Post new years things slowed down for a while and I was feeling quite fragile for a little while.  I went to dinner with JJ, Julien, Menz’s cousin and her friend.  I didn’t eat heaps because I felt like crap.  After that went to Julien’s for a while but I quite literally couldn’t work out how to speak English so didn’t stay long.

After that it was slow time although I did get to go to Normandy and Bayeux.  Omaha beach/memorial was really good experience for me.  While I don’t claim to know very much about WWII it was always my favourite and this experience really humanized it for me.  The Bayeux tapestry was long and old and fairly entertaining.  Worth dropping by but not worth leaving Paris for in its own right.

I went to Moulin Rouge.  It was pretty fun but a better place to take a date.  Solid panty peeler.

Manchester was fraking cold.  I landed at -2c and the lady I had been talking to on the plane explained to me I was lucky and was going to die.  Got to Tim’s place and ate and went to bed.  Manchester City the next night was so sick.  Tevez crushing.  Pity how much they sucked vs Everton though.  The final night I went to a pub called ‘The Red Lion’ and it was pretty cool, good to experience a real English pub.  I was a little bit sad I didn’t get to she any of the slack women Tim had been slamming.  What can I say?  Sorry?

Anyway, got home, went to Invalides.  Sick museum.  Got like bad ass horsed in armour fighting each other and just loads of bad ass shit.  Then there was Napoleon’s tomb, fucking wicked bad ass.  I have always been interested in Napoleonic history but have never looked into it in much depth.  I think I’m going to get a Napoleon biography, I nearly got one for the way home but got Anne Frank’s diary instead.

On that note I might quickly put down the interesting books I’ve read and the interesting movies too.

Books

The Psychology of Love:  Basically involves a lot of case studies and is a serious psych book (not pua) and it was pretty interesting about chemicals and evolution and stuff.  Worth the read for mine but I can imagine a lot of people snubbing their nose at it.  It is defiantly not going to help you with girls.  In fact sometimes I was a little depressed along the thought line “love isn’t real it’s just chemicals and tricks, women are just using me to preserve their genes.”  But I think that’s over now.

What I learnt at HBS:  Pretty good exploration of a journalist turned MBA student at Harvard.  Entertaining enough and quite interesting to see how this place’s mentality is like and even more relevant after the crash.  I’ve got this book so if anyone wants to read it.

Enough:  I just kinda of skimmed through this but this is a very relevant book.  The basic concept is “you’re not happy when you have enough, you have enough when you’re happy.”  It explores the consumption of modern western society and how absurd it is if you think about it logically.  Worth reading, and entertaining with a relevant message.  I don’t think it’s going to change me though.

Anne Frank:  I don’t know if I had heard of this before I went to Holland but I’m very glad I read it.  You really get to know Anne through the book and you see her change and mature.  Not for everyone but shits all over any fiction book.

Movies

Up In The Air:  I want this guys job.  Worth it.  Watch it.

Up:  Possibly the best animated movie of the ‘00s.  I watched it on the plane coming over and told anyone who would listen it was sick.  The guy next to me on the way back watched it and was laughing at it, what a lad.  Watch it.

Food Inc:  Interesting documentary, worth watching if you want to watch a docco but very America-centric.

The Cove:  Saving dolphins from those damn Japanese.  Worth it, but a tad racist maybe.

The Vicious Kind:  Heavy weight drama, interesting and fresh [definantly NOT a date movie].

Samson & Delilah:  Shithouse.  The only good bit is the singing bum, other than that its fucking drawn out.  They go somewhere, have no life skills, sniff petrol, are about to die, then go back to their little shithole town.

An Education:  Drama.  It was pretty good but probably not worth your time.

State of Play:  Solid political thriller but unless you want to watch a political thriller it’s probably not worth your time.

Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs:  Probably would have liked it better if I hadn’t watched Up twice before it.  Still it was entertaining and if you want to watch a goof-ball animated flick then this is for you.

Invictus:  Waste of time.

Adventureland:  Umm I liked this movie.  You can see the superbad in it but it’s a bit more drama-esque and less comedy.  It’s got the chick from twilight who is hot.  Could watch it with a date, but it’s pretty engaging.

Big Fan:  There were some points where I was pretty sucked in.  I was really tired when I watched it.  I could imagine some of you liking it but overall I didn’t really appreciate it.  This and Invictus I felt had tried to make something fresh but it was just kind of lame and not appealing.  As opposed to like the Vicious Kind which is like the direction films should be going in.

I watched some others but they’re not worth mentioning (half of wolverine, Post Grad etc).

GIRL!!!

I haven't bothered posting a girl for a while but some of you might already know that this girl is kind of special to me.  Jessica Stroup ladies and gentlemen;

OK, lets do Amsterdam and NYE + lead up.

Once again, I’m going to preface this with the I am not proud and also don’t know if this is entertaining but it’s basically just what happened thing.

We went into the Netherlands on the train and there was quite a bit of snow in Paris/Holland and so people were running on the train and like stealing seats.  But the general disorder was fine because it didn’t really affect us on account of our lucksackness, I swear when we got on the train people were standing and shit and our seats were the only ones available.

In Amsterdam, obviously we tried out a  space cake or two and basically didn’t really love the scene that much.  Went on a redlight district tour after and it was worth it because they walked us through the end of the elite alley which is basically a room with girls all around and is totally from another world, it was quite literally unreal.  Then we go to bar after the tour and after two beers discover that we feel quite woozy and it like triggered the space cake from earlier.  We went home and had a tad more and then just went to bed and slept for like infinity hours.

Next day I of course made Tim do another walking tour, which, as the 50 year old I am, I showered it. Tim did walking around in below freezing snow condition for four hours in extremely bad shoes, but I needed my history lesson god damn.  Afterwards we (mainly Tim really) decided it was time to try hallucinogenic drugs.  We went to a smart shop and got a box of truffles.  I was basically the most useless drug ever as we turned in to dribbling smack heads for like three hours.  We have like 8 grams each and the boxes are 15 grams each and designed for one trip and not even supposed to be that strong.  I must admit that I had a ball.  But still, from a nutral sort of perspective spending 3 hours looking at a pillow is probably not the most constructive use of my time.  After this we went and played card games with some French girls and generally acted like we were 11 years old and on a family holiday somewhere on the southcoast, it was once more a really weird way for things to progress.

That was pretty much Amsterdam.  Went home and was pretty tame after that until hurricane Nugget came to town.  First night we decided the only responsible thing to do was a centurion and then go out.  Turns out the shot glasses we got for it were actually 4cl rather than 3 cl  Nugget and I had not really got lost for like a moth or so and it ended up with Nugget vomiting out my third story apartment window and just generally being pretty close to death.  Brilliant.   And then we head out and make sure Nugget is only allowed to drink out of his pink shot glass.  Obviously seen as we’re basically the the drunkest people in Paris and probably Europe Nugget thought it would be a good time to run some game.  Now, this is sort where we had the beer that started making things go blurry for me again.  But apparently we talked to them for quite a while and it was probably the most charming conversation I’ve ever heard of (Also this was focused mainly on a girl how was pretty fit but had a ranga friend and a fat friend).  Let me transcript for a second (this portrayal is going to paint us as a lot less loud and less slurry then we were);

Us: “Where are you from?”

Them: Somewhere shithouse sounding in the US

Us: “Don’t know where that is.”

Them: Starts talking about it.  It is boring.

Them: “What are you guys doing tomorrow”

Us: “A bar crawl.”

Them:  “You should come to where we’re going [some club]”

Us:  “No fuck that, were going to have fun”

This was pretty much the gist of it.  Basically just us knowing how to start conversations and everything but then not caring enough or being in control enough to be able to maintain anything.  They were American sluts (which isn’t nice to say but it is as it is; http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ngHDYzhDBk4) so as a result they put up with our shit and my favourite little gem that I feel illustrates this is “so you guys are like the hot austalians”.  No woman.  I hope they went on that bar crawl, which (of course) we blew off.  The highlight of the night was the walk home which involved running and laughter and sitting on scooters and nugget twisting my ankle (from this point on it the story I was walking with the most retarded limp you'll ever see).  I remember little of this but Tim did a good job capturing it on camera.  Anyway, my ankle really hurt and I got like super flushed, it was a weird feeling.  I died on the couch and got carried to my bed.  Tim was the only one that night who didn’t spew and as a result he was super super sick all morning.  It was a somewhat eventful night but with too much vomit.

The next night JJ got to Paris and we went over to his apartment.  I thought we were going to be fairly tame but Tim and Nugget disagreed and bought another bottle of vodka and teen beers to go along with alcohol we already had.  It wasn’t a super eventful night, just drinking and sharing stories.  Good stories though.  JJ was a tad jet lagged, and drank a lot.  He fell asleep, wok up when we left, spewed, and then slept for like 12 hours.  Nothing much happened at the bar that I can remember except for Nuggets “I am really hot guys can we go outside” and he was getting really anxious and fidgety.  It was quite funny seeing him act like a such an ancy neurotic.  Me and Tim ignored him and just kept trading stories.  It is funny because nugget can’t remember them, and they were really great stories.  When we got home nugget hopped into bed and started trying to read.  He couldn’t read in his state so I read him a good night story.  The stories was about blow jobs.  Sin sin sin.

I wake up yesterday on NYE and really really dread the idea of going out or generally doing anything.  At dinner I was close to tears because I was just in so much pain.  I hate my life, I hate drinking, I hate myself.  We got to a bar which is like more or less empty but has pints for like 2.50, result.  Start drinking and Julien brings two friends from Australia who are lovely girls but I don’t think they were quite ready for hurricane Nugget.  We start off as basically the only not shit people (by the time we were lost the bar was absaloutly out of this world) in the bar sipping on beers and the girls on mixers.  It was strange because we seriously were arguing about acceptable lifestyles and generally modus operandi issue, we followed this up with a discussion about WWI and WWII and the shape of the world because.  It was like semi-intelligent conversation which was retarded because a) we never do it and b) the night turned out into an above average spanner-fest.  Ok, I will try structure this best I can, the girls.  We started off drinking then they went and got cigarettes, and from there I started seeing them sparatically through the night.  It went from pseudo smart chatter to flaming shots, to the short one basically coming up and nibbling on my neck (of course the night was too young and I was still the centre of attention so she was trying to hook up with me while I was continueing to entertain my new best friends “I’m Australian and my people love me”).  And then my final view of the girls was as the ambulance carted one away and the other ran after her in tears.  I don’t really know how they managed to lose their shit quite that hard. Does it make me a bad person that at the time my feelings of concern were strongly outweighed by the “that was interesting but lets get back to the bar” reaction?  Anyway, probably not going to go down as their best new years ever.  Drink with Nugget and you are probably going to die.  Our night basically consisted of conversation with people from all around the world and telling huge Greek gorillas that I am going to pee on them in when I walked into the loo.  Probably not the wisest thing I’ve ever done but once again no repercussion so I probably haven’t learnt my lesson.  I wish I could remember the conversations better because I am sure I’d find it highly entertaining.  It was an awesome night sargeing the bar, my memory of it is basically like a really good dream, I wish going out was actually that much fun.  Anyway when 5am hit and it was time to go home I kind of stumbled out the door and into a conversation with this French girl.  My friends were there as woozy as a ever standing in the cold while I refuse to stop talking to this girl.  Luckily drinking had made my French had gone from non-existant to fluent under the influence and I was almost certainly the most charming man in the world.  Anyway, I was like running game or anything like that I was just talking for the sake of it and when I finally returned to the boys I realised that I had accidentally fallen in love.  As a result I had to go back and ask her for her number... in front of her boyfriend.  Did get her number, am going to text her tomorrow.  Result.  She can’t speak English and has a boyfriend, she is perfect for me.

Anyway, I am going to finish lunch and then have a shower and wash away the sin and start not hating myself until at least O-Week.  Sorry mum, jesus and the city of Paris.