Sorry I've come to neglect this travel journal. I don't even know if I have people reading/watching/or anything this LJ anymore!

To see more of my adventures, please come and visit my collective blog site with my friends:

www.DefectiveGeeks.com

Hope to see you there!

Sunday, December 21, 2008



The last day, was spent on two more tours. First, we woke up early in the morning to go to a cemetery tour at 10am in the morning. The tour went well and our tour guide was very informative. It was kind of cool how much history can be told from such a small cemetery.



Photos: http://flickr.com/photos/oosakinana/tags/cemetarytour/

After that, we did a swamp tour-- I should mention that it was VERY cold that day as opposed to the warm weather we've had all weekend. Cold for California residents, anyways. I was freezing at the swamp tour, but it was so neat to see the wet lands of New Orleans. Our tour guide even had snapping turtles in captivity and was pulling them out of their giant buckets without fear. Even though those things can bite of a human arm very easily. We even got to pet a baby alligator! Here's a couple of snap turtles and alligator videos:






Also, I found out that alligators' favorite snacks are marshmallows!





Photos: http://flickr.com/photos/oosakinana/tags/swamptour

Saturday, December 20, 2008



Giselle and I managed to roll out of bed so we can make it to our Oak Valley Plantation tour at around noon. Miraculously, we had time to stop by the famous Cafe Du Monde before our bus was to leave. I had my first taste of their beignets with an ice blend of the cafe au lait. That donut was pretty intense... and very messy to eat!

http://www.flickr.com/photos/oosakinana/tags/cafedumonde/



Then we settled on about an hour and a half bus ride to the Oak Valley plantation; a mansion famous not only for its history but for being used in several movies (i.e. Interview with a Vampire). The area was beautiful and very refreshing. The air was so clean!



Before we headed back, our bus driver stopped the bus again so we could enjoy the view of the Mississippi river away from the city. I'm really glad he did that!



http://www.flickr.com/photos/oosakinana/tags/oakvalleyplantation/

That same night, we did a ghost tour of the French Quarters hosted by the Haunted Mystery tour guides who offer several kitschy tours about vampires, ghosts and voo doo. Even if you don't believe in the paranormal, I think most people will find these tours entertaining and pretty historically informative.



http://www.flickr.com/photos/oosakinana/tags/ghosttour/

In fact, before our ghost tour, we ate at a restaurant called Muriel's which has a room that has a table set up for its resident ghost. Apparently, the restaurant's former owner committed suicide by hanging himself and began to haunt the place. He made food and silverware disappear. Now that he has his own private table, he no longer bothers the other customers and employees. His table gets refurbished with food and wine everyday; supposedly, the food and wine disappears every day! People can actually visit the room with the table, but no one else is allowed to dine on it at all. Just Mr. Ghost himself.

Thursday, December 18, 2008

We arrived at our hotel, the Maison Dupuy, in the French Quarters in the early evening. Already, I was loving the environment– the old buildings, the gas lamps, the obvious presence of history on the surface of the streets...



We had dinner at the Court of Two Sisters where I had my first taste of barbecue shrimp, New Orleans style. We gave Giselle a hard time on her last night in the state of 'under 21', even though our waitress was generous enough to allow her to partake with a glass of wine anyways. The people there were the friendliest, warmest people I've come across in the United States. It made the whole trip quite pleasant.

Giselle and I wandered around for a little bit after dinner and found a cafe that served white chocolate pumpkin flavored gelato. It was delish!

Friday, December 19, 2008



We woke up and got ready for our breakfast/lunch and made our way to a restaurant called Brennan's. Their breakfast was a three-course meal! We also ordered a round of gin fizz for everyone, which looks a lot like milk so it suited our morning meal. It is officially Giselle's birthday and she is 21 years old. She opened up some gifts from her mom and aunt before our food were served.



After we ate, we rode a horse buggy whose driver doubled as a tour guide around the city. I barely listened to him as he talked though and just took loads of photos of the areas we visited. That night, we had dinner at Bacco's where I ate more barbecue shrimp! Giselle received more presents and I got some too! Her mom and her aunt are both so sweet!

Then, we parted ways as Giselle and I got ready to go out for the night to celebrate her birthday hardcore style. We met up with my friend, Hai, and started our venture on Bourbon St. in a bar called The Dungeon. It was somewhat suiting for Giselle's first legal bar adventure (though no one really checked for ID on Bourbon St...).

We went to Pat O' Brian afterwards, where we ordered our first Hurricanes after we were already loaded with three drinks. That drink is killer! The rest of the night was a big, fun blur! We made friends for the night, too, and they were really nice and fun. We all ended up at a gay bar/club and much shenanigans happened which I probably shouldn't talk about in this public journal. Haha. :)



It was a really cool night though and I'm glad I got to experience the night life on Bourbon. Even though I definitely can not do that every night since I am an old lady at heart.

Photo links:
Photos of when we first arrived:
http://flickr.com/photos/oosakinana/sets/72157611534146176/detail/?page=24

Giselle's flowers:
http://flickr.com/photos/oosakinana/tags/gisellesflowers/

Maison Dupuy:
http://flickr.com/photos/oosakinana/tags/maisondupuyhotel/

Breakfast at Brennan's:
http://flickr.com/photos/oosakinana/tags/breakfastatbrennans/

Horse buggy tour around the French Quarters:
http://flickr.com/photos/oosakinana/tags/thefrenchquarters/

Giselle's birthday dinner:
http://flickr.com/photos/oosakinana/tags/gisellebirthdaydinner/

Our night on Bourbon street:
http://flickr.com/photos/oosakinana/tags/bourbonstreet/

Dec. 29, 2007 - Saturday

At around 10 a.m., the crew managed to gather themselves at my house. We threw our luggage into the trunk of my car and set off on our journey. A little after noon, we arrived at Santa Barbara and had lunch at the pier. I had a calamari steak burger since I've never had one before-- I had to try. It was pretty good, though I think the sauce on it was a little weak. Our resident Brit-Boy decided to try fish and chips to "compare"... After we ate, we wandered around the pier a bit, looking at all the tourist trappy stuff and ate some ice cream.


This is Simon and Nancy's couple tourist shot

We wanted to go inside the museum on the pier but we had trouble finding the entrance since we were all kinda slow. When we did finally manage to spot the front door, we realized that the dinky museum was not free and decided against it.



Instead, we found a ship cruise that advertised itself as a Pirate Cruise-- ultimate tourist trap, but we went for it ($10 bucks a pop). It was a 25 minute boat ride and they took you to see some sea lions and Pelican Island. It was pretty cute.


The rest of Santa Barbara: http://flickr.com/photos/oosakinana/tags/santabarbara/

A little after 3 p.m., we left Santa Barbara and made our way to the Madonna Inn, which is this tacky hotel and each room has a different theme. Our room was called the Pony Room. Despite the tacky decor, the hotel was actually really nice. Our room was the size of a one-bedroom apartment and we loved it.


big beds!

After all the driving for that day, we relaxed in our hotel room and turned on the television. We watched a little bit of a Bourne movie, eating sandwiches that Nancy packed for the trip, before deciding to explore around the hotel a little. We poked around the hotel shops (all full of tacky but expensive crap) then waited to get a table at their cafe.

The wait was pretty bad and when we finally got seated... no one served us, except for the girl taking drink orders. We stared at the menu for a little bit, and after almost half an hour of waiting for a waiter to take our orders, we decided to leave. We went to little bakery in the cafe and bought two slices of their chocolate cake. We took our loot back to the Pony Room and popped in Jay and Silent Bob Strikes Back into my laptop. Then it was lights out.

Madonna Inn photos: http://flickr.com/photos/oosakinana/tags/madonnainn/

Dec. 30, 2007 - Sunday

We woke up pretty early the next day and reluctantly left our beloved Pony Room. Giselle got on the driver's seat for the day and we made our way to the Hearst Castle via highway 1. We scheduled ourselves on one of the tours and learned what one can do with too much money...


And the rest: http://flickr.com/photos/oosakinana/tags/hearstcastle/

We enjoyed our tour guide a lot. I felt like he should be in a movie or something, as the awesome-old-guy. We dreamed of a day when we would be rich enough to build our Geek Castle and have parties with our own heroes like Kevin Smith and Bruce Campbell.

We left the castle after our tour and got on the 101 freeway again to get to our final destination, San Francisco. Oh yeah-- for some reason, there were a lot of dead skunks on the freeway. Go figure. It was really smelly though.

For lunch, we stopped by a small town called Greenfield and found a small Mexican restaurant. Inside, one of the locals chatted us up and all of us Southern Californians squirmed in suspicion at the small town friendliness. We got through it though and then made the rest of the way to San Francisco. I fell asleep in the car and got my picture taken, which seems to be a solid law of action when one falls asleep among good friends.

Around 5 p.m., after getting a little lost and confused with all the one way-no-left-turns streets, we pulled up on the Travelodge on Market St. Our room was disappointing in comparison to the Pony Room. First off, it smelt kinda funny. Second off, the beds were tinier and wrapped in plastic. We sucked it up and managed ourselves, then went to the Stinking Rose for dinner. After dinner, we called it a night since most things were closing and went back to our hotel room. We vegged out and popped in Clerks II for the night's entertainment.

Dec. 31st 2007 - Monday

We woke up at a good hour and investigated the public transportation, figured out a way to get ourselves to the Fisherman's Wharf. Once we were there, we found yet another cruise around the bay. Originally, we wanted to take a cruise to Alcatraz Island, but the official cruise was sold out and there didn't seem to be any other ferries that would drop us off the island. We opted for a cruise that took us under the Golden Gate Bridge and went around Alcatraz a couple of times. The ship's narrator was Captain Nemo, who claimed to be a pirate of some sort.



When they dropped us back on the mainland, we immediately went hunting for lunch-- since we were at the Wharf, we wanted clam chowder in sourdough bread, of course. The weather was cool that day, but when we were out in the water, we freezed our asses off. We settled to eat indoors in Boudin's and had a yummy lunch of clam chowder and some gourmet mac and cheese.

From where we sat in the restaurant, I spotted Museum Mecaniqee, which is an arcade, but also a museum of old penny arcades. It was really interesting and funny to see some of the old games people had.



I also decided to play some old school Tekken 3 and was kicking butt until the 7th or 8th stage. I'm out of practice.

Since we were completely doing the tourist-thang, Giselle hunted down the wooden trolleys and we rode on one to get to Union Square. When we got there, we went inside a Borders store and the kids gorged on some books and comics. I only bought one thing, the graphic novel version of Artemis Fowl. Afterwards, we hunted down the H&M store. Spent some time inside the store trying on clothes but in the end, I only found one sweater I wanted to buy. One of my fellow ex-JSP friend started texting me, knowing I would be in NorCal that day. We arranged to meet-up for some New Years Eve celebration later that night.

Nancy and I are pretty old-lady and were tired pretty quick. Shops were closing pretty early that night and so we made our way back to our hotel. We stopped by a cute cafe/bakery by our hotel to pick up some dinner. Once inside the room, we popped in 28 Weeks Later, which wasn't really a good movie to watch while eating, but we survived. After the movie, Brett and his friend arrived at our hotel room (and laughed because I had changed in my pajamas). We chilled for a little bit, talking and watching Project Runaway.

When 10 p.m. rolled around, we emerged into the streets again and walked towards the direction of the Castro district to see if anything was going on there. A block from our hotel, we discovered a comic book store (closed for the day) and laughed at the irony since the whole day, we were looking for a comic book store and found none, without realizing there was one next door to us the whole time.

Brett gave the kids a little point-and-look tour of Castro. The crowd seems to be settling inside bars, clubs and theater shows for the night, the first two we couldn't really do because we had a under-21-individual with us. Finally, we jumped into a cable car going to the Fisherman's Wharf. The ride was free for the night and we got dropped off a couple of blocks away from the Ferry Building. The road was closed off for the event.

Jan. 1, 2008 - Tuesday

The crowd was huge! And drunk! And stoned (much to Giselle's excitement)! All sorts of people were there-- from families with kids to unruly college students. When midnight struck, there were fireworks. Our view was blocked by trees, unfortunately, but we saw the ones that were higher and bigger than the trees.



The fireworks went on for about 20 minutes and we hung out for a few more minutes after it, just being silly and whatnot. I was definetely getting really tired by then but we still had to get back to our hotel somehow. Taking public transportation back was almost impossible. We began trekking up the 17 blocks to the hotel... I think we were too tired to even challenge our own crazy decision by that point.

We managed to get back somehow-- said goodbyes to Brett and his friend and promptly collapsed in bed to prep ourselves for the drive the next day. Even though we exhausted ourselves, it was a good way to celebrate the new year!

The rest of the photos: http://flickr.com/photos/oosakinana/tags/sanfrancisconewyearseve/

My friend, Missy, invited me to accompany her in New York to stay at her cousin's house in Brooklyn. I decided to go because it's been a while since my first visit in the Big Apple. Mostly, we spent a lot of time with her relatives. Her cousin, Jenna, and her husband, Jhon, were awesome.

On our first night, we went to an Italian restaurant in Brooklyn. The restaurant's manager took an interest in our table and gave us free wine (I think each of us had at least one bottle of wine each........), free appetizers and desserts. Holy crap. They had the best pumpkin cheesecake in the world. It was AMAZING. *____*


Bryant Park

Our second day, Friday, turned out to be a very full day. We woke up and got ready to hop on a bus and spend the day and night in Manhattan. First, I went to Hachette Book Group USA's office to meet up with the people of Yen Press. Yen Press' founder took me out for lunch and a few drinks. After lunch, he decided he wanted to go to karaoke and more drinks that night. He sent me off and went back to work, while Missy and I went shopping in SoHo for a little bit. I bought a couple of cute dresses and some pieces from Uniclo... they had the best skinny jeans ever!

Around 6pm, we met up at a karaoke box called Duet 35. Unlike the karaoke boxes in California... this one serves alcohol and food like in Japan! DUDE! Why is the east coast way better than the west coast?!?! Missy was with me, and so was my friend Branden. Kurt and Tanya from Yen press were there and a couple of new people showed up later, and so did my friend, Sean. It was really fun and Kurt was generous enough to pay for the whole thing~ Free things adds to the fun XD XD XD YEN PRESS IS AWESOME!

After karaoke, Missy, Branden, Sean and I ran off to find Serendipity to meet with Missy's friend, Oscar. After about a 45 minute wait, we finally got seated and had some crazy frozen hot chocolate-- I know. The concept confused me too. But all that really mattered was that... it was quite tasty.


Serendipity's frozen hot chocolate

Oh, and the main reason Missy wanted to go to this restaurant was because it was central to that John Cusack movie... they had good clam chowder soup at least.

We staggered back home that night and woke up the next morning to go to the Metropolitan Museum of Art. After struggling with public transportation (aka: buses not showing up), we made it to the museum later than we planned (which didn't leave us much room to do anything else afterwards :( ). We did have hot dogs at the steps of the museum so we could have some energy-- that was the only morning we didn't have bagels. Again-- why do the east coast have BETTER bagels with cream cheese than the west coast?? L.A. sucks!!!


art for the sake of art? to be or not to be??

After the whole bus incident and no breakfast we got to the city feeling hungry. The hot dogs helped bring our spirits back up and we enjoyed ourselves some art for the rest of the afternoon. We couldn't hang out in the city that night because Missy's grandparents wanted to take us out for dinner back in Brooklyn. We went to the dinner; went back to Jenna's house and had some wine... then went to pick up some dark and white cookies, chocolate cake and Italian ice... then we settled down in the living room and watched Will Ferrel's Stranger than Fiction until we were tired enough to go to bed. Though we spent a couple of hours gossipping in the bedroom, of course.

The last day, we saw more of Missy's relatives and did some shopping in Brooklyn until we got picked up to go to the airport to catch our 6pm flight.

I should mention that when Missy and I boarded our plane, Will Ferrell was sitting in the executive business class. Missy and I were amused because we were watching his movie the night before... and suddenly, there he was. We both looked at each other and went "OMG It's Will Ferrell LOL" XD I wished that happened every time I watched a movie and got on a plane.

The rest of the photos are in my flickr account!
http://flickr.com/photos/oosakinana/sets/72157602438551683/