I had to book three separate trips. On top of that, this time the budget airlines didn’t seem to fly to where I needed them to.

Enter train travel.

So far the only train I’ve taken in Europe is the one from Rouen to Paris but I hear they’re a lot more convenient than plane travel because 1. Most train stations are located in the center of town and 2. You don’t have to worry about baggage restrictions. The only thing is they can be really expensive. For example a train from Vienna to Paris is around 250 Euros (yes one way).

After several days of checking multiple sites I ended up booking a flight instead for approximately the same cost as flying round trip to London figuring it was the best I was going to get.

So one down two to go. Sounds easy right? Not really. That’s because there are like a million train travel websites.

There’s SNCF which is the French train travel site (in French). Then there’s TGV which is the fast train travel site but from what I can see it’s the same as the SNCF one only in English. Then there’s the rail-europe site which only caters to the U.S., Canada, and Mexico and another site that caters to the UK.

All of these websites sell train tickets from multiple locations but not the same tickets and if it is the same ticket they sell it for a different price. Not only that but I notice that, depending on different times, you get different results from the same website. And not like the price goes up, I mean new train times or a cheaper prices magically appear.

What’s a girl to do?

Spend all day combing through these websites that’s what. Finally I found what I thought was the best price through the site that caters to North America. The only things is that this website only sends the tickets to a U.S. address so it added an additional complexity and annoyance to everything but the price was so good I was willing to deal with it.

I booked the tickets from Paris to Chamonix and Geneva to Bologna and waited for the confirmation email. Got it.

So I shoot off some emails because I’m feeling so happy to be done with the whole thing when I get another email from the site that reads:

“Thank you valued customer…. [blah blah blah more sucking up]… the ticket you requested is no longer available. We do however, have another ticket for double the price! [they didn’t say this but essentially it was so]. Please let us know if this is ok and we’ll send the tickets immediately. “

I close my laptop and don’t use the internet for three days.

After I regain my composure I again check out all the websites possible. By this time I started to get good at things and found a really cheap overnight train ticket from Paris to Chamonix for 40 euros. Score.

Two down, one to go. But this last one, she was tricky.

Basically if you search for Geneva to Bologna you get one possibility and that’s to leave Geneva at 11pm and arrive in Bologna the next day for 105 Euros.

Um yeah. Sorry but I only buy crap for cheap. Not for expensive. Then the “highly motivated to save money Asian” in me gets a bright idea. I search from Geneva to Milan and then Milan to Bologna. It was then that I found the 19 euro ticket from Geneva to Milan. Unfortunately the 19 euro ticket leaves either really early or really late.

Being the veteran budget traveler that I am, I know that a cheap ticket is cheap for a reason and usually that reason is because the person purchasing the ticket is naive as to what it actually entails. For example, short transfer times when there are a million platforms at the train station or a really far away airport that takes more money to get to and kills your savings margin. The thing about cheap tickets as well is that they are high risk meaning they are nonrefundable so once you buy them you are stuck dealing with whatever problems they bring.

Not knowing the transport system from Chamonix to Geneva I couldn’t risk getting the early ticket. That left the late ticket. It arrived at Bologna at 10:35pm. Unfortunately, according to the SNCF website (which is where I found the 19 euro ticket) the last train to Bologna was 7pm.

I contacted my friend in Bologna and he reassured me that the last train leaving from Milan to Bologna was at 11pm. Still a 35 minute wiggle room made me a big uneasy especially when the fallout is that I would be in a foreign place by myself in the middle of the night. Still a 19 euro ticket is a 19 euro ticket and the alternative was 60 euros.

I checked out the Italian train website to see for myself and realized that he was right, the last train was 11pm. I also realized I could purchase my Geneva to Milan ticket from this site and get a train that left at a decent time if I was willing to spend 10 euros more . Hells yeah. I searched for Milan to Bologna. 18 euros. Score!

I quickly registered with the website, double checked my train dates and times (military time makes me uneasy), got out my credit card, entered the information and hit “buy.”

“Sorry your credit card has been rejected and your session as timed out. Please try again.”

So I did.

Only to find that the ticket I want is no longer available.

I close my laptop and don’t ever want to use the internet. Ever again.