Upcoming Eurasian Trip!!!

So as my faithful readers already know, Rodzilla is both a heavy and a passionate traveller who plans to unravel the whole goddamn world before trespassing and being burried into Canadian soil.

It's been more than a year that I'm scheduled to travel in Paris, South of France and Barcelona with my dear friends Jizz, Cherryka and Merry. Merry the future accountant has been exiled in Nice for about four months now and we've planned to meet her down there and embraced the sun-kissed Côte d'Azur for a third consecutive time in my case!!! But hey, for those of you who've never got the chance to discover this magnificient region of the world, you MUST go!

An incredible opportunity to travel to Asia has been seized by Rodzilla; mijn vriend K will be studying in Beijing for a whole month (May). Being a Hong Kong native herself, she set out to stop in HK for a few days after her stay in Beijing. She insisted on me visiting her during her time spent in Asia and trust me, it hasn't been hard to convince me to find the cheapest flight from Barcelona to Beijing and settle an Asian tour!

That being said, I'll stay with her in Beijing for two weeks and during the meantime, we agreed to visit Shanghai for a weekend and later on we'll be staying at her uncle's house in Kowloon, HK. Traveling with us in Asia is Al and Mim, her Jewish girlfriends who are more than fabulous and more than happy to be hopping in Asia this summer!

As I've always dreamed of going to Thailand, I proposed to them that we went there for a week but K was a lot reluctant about it, so we had agreed to go to Hainan (a Chinese province), which is a Tropical island south of China. After two weeks of discussing the matter and roaming through pictures of exotic Asian destinations, K decided I was right; Thailand seemed a lot more exquisite and interesting. And that's how we scheduled a one-week stay in Phuket and Ko Phi Phi in Southwestern Thailand ;-)!

After the Thai getaway, we will all come back to Hong Kong for two days and leave to go back home. But not for Rodzilla: my flight ticket required I laid over Vancouver for a few hours before rejoinning Montreal later the same day. Since my dear friend Mevrouw Huppe lives there since two months and I haven't had the chance to hook up with her since then, I paid a lil' extra to stay in Vancougar for a whole week. I further got to learn that another hot friend of mine will be studying at UBC because she wanted to learn French in order to be more fluent and engaged into the Montreal social life. Another exciting news: Nizza's brother Thunder Eagle will be in Seattle recording a Heavy Metal album during that time. I guess that sounds like a hell of a trip! I'll keep y'all posted about my misadventures, expenditures, exciting news'n gossip and lack of pesos!

Considering the fact that I'm leaving East and coming back by the West coast, this trip actually involves Rodzilla touring the whole globe from East to West!!!

Posted below is my scheduled two-month vacation:

+Paris: With Jizz & Cherryka

+Nice: And surronding towns (Monaco, Cannes, etc.) With Jizz, Cherryka, Merry & Erik

+Barcelona: With Jizz & Cherryka

+Beijing: With K, Al, Mim and mucho othaz

+Shanghai: With K, Al & Mim

+Hong Kong: With K, Al & Mim

+Phuket/ Ko Phi Phi: With K, Al & Mim

+Vancouver: With Mevrouw Huppe, Nova Scotia, Thunder Eagle and other potheads

Paris

Cannes

Monaco-Monte Carlo

Nice

Barcelona

Beijing

Shanghai

Hong Kong

Phuket

Ko Phi Phi

Vancouver

Biting Into the Big Apple

As I mentionned earlier, I visited "The Big Apple" aka New York City two weeks ago accompanied by the fabulous K and Nizza and also by Michael, an Asian friend of mine who I study at University with.

The whole trip was completely unexpected and planned at the last minute; not even 48 hours in advance! Indeed, Nizza called me two days before (sunday, december 18th) her arrival date to announce to me that she had finally found a reasonably-priced roundtrip flight ticket from Stavanger-Sola to New York City. For those of you who have never flown before or are not used to book flight tickets online, the key to saving a few pesos is to compare prices among different airlines and on different retail websites. 

Abercrombie and Fit model and us ;-)

I had warned Nizza that the flights from SVG to YUL were pretty pricy at that point and that we should've booked them in advance in order to have okay fees. Therefore, I told her to look out for flights heading to Boston, Toronto or New York City. In turned out that the cheapest was NY as there are several translantic flights per day connecting The Big Apple to the old continent.

And that's how Michael, K, K's mom and I drove all afternoon that sunday heading south toward the Empire State of Mind. We reached the overly-populated island of Manhattan shortly after dinner. Travelling with Chinese folks also implies a lot of shopping for brands and sales!!! All three of them forced Rodzilla to stop at the Duty Free before crossing the American border. The prices indicated were just slightly cheaper than in Canada or in the States which means that you should shop by category in these shops since certain items might be worth the hassle to stop there while some others might be about the same price.

You know you're in Little Italy  when...

Another very important stop we had to make was Woodbury Common Premium Outlets which is in fact a H.U.G.E. retail outlet outdoor mall located in Red Apple Central Valley, NY two hours shy of the Big Apple. I believe these outlets were very interesting and appealing for savvy shoppers but as for the tired driver that I was, I didn't feel like buying anything and the fact that we needed to walk outside between shops anoyed me very much as the temperature was friggin' cold!!!

The moment we reached Chinatown, we had to hurry the (&*? up to bring all of our luggages into K²'s hotel room in order to leave some space for Nizza. We then sashayed away into the ghettos of Queens and Brooklyn in a New York minute to get at JFK where Nizza was scheduled to land. We waited an hour in awe at Terminal 4 (probably the ugliest terminal at JFK) and that's when the lovely Norwegian made her way out through the arrival hall and greeted us with her cute Scandinavian smile. I presented every single one of them to each other and proposed we leave the airport before the parking fees exceeded what we wanted to spend on food and booze.

That night, we were all so dead tired that we did nothing but eat and get off to bed. The following morning, I went shopping with the Chinese posse at Bloomingdale's while Nizza was recuperating from her lack of sleep and jet lag. We then hopped in a cab toward the Empire State Building and went to the top to take pictures and admire the New York skyline. I thought I'd be scared shitless as the first time I had been there (I was 14 at the time), I could barely breathe nor open my eyes and my family had made fun of my virtigo!

New York skyline

We walked a bit north towards Times Square, visited or should I say, shop again at Toys'r'us and agreed to eat a generous meal at Bubba Gump. I have to tell you that their Cajun shrimps were probably the best dish I had in ages and that their menu is definitely high on price/quality ratio! I also took a Fisherman's plate and a Louisiana Lemonade which allowed me to get a free glass buck at the end! A few minutes before we left the restaurant, we asked our waiter if he knew any good night clubs in NY as we were looking forward to go out and get loose. He said he didn't go out very often so he couldn't really help and came back with his colleague; a tall and lean African-American twink.