Questions To Ask Before Booking a Bus in SE Asia...

1. May I have a seat in the middle or front? I prefer to stay in my seat when we hit a bump.
2. How many stops will the bus make? If over 10, reconsider.
3. Will the fluorescent light panel above my seat be red, orange or yellow? If so, may I be moved under blue, green, or purple? Preferably black.
4. What time does the bus get in?
5. What time does the bus really get in? 
6.  Will people be smoking on the bus? If so, are there working windows or escape exits?
7. Will the bus drop me off at my intended destination or shall I just pay that hidden fee now?
8. Will the employees on said bus be searching my bags and taking what they please?

Enjoy your trip!

Love, Paige

Made It To KL. May 12th 2011

Our flight to Kaula Lumpar, Malaysia from Barcelona was at 5am on the 4th.  The only logical thing to do was sleep in the airport.  This is not the best airport to sleep in because it didn't have many stores before security, and most importantly and disturbingly, no bar. We got kicked out of the only bench we found that we could lay down in.  I ended up finding a nice padded desk chair in one of the corners to have a good rest.  Yet I couldn't sleep because this lady kept walking by and I am almost positive she was a gypsy after our bags... or our souls. Look I'm clearly not a Nazi or anything... but I hate gypsies.

After our flight we had a few hours to kill before we could check in so we went to the Central Market.  There, we stuck our feet in a pool of fishes who swarmed them and ate our flesh.  We paid for this service.  The room we got in China Town was in a hostel and had NO windows.  I have been after a three day bender with a total of 4 hours of sleep and still not slept in as late without even a slight stir to check the time or go to the bathroom.  Actually I usually wake up early for water because I'm beyond dehydrated due to massive amount of vodka sevens and shots of tequila.  That's besides the point.  We slept in till 5 pm on the 3rd or 4th day we were there with out a drop of alcohol in our system. I always thought a black-out room would be perfect for the weekends or a hangover, but they are not conducive to curing jet lag.  Our time in KL was spent laying awake for hours in the middle of the night, sleeping during the day, going to the mega malls for air con, and walking around seemingly endless outdoor markets in the evenings. One day we did manage to wake up early to go to a sacred Hindu site, the Batu Caves. Overall beautiful, infested with monkeys, ornate shrines, and one hundred and forty two steps to the top.

After KL we headed over to the east coast to a small beach town called Cherating.  Chilling out by the beach and cutting back on the spendage was certainly in order. Yes, I said "spendage". I also have taken up saying "stoked" a bit more than usual, but I think that is expected with the life I'm living. Wait, I have re-read that, and I also said "chilling out". The moment I start wearing those ubiquitous bracelets that all hippie backpackers hoard all over their wrists someone stop me. Just send a mercenary to Asia to cut off my hands. I'm already wearing a bright pink watch and feather earrings. I'm really close to going downhill.

 

Eww.

Love, Rebecca 

Spain, France, and Flashers

We met Claire in Figueres, Spain. Her parents moved to Spain from Armagh when they retired and I can only hope my parents will do the same so I can have an awesome place to crash when I need to save a bit of money. For Easter Sunday we stayed at her friend’s holiday home in the South of France. Twelve hours we sat in the living room and out on the patio eating, drinking, and talking. I have never been so entertained while doing nothing.

After about 4 days we figured we had overstayed our welcome and decided to head to Barcelona. We arrived at 10pm with no map or plans of a place to stay.  Only with a memory of a hostel in a plaza we had stayed in once before. Two hours later we booked a hostel and came to the realization we could not afford to spend the next week in Barcelona.  The next day we headed out to Callela. Luckily, this turned out to be quite the little discovery. Callela is a perfect little beach town  North of Barcelona with bars on the sand, strips of shops, and it’s not over run with tourists like us. We found the ApartHotel Safari on LateBookings.com for about 145 Euro for 5 nights. The room had a sitting area, kitchen, bedroom and bathroom. A perfect little home!

On Saturday we headed into Barcelona to meet Claire for dinner and drinks. After getting ripped off by an all you can eat tapas dinner (we should have known better than to eat on Las Ramblas), we realized that we had missed the last train back to Callela. No worries, we’ll just stay out till 6am when the train starts running. Four hours down, four over priced Vodka 7’s later we tried to get into the strip club next door; not for entertainment purposes but for somewhere to sit. At the door they told us it was 20 Euro per person but we could not get in without a man. Apparently a lesbian couple (not that we are one) cannot enjoy naked ladies without a man to escort us in. Ridiculous! The next day was dedicated to sleeping.  

Monday morning we headed out for a nice pleasant jog by the beach. Halfway down the trail we headed down some stairs to a little cove. After about 15 minutes we headed back towards the stairs.

Scene: Early 30’s Spanish man heading down stairs. Man gets to bottom of stairs, slowly unbuttons pants. Pulls pants down with boxers, lifts shirt up, stands with hands on hip and smug look of accomplishment.

Becca: “We’ve got a flasher on our hands.” Quick turn right and head down beach until he leaves.

End Scene.

One of Becca’s biggest fears is flashers. I have never been overly concerned with them until now. This is odd considering I’ve encountered my fair share of exhibitionists. I have walked past a man in the movie theatre hall pleasuring himself, driven up next to a man having his way with himself in his car, and a flasher stood next to Becca for a fair amount of time at Bay to Breakers before any of us noticed his dick was out. Not to mention we live in San Francisco and any festival or street fair you go to you are pretty much guaranteed to see a penis. This time however has scared me for life. Every time I see a man even adjust his belt now I am preparing for him to show me his junk. I just wish I had thought quick enough to laugh and say “Uno pequeno” and walk right past him up the stairs.

Love, Paige

Things I Miss About Ireland

Four months in Ireland can seem like an eternity. I had an amazing time there, don't get me wrong. I just understand now why there are more Irish living outside of the country rather than in it. This is partly my own fault. Instead of getting a job to fill my time I partied in every village/town I could get to and spent the rest of my time shopping, cooking, and staying in out of the cold. The following is a list Becca and I have composed of what we miss and don't miss about living on the Emerald Isle.

     I do NOT miss the weather. When it's sunny it's gorgeous but those days are few and far between. I do however miss always having a conversation topic. Especially after this past winter. Every conversation started with "It's never been this cold, we just aren't prepared." or "Enjoying the sun today are we? Soak it up, it won't last forever.".

     I do miss Irish butts. I don't know what it is but Irish men have the most perfect butt's. They fit those ridiculous jeans with the weird pockets so well. I do not miss however, the smell that comes out of them. It's gotta be all the Guinness and meat consumption, but that smell is fowl.

     I do miss Irish Mothers. They let you sleep in, don't mind if you were out drinking all night, and have a warmed plate of food just out of the oven and a cup of tea when you wake up. A few of them even folded and laid out our clothes to dry while we were out. There is nothing here I will not miss. Those women are lovely!

     I will miss being "the Yank". To be honest I find my accent to be lazy and boring, but the lads love it. It gets me everywhere. I will not miss having to use the line "Hi, I'm American" in order to start up a conversation with a lad. Someone please explain to me why Irish men will sit, stare, and wink from across the bar but not make a move until they are stumbling drunk?

     I do not miss the effort it takes to get ready at night. I'm from California. I've literally worn my pajamas into a bar before. I wear flip flops and sun dresses. On the occasion I do get all dolled up it's on a Saturday night and that's it. It took two weeks after I left the country to get back to normal and not feel like I needed to have full make up, big curly hair, and six inch heels on a Tuesday night just to keep up with the girls.

     I will miss rashers, dairy milk bars, and breakfast rolls. I will not miss black pudding. That shit is gross.

     I WILL miss my housemates and all the friends I've made there. You were all lovely and I felt more comfortable in your country than my own home town.

Luckily, though we will miss more things than not, whenever we go back to San Francisco we will have our perfect little blend of Irish, California. Until then we will do our best to make our own craic and keep ourselves entertained.

Love, Paige

On the Farm

 I am not sure if this was taken before or after Paige and I were called "lazy Americans" (7x) and instructed by the mother of the house to "get me an Irish woman".  I am also not sure if this picture was taken before or after I was sexually molested by one of her dogs.  I do know this picture was taken on a farm in Ballymac, Co. Kerry.

I know for sure I was not sexually abused by the retriever on the right.  He was a gentleman.  It was one of those cheeky curly haired  Irish bitches. Bending down to get something on the ground resulted in my bare bum peaking out of my jeans. One of these feisty large animals came right up and stuck her tongue, in its entirety, directly down my ass crack. I didn't know what to do.  I had no vodka soda to splash in his face and I wasn't sure if it would bite back if I gave it a slap across the cheek.  Instead we just kind of looked at each other.  I lazily said "no" out loud, knowing it made no difference in teaching a lesson. I only said it because if I stayed silent I would feel like such a whore bag.  Get me an Irish woman, she would have known what to say if some dagg tried to toss her salad...

 

A Wee Town Up North

After London, Paige and I went to Northern Ireland to see a friend.  We stayed in a small town called Hilltown in County Down. That night we went to the hotel bar on Main Street. It may be the only street in Hilltown.

 I have a fascination with small towns. I want to live in one, just for a bit.  I know I could not handle it long, but just enough to get the experience, maybe a month or so.  The reason the hotel bar was open later than normal was because the people who leased out the hotel were having a meeting upstairs with the owners to see if they could keep the place.  This was real deal Andy Griffith shit and I was there for it.  All the wives and mothers were down in the bar waiting to see if the small town folks would get their way with the big wigs.  Someone at the bar actually said I was about to witness one of the biggest historical moments in Hilltown.  The set up was spot on Little House on the Prarie and The Waltons material and I was loving every minute of it.  Well, only if Charles Ingles owned a bar not land and Mr. and Mrs. Walton were getting sauced every night after you heard "Goodnight Johnboy". An hour later the fellas came down.  An hour of waiting to see if the good people of Hilltown can keep their restraunt/bar/hotel where their heart and soul had been invested for years.  This hotel was part of Hilltown and should have been run by the people who live there...  Well fuck if I know any of this but its just what I gathered up from the locals and my imagination while taking back shots of whiskey.  Anyways, they got to keep the place! Fuck the man, up the locals and all that.  The owner had a lock in and a free bar and we all celebrated. Everything all works out, end scene, roll credits, and until next week.... I hear little Johnny falls in a well... but instead of a well it was the back alley of the bar while trying to have a slash.

London Town

We hadn't seen Big Ben, Buckingham Palace, Parliament, Notting Hill or anything remotely resembling a museum. I did see the Thames and the London Eye; two days before we left, and it was only because I got off the tube early to smoke a cigarette and call Paige to see if she was still in Clapham. I also thought I would head home but changed my mind and decided to stay out for a bit longer. Yesterday Paige and I had made a decision to not go out. Thursday was St. Patrick’s Day; Friday was SF financial district-esc bars followed by a club. We needed a night off.  We went to meet a friend in the early afternoon only to watch the Ireland Rugby game, have one or two pints and head home. This led to meeting another friend for one drink at a pub. Followed by yet another bar, a few Irish men, a huge three room club with smelly carpet and shots of Jager, then at about 2am to the afterhours club, to the sun rising and people getting their morning coffee and going for jogs past the club as we were stumbling out.

I sat on a bench overlooking the Thames wondering why there are no after hours clubs in San Francisco and then coming to the conclusion that it may be for the best. (Still ordering vodka Redbull at 5 in the morning is a good thing, don't get me wrong, but I am afraid I may look like a chewed up wire by the time I'm 35.)  It's 11am and we are not scheduled to keep drinking till about 12. I sat for about ten minutes taking in the view. That was the end of conventional sightseeing of London. Back on the tube! Feeling productive having at least seen something aesthetically pleasing in London during the day, I head back to Clapham to meet Paige and a few friends. It was Sunday. We had been waiting for this for a good year and it didn’t matter that I still had not slept. The Church was our tourist attraction. We didn’t need to see Westminster Abbey we needed to go to an old theater with the seats removed in Clapham Grand.  Now if you have lived with me in the last two years you already know this. I love to dance early in the morning. It's when I am still a little drunk or hung-over, I usually always have a bit of extra energy the morning after a good session. The happy jumping around kind of dancing that usually works best with bands that use abbreviations or acronyms for some reason, Like MGMT or LMFAO. MIA works brilliantly as well. Another thing I love to do after a good session is dress up.  I find it helps with my hangover depression. However unless it’s Halloween I can’t really go "all out" because I would look like a fucking nut job. So I usually have to be very subtle. I may wear funny dark rimmed glasses for example.  One morning I decided to dress punk rock and wore chucks, black skinny jeans, and my Mars Volta tee shirt.  Or I will go super girly with lots of flower print and pink sandals.  So my point is, The Church sounded like my hangover's wet dream.  Basically it’s a club that's only on Sundays and you can dress up, dance, see a magician and a stripper. Read my Review on Yelp of The Church to get idea of the place. I met up with the team and we headed over.  I don’t remember what the cover charge was and it does not matter. I don’t remember how much drinks were only that you have to get three tall cans at a time. It was pretty brilliant and I would suggest it to people in London.  Well I would suggest it if you like places like Coppers in Dublin, Reirdans in Cork, Kells in San Francisco, and pretty much most of the bars on the upper east side.

Sadly The Church closes at four so we moved on.  Paige would have to get her fix of Aussie men making out for her ammusement elsewhere.  Until next time, maybe we will bring costumes. Afterwards we went to a few bars.  The thing to do apparently was go to a bar, The Walkabout, after the Church.  The lad we were with was absolutely adamant about showing us yanks the walkabout.  If I had a drink for every time he said the name of this bar I would almost have as many drinks as I had consumed over the past two days. And that was too much to make any kind of effort to go to the Walkabout. Although now that I think back.... aye forget it... the way we are living there should be no reason to regret anything.  After the bars was it now time to go home? Nope. It was back to one of the lad’s house in Clapham.  We got back to the house more exhausted than drunk.  We had now been out for over 24 hours and we had surpassed that point of being totally pissed. We had officially drunk ourselves sober.  We showered (not together) when we got there.  There is always a method to our madness.  We may be able to drink for long periods of time, but we're not taking massive amounts of shots.  We may be able to stay out for 36 hours but we are still showering and helping ourselves to mouthwash in the bathroom whether we know the owners or not.  After freshening up, Paige and I along with four other Irish lads kept drinking there into the night all the while being entertained by the banter. 

Paige and I woke up on the couch in the morning and thought it was a good time to start home.  We walked to the tube station through the neighborhood remembering how two days ago we went out for that one drink. Remembering how when we got to the club I bought a round of 3 Vodka Redbulls and drank them in the time it took me to find everyone. When I repeated this story one of the boys responded with, "I left you ten minutes ago".  An hour and a half later we made it clear across town on the underground.  Epic. The weekend was epic. The rest of the trip would have to be devoted to lying on the couch and having a nice Italian dinner with outdoor seating.  I was telling the person we were staying with in London how we really have not and probably will not do anything touristy during the day.  He figures he can do stuff like that when he is older.  I fully agree.  When I’m older I will probably really get off on seeing Parliament getting some free walking tour of 18th century London.  What else am I going to do when I’m in my 50s?  I will probably take my family to London and I will need a way to entertain myself and torture my kids.  We will walk along the Thames on the way to the Tate right by where I had sat to give myself a break from the weekend long bender and they will have no idea how awesome I was.  Maybe I will give some hint when we walk by; Implying something that would only slightly let wind that I once sat there sometime between drinking enough vodka to kill a small child and watching a man eat a gold fish followed by a nice young woman who took her clothes off for a room full of dancing drunks.

A Recap

Did ya miss us? Well we missed each other. We are going to start to regularly update this thing. In order to properly do so I am going to recap what’s been going on in each of our lives. It will be a long one but it must be done. I will start with Paige.

In December our Paige made the move to Ireland, she stayed in Mayo, met a lot of Irish mothers, ate a lot of meat, drank a LOT of tea, travelled to Belfast, took a tour from a Nationalist who said he was shitting his pants while we drove through Loyalists areas in fear of being recognized, went to the most over crowded cemetery I have ever seen, saw the Giants Causeway, bussed to Tipperary, had more tea, saw some pikey's, hit on a 18 year old at a club, turned around to find all my friends laughing at me, saw Beth, hitched a ride to Connemara, went to a bar where Irish was the spoken language, drove 30 minutes to a club that looked like high school prom, convinced Beth not to go for the guy with missing teeth, narrowly escaped becoming someone's baby mama, went to Kerry, convinced some footballers I was the Rose of San Francisco, went to Galway got banned from a bar for calling the bouncer a cunt, in Dublin went to Copper's with some friends of friends from Roscommon, ditched them for a boy from Limerick, moved to Cork, got a blow up mattress, bought a lot of clothes, made friends with my housemates who like their drink and probably know the local bookie’s birthday and kids name, went to the dog track,  bet on a dag named Yeah Richie and lost 3Euro, definitely a sign, developed a great impersonation of the Cork accent, went to Killarney for a poker tourney which turned into a 5 day bender with nothing but champagne, became a fan of rugby and Liverpool, developed an unhealthy crush on Jonny Sexton, took a road trip to Clare for a going away party in the smallest bar in Ireland, played housewife, made dinner, cleaned house, developed a nickname and is now only referred to as "the Yank", spent a lot of time hung-over and sick on busses, tackled some daytime sessions, and flew to London.

I stayed in SF for a couple months, ate a lot of pub food, made some great new Sunday drinking buddies, got rid of the Richmond house, quit my job, flew to New York, saw my sister, saw my niece, played a lot of hide and seek, took her to day care, did some Bikram, listened to a lot of Hova, picked the kid up, played more hide and seek, walked the dog, saw SJP and Ferris Bueller, Pollack, Matisse, and Van Gogh, smoked some pot, met some hipsters, met a bud light commercial "star" who took me to a dance party, danced till 6am drinking tall cans of bud light, saw our lovely Canadian singer Jess, drank Patron and talked about San Francisco life and music, woke up fully clothed in the right hotel, wrong room,  flew to Israel, hiked the Negev, floated in the Dead Sea, saw a lot of missiles in a town that was last bombed in November of 2010, hiked Masada at 4am, lived off hummus and hard liquor, falafel or shwarma was my biggest decision, got a lot of propaganda, met a lot of soldiers, heard a lecture from a guy that had dinner with Noam Chompsky last month, they didn’t agree, prayed at the Western Wall, drank Goldstar in Jerusalem, had Lebanese food, slept in a Bedouin tent, had the best sing song ever, sorry Kevin, saw more graves of 19 year olds than I would have liked to, stayed in a kabbutz, had Shabbat with my aunt and watched the news from Japan, heard some more guitar, heard a lot of Jesus jokes, rode a camel, did an epic card trick, said some jokes, kissed an Israeli soldier, but everyone in Isreal has been a soldier and knows how to shoot a gun, did some drugs, stayed out in Tel Aviv dancing until the sun was up in this secular city that is filled with art, energy, music, and truly never sleeps, saw a Rabbit at the flea market, laid on the beach, ate a lot cheese, saw a soccer game, heard war stories filled with more emotion I am used to, heard only a bit of dissent, heard some Sinatra from a guy from LA, had more amazing food, drank absinth, took a sharoot to the train station, got in a haggling fight with my cab driver, ended up by hugging him goodbye, and took a 5 hour Easy Jet flight to London.

Love, Rebecca