Quote Board Update: An idea from our kiwi friends Anna and John!

Updates to the quote board....

During our everyday lives we find that we say the stupidest things... Our friends Anna and John put any silly quotes of thiers onto a quote board so we have decided to make our blogspot a quote board!

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Simon: Wow look at the way the water crashes up against the ocean (Meaning: Look at the way the ocean crashes up against the rocks)

Zoe: I must say 65 is quite slow for a highway (Simon's response... Ummm its miles per hour Zoe)

Zoe: Its so weird driving on the left hand side... I can't tell when there is someone on my right hand side... how do i do that? (Simon's response... Look over your right shoulder)

Simon: How good is this LA weather... its sheets and t-shorts! (Meaning: It's shorts and t-shirts...)

Zoe: So is Mexico a big state in America? (Meaning: Is Mexico a big country... said whilst looking at a map of America... hmmm)

Zoe: Look thats the steam that makes Marilyn Manson's dress go up in the air... (Ummm Marilyn Monroe Zoe... whoops!)

Zoe: I feel like a turtle with my life packed in my back (referring to how wearing a back pack made her feel like a turtle)

Update 6th of April...

Zoe: It's good that you had a photo picture!

Additional Quotes:

Simon - 'This is the first time I've repeated this story'

Simon - (When refering to late night shift work where together time is minimal) 'I've promised Zoe I'd never take a gig like that again...unless I have to'.

More to come!

New York New York

Time of our lives!

We had four nights and five days in NYC (Arrive-Fri, Sat, Sun, Mon, Depart-Tue). You could stay here four months and still not see everything! Amazing place!

On our first day there we hit the showers hard, very hard, as you may have read earlier we had been on Greyhounds for the previous 3 days! With all that behind us we were so excited to be in the big bad city. We went for a walk though central park into the city. A casual 25 minute walk.... much longer than the "close to the city" as advertised on the website of the place we were staying. A very nice walk though and lots of squirrels. Ok so we know that they don't have squirrels in Australia, but seriously these little suckers are awesome! The funniest characters and we have become slightly obsessed with them!

We stayed on the Upper West Side which had a bit of character and to be honest it was really nice to stay in an area where real New Yorkers lived and not where there was stacks of tourists. We spent the first day or two just walking around with our mouths open. The place is a concrete jungle. So many varieties of people sqaushed into one place.

You may have heard people say that there is a magic in the air in New York and its true. There is a real sense of atmosphere and no it wasn't due to the mushrooms we had dropped. Before heading to the US we had so many people tell us that the clothes were cheap there. We kind of didn't believe until Zoe bought two pairs of boots for $18. It is ridiculous, Simon picked up a pair of jeans for $50 that would be worth over $150 in Australia. We simply don't understand and quite frankly we think it is unfair, but hey when in Rome! So we ended up buying more clothes than we could fit into our back packs which is another blog in itself. We also found speakers for our iPod for $10... crazy!

We were in NYC over the weekend and chose the Saturday afternoon to go up the Empire State Building... bad choice Zoe and Simon... correction bad choice Simon... it was so bloody busy, it took almost 45 minutes to get from the street to the out side platform. There was a line outside of the door onto the street when we first arrived and to make matters worse there were lots of tourists groups and christian camps getting off by the bus load. Damn christian kids getting in our way and being so happy about it at the same time... "Where are we from" Insert camp name in chant reply... end with a big "woo hoo yeah"! Nothing worse than standing in a line going no where with people who actually enjoy it! Ahh it wasn't all that bad... just different over here, they really get into it! Maybe us Australians are just too cool for school....christian school that is! Amen! Parts of the building are set up to accommodate large numbers of people, so when you finally think you are about to get to the level with the elevators to take you to the 86th floor, you walk round another twist to another turn to more barricades. If we had anymore "woo hoo's" and "oh yeahs" we were contemplating throwing someone over the side! When we finally got to the top though, it was all worth it! Stunning views! You realise the size of the place and how many things are going on. It is one of those moments when you can't really speak for a while as you try to take it all in. We are really glad we did it and we chose the perfect time, we went up in the late afternoon and witnessed the evening sunset turn into night time. Such a contrast in the day to night experience! We highly recommend going in the late afternoon and waiting for the sun to set! Amazing! Maybe check the weather though. We had a perfect clear sky but it was 0 degrees celcius... freezing!

On the Sunday we caught up with a friend of ours, Jill. Jill and Simon went to University together when Jill was an exchange student from San Diego State University. Jill has been living and working in New York for about 2 years as a pharmaceutical sales rep and is such a legend, we had a great time meeting her and her New York buddies over some Mexican for lunch. We also granted Jill some temporary Australian citizenship because she requested that we bring her some Vegemite from Australia. We could only oblige, spreading the love of Vegemite world wide... did you get it... it was a condiment joke... "spreading the love".

One of the things we really wanted to do was go to the live taping of a tv show, either Dave Letterman or Conan O'Brien. It is really hard to get tickets to these shows and you have to turn up early in the morning (9am-12:30pm) and line up to get yourself into the draw for a lottery type ticket system. We decided to do this on the monday morning because it was our last full day there and we were changing accommodation for our final night there, do it all in one big hit we thought. Wouldn't you know it... we slept in! So the plan for the day was wake up early... ambitious I know, pack our back packs put them in storage and get to the Ed Sullivan Theatre by 9:30am. We got there at 12:15pm wondering what the hell is wrong with us. The tickets are allocated via a lottery as mentioned earlier, so you put your name down and cross your fingers that you get called back in the afternoon to watch the nights taping. We got talking to one of the staff members Paul and were having a laugh with him when i mentioned that we didn't have any credit on our phones... he pulled us aside and said "At 3:30 this afternoon meet me at the corner of 46th and Broadway and i'll have your tickets". Nice work Micth and Zobo... it's true you get more with sugar than you do with salt... just ask any of Americas busy diabetes practitioners. Paul was a legend, we had a really good laugh with him later that day and we are now even facebook buddies. So we scored tickets to see Letterman in New York and we were stoked. The show was great fun live and it was really impressive to see how they worked people into a frenzy before the show starts. If you pay close attention you realise that they do it from the moment you line up for tickets... another well oiled machine. Jay-Z and Mary J Blige finished out the show and they were top shelf, so it was just a top day all round... even with the sleep in!

Just to finish off quickly, later that night we bumped into a lovely old man walking his dog. The dogs name was Chi Chi and the owners name was Ralph. Ralph was born in New York City and was 70 something years old. He has never been up the Empire State Building, never been to the Statue of Liberty, never seen a live taping of a tv show and has pretty much never left the island of Manhatten. He was such an interesting guy and almost the highlight of the day!

So much to blog about and sorry it has taken us ages to get the time to write some more stuff. You can see all of our photos from the link at the top left hand side of this page. I may even update this blog as i go along! Coming soon we'll blog about Vancouver and the flight out from New York... very funny... did we miss the flight or did we make it!

Thanks again for stopping by, although we are far away you guys are not far from thought... much Love MitchnZobo xoxo

We didn't change our undies for 71 hours!

First things first, news came through on our journeys that our friends Laura and Bill got engaged so a massive congrats to the two of you! We hope all your best wishes and dreams come true! Sorry for putting this congrats under the heading "We didn't change our undies for 71 hours!"

Wow!

On the 25th of March we jumped on a Greyhound in San Diego California.... destination New York City... arrival date 28th March... 3200 miles away.... yes miles. Do you want me to do the conversion for you... 5149.88800 km... mammoth right! The reason? Well when we initially did planning for the trip we realised that it was going to save us about $600... that is $600 to spend elsewhere and we thought that we would be able to see lots of America... once again putting a positive spin on a potential negative! We travelled through California, Utah, Colorado, Nebraska, Iowa, Illinois, Ohio, Pennsylvania and finally New York Sate... geez! If someone had asked us in Australia, 'Would you get on a Greyhound from Cairns to Perth for 71 hours straight?" we would have told them they were possessed by a retarded ghost!

After the first night we kept on saying to each other "this is ok, we'll be fine" because when you look at your ticket you can see scheduled breaks along the way. 1 hour in Vegas, 2 hours in Denver, 1.5 hours in Chicago. In our minds we thought great! Time to take a walk, grab some food etc etc... did that get to happen? No! The buses make so many stops that they quickly get behind and then they don't plan for stuff like bad traffic, federal police getting on the bus to check for drugs and bombs and massive, massive snow falls! All of which happened!










At one stop in the middle of no where this guy gets on the front of the bus and says "Hi ya'll i'm from the federal police and we're just gonna take a quick moment to have a chat and check the bus for any drugs, alcohol or explosives, ya'll don't mind do you?" That 'quick moment' took over an hour... there went that 2 hours in Denver considering we were already running an hour late! So as you can imagine 'time spent on the bus' was getting greater and greater... Along the way there was driver changes, obviously for safety reasons. You could tell each drivers favourite place to eat... because they would pull over for a rest and to give us the chance to stretch our legs. They would pull over at one of three places, a roadside dinner, McDonalds or Burger King. Gross! Try eating healthy with those options. We stuck to these rules. No burgers, no hot dogs and no sugar loaded drinks! That way we were able to feel somewhat healthy and Simon wouldn't load up the bus with flatulence! The bus drivers were interesting themselves, we had a big mean lezzer who liked to show who was boss, an over friendly fella who just thought every mountain and piece of countryside was beautiful, the mumbler (we could never understand his announcements) Queen latifah she drove like a maniac and old mate who felt like he was falling asleep sometimes... occasionally the bus would run over the sleep markers on the side of the road and wake everyone up. We later named them the "Oh Shit lines!"
At one stage we thought we were going to die... we were hitting the road through the upper mid east (Ohio) and it was snowing very, very heavily. So heavily that truck drivers and the majority of the people on the road had pulled over so that they didn't veer of the road, flip, roll, catch fire and die. What does the Greyhound driver do... hit mach speed like Maverick in a F-14 fighter jet. Crazy son of a bitch!

On the bus there were some really weird characters, lots of mexicans, trailer parkies and quite possibly some convicted criminals! One of our favourites was this massive bloke who was a splitting image of Eddie Murphy (Mr Klump) in the 'Nutty Professor'. Not kidding either the guy was huge and he spoke just like him too! He got on the bus an mumbled all the way up the aisle... "Oh man there's so many people on this here bus, how am i gonna get a seat up in here". He did find a seat, right behind us. Hmmm that made it hard to recline. He snored and had smelly breath, so when he really got going it would waft over our seats... eeeew!

Towards the back end of the trip we changed onto a really nice bus. Bigger seats, more foot space and tv's too! We got to travel on that little puppy for about a day and a half! It was on said bus where Simon and Zoe experienced a very surreal moment! It was the middle of the night, we had just made our last stop for about 4 hours and we had just finished watching the movie "Dunstan Checks In" a dodgy 1990's kids movie. Before we hit the road from Macca's number 37 the bus driver put a new movie on and hit the road. The feature film started... It was... get ready for it... "The Man from Snowy River"... starring Tom Burlinson. Are you serious... On a greyhound bus at 1:30 am, in the United States of America, in the middle of nowhere watching the man from Snowy River on a bus full of yankee doodles with the Nutty Professor swallowing 3 big macs (patties, buns and special sauce in one go). Simon had never seen the film all the way through before so he watched the entire thing and fell asleep to the nausiating smell of special sauce! Zoe woke up to the nausiating smell of special sauce in a panic yelling, my neck, my neck ive killed my neck. She had fallen asleep in the worst possible position and Simon had to physically lift her chin up to help her! Funny!





On the 28th of March, 3 days after setting off from San Diego we arrived in the monstrosity that is New York City! Thank christ, we finally got a shower and the chance to peel off our undies and socks!

Would we do it again? No!

Much love Mitch N Zobo xo

P.S. On the top left hand side of the page you can click onto a link for all of our photos on picasa web albums. You don't have to be a member to log in, you can just view all of our photos, thanks again for stopping by and feel free to leave a comment it is nice to know you are alive.