Alexandra's Adventure's

Photos: Espana- Spain

alexmills64 — Mon, 16 Aug 2010 06:09:00 GMT

Espana- Spain

alexmills64 — Sun, 15 Aug 2010 05:34:00 GMT

July 5^th

We had a very early start in the morning to catch our flight and had quite a journey just to get to the airport. Chloe & I got up at 3am!! The whole mission ended up being pretty funny , we had to catch a taxi from chlo’s flat to the train station this turned up 10 mins late and when it did arrive it had no taxi sign on it at all and out jumped this nigeran man who pretty much had no idea where we were meant to be going and everytime chlo and I spoke to one another he would turn around and say whattt & would break suddenly. He finally managed to get us there we both spent the trip fearing for our lives but giggling at the same time. Finally we made it to the airport, chlo was the only one who hadnt checked in online and the check in queue was hugee we all stood around waiting and waiting and as a result the plane was sitting waiting on the tar mack for kim and dave to board poor things had waited for chlo and sumhow chlo managed to get on the plane 30 mins b4 them- u can imagine kims face wen she came running on the plane- priceless.

The flight was pretty quick and we then had to catch a bus to the main bus station from the airport and then wait round for a bus to the pamplona camp site, so we went off and stocked up on boxes of sangria which were only 1.50 euro for 2 litres! After drinking at the bus station with sum aussies and kiwis we’d just met we finally all boarded the bus it took us 2 hours to get to the campsite- looong day of travelling!

Biggest treat we saw when arriving at the campsite was that the tents were already put up for us! The downside was the mattress we’d purchased from the pre to arriving and paid 24 nz dollars came out and was a tiny thin piece of foam, and we all had to use our towels as pillows. Once we set up we all sat down to start drinking the sangria and chatting to our neighbours, there was a group of americans beside us from California that were really cool and we ended up hanging out with them every night. After drinking for awhile we headed off to check out the rest of the campsite and the pool area. There was a really cool outdoor area setup with a bar witha stage infront of it, which had a kiwi guy on with his guitar belting out some good sing along tunes, the place was pretty full and at about 11.30ish a dj started. Of course all the couples had headed off to bed round this time and only me mink and chlo remained, we ended up having an awesome time and dragged ourselves off to bed at around 3am. Luckily we’d drunk enough that the uncomfortable beds didn’t bother us!

The next morning was a whole nother story though! As well as being extremly stiff everyone had sangria hangovers and there were a few piles of purple vomits left next to people’s tents( not ours thank god!) We had a wake up call at 7.30am- all the campsite staff cum round and smash on ur tents there people our age so they throughly enjoy it, we had an hour to get dressed into our white gears and try attempt breakie before heading to the San fermin opening ceremony.

We all arrived into pamplona city around 9am, and flocked in with all the thousands of people. There were these cool side street stalls selling souvenirs & we spotted these awsome bladder like contraptions that had a rope to strap it round urself and a drink bottle top, we excitedly bought these and then headed to the closet dairy to buy more sangria (yes they sell alcohol in dairies over here & petrol stations) we all bought

3 litre bottles of sangria for only 3 euro- $6 nz dollars & started the filling of the bladders. The bladders ended up coming extremely in handy later as they doubled up as a water gun to squirt people with. Must say drinking at 10am with sangria hangovers was extremely hard the first sips all went down with gags...

We made our way over to the town plaza where all the action takes place, the sangria fights soon began & ended up getting pretty out of hand but very very funny, I’m sure you can all imagine me in my element actually being allowed to fuck people up and throw stuff at them- of course I did get it in return but it was worth it. The Spanish go really hardout an even throw food we saw heaps of the locals squirting tomato sauce, mustard and mayo on people and even smashing eggs on their heads and in their faces and flour was being thrown about to, I saw one girl whos face was covered in flour all you could se were her eyes and her clothes were totally stained yellow and red and she had mayo and eggs squished all thru her hair, we avoided these people big time! And just stuck to the sangria.

The festivities started at midday & by then the plaza was absolutely full of people. To start off they have a song playing & everyone must take off the red scarfs they originally have tied around their wrists and hold it up in the air, after doing a chant (not that we understood any of what was being chanted we just went along with it) fireworks go off and everyone waves there scarfs in the air and the champagne and sangria starts flowing and shooting out left right n centre. Every single person is changed from being all white to a red/purple colour.

After this we wandered around the streets checking out all the stalls & streets acts and just talking to all the people there just sucha great vibe in the whole area. With there being so many people it made it hard to get from place to place,s we walked the small streets & alleyways that the bulls run would be on the following day. Above these roads are peoples apartments and homes with all their little balconies looking down on the action, these balconies were full of the owners who had buckets full of water/sangria & champagne who were then dropping them down onto the innocent people below- was again very funny to watch and I’m sure you can now tell we were literally covered from head to toe in alcohol! We made our way over to the Muscles bar which is bar which pretty much consists of all kiwi and aussies who go to watch the statue jumps, the statue is famous at the festial for people climbing up it and ontop of it and jumping off into the crowd below, the crowd is meant to catch you. It’s meant to be a thing only men do its sort of a Spanish tradition for boys to do it as a way of “becoming a man””- utter bullshit if u ask me but hey!

Unluckily for us a girl decided she wanted to try her luck at it lost her footing after being booed by the crowd and she horrifically fell and cracked her head open, and we witnessed her lying on the crowd not moving, and amblunace turned up but it did not look promising at the time, we found out the next day she had died :(

After all this drama had happened we decided to move off get something to eat and then head home as we were all getting pretty exhausted from drinking & walking round in crowds all day and we were extrmly stickey, but the stickiness was worth it this would have been one of the funnest days of my life.

When we got back the campsite was having a big pool party, the campsite pool was really cool huge pool area with a bar round the side and it even hada slide and they had a dj playing there all afternoon. And of course the place was full of really funny drunken people back from the festival doing sum interesting dance moves so that was some quality entertainment for the afternoon. The pool party pretty much just continued into the night moving into the bar area, they close the pool at a certain time everynite obviously to avoid drunken drownings- very wise some of the boys were serious serious chumps. It was Mink’s birthday at 12 so we all had shots for this we were meant to have an early night for the bull run the next morning but didnt end up heading to bed till 4am- not good.

The next morning was the first bull run, and we had to be in the city by 7.30am to get a good seat in the arena. So we were pretty much woken up at 7am..a few slept thru the wakeup call or were just so hungova there was no way they were getting up. But a few off us managed to make it in time even with terrible hangovers, and we were so glad we didnt miss out once we’d got there. We made our way into the city on the bus and into the arena passing the boarded up streets and the running track for the bulls with people all lining up along the walls of the run to watch up close. Inisde the arena there was two huge screen tvs on each side of the stadium showing what was going on on the streets and what the runners were doing at the start line. At 8.30am it all began a chant was done by the thousands of runners a firework is let off and they were off with the bulls not to far behind. Traditonally it’s meant to be only men running another “ becoming a man” tradition in spain and women are shunned from doing it, but technically its not disallowed & a few crazy bitches were doing it- don’t no why they bothered all the guys just fucked them up and pushed them outta the way anyway no time to be a gentleman in this race! Mum your lucky you have an intelligent daughter.

They all run the way thru the whole track which leads intothe arena we were sitting in. At the time all the runners think that this is the end and there all jumping up and down and hugging each other showing off and then all the gates get shut and locked out of the arena apart from the gate the bulls come into..so there’s thosuands of people in there by now you can jump behind fences but the fences filled up pretty damn quick. And eventually all the bulls came in- the bulls were actually GINORMOUS the matadors direct the huge bulls out as these arent the fighting ones and another gate is opened and out jump the charging bulls. This is were it got seriously entertaining it was actually like watching amercias funniest home videos the bulls just go for people some chumps were tryna wind them up being all tough and just got nailed. They keep bringing out fresh bulls every 10 mins to keep it intersting. Even in my hangover state I was cracking up took some pretty gud photos of people getting nailed to which I’ve added. Anyway the day we did it we didnt see anyone get to severly hurt but dave and delmont went the next day and a guy was killed in the arena and our other friends ran it the next morning and a guy who was running right in front of our friend Antz got the bull horn thru his middle and had his intestine ripped out- poor guy didnt survive either.

After seeing this for awhile we decided we needed to sleep off the hangovers and headed back to the campsite unfortuntely it was 39 degrees when we got back and the tents were like ovens. So we went to the pool to watch all the chumps in action again, it was Mink’s actual birthday this day so we were expecting her to make us all drink and get in on the action but luckily for us she was so hungover from the night before she hadnt even made it to the bull run and spent the whole day in the tent spewing and sleeping- very funny. The pool party got pretty out of hand on the verge of disgusting with the boys who were doing the van tour I wont repeat the things that they did as I know Nan & Grandad will be reading this and Nan would be horrified.

This was the night of the soccer semi final we left the decision to Mink on if we should head into Pamplona city to watch the game with all the spainards or to stick round the campsite and watch it on the big projector at the bar- of course with the hangover talking she chose the bar at the campsite. Which we ended up being seriously gutted about. We headed over to the bar and managed to get good seats only probelm was it was inside and it was still abot 30 degrees at 8pm at night so we were all sweating up a storm, anyway there ended up being quite alot of the locals spanish in there singing the whole game and doing their awesome chants – they hava chant for evry player, and of course the mexican wave was being done. It was tonnes of fun hate to admit it but I’ve never enjoyed soccer so much! When the last goal was scored the crowd in the bar actually went nuts shirts were being ripped off everywhere(boys of course) and the ole ole chants were deafening. We are the champions came booming over the bar speakers and who gets up and starts singing it for the dear life and hugging one another with extreme passion and no shirts on? – all the kiwi & aussie boys of course who had decided they were actually spanish the local people were looking on rather sheepishly it was very entertaining. Our boys mates buggered off not long after so they could get up for the bull run the next morning and us girls continued on having a girls night for minks birthday which was heaps of fun.

Once again the next morning we had another early start, I think my whole time in Pamplona I maybe got 8 hours sleep in total from the 3 nights. We caught a bus onto San Sebastion which took 2 hours, we didnt mind as we were all dreaming over the fact we finally got to sleep in a proper bed with an actual pillow for the next 2 nights. We were all staying in scattered hostels around the area, because its such a popular destination in spain it was to hard to all stay together. San Sebastion has a beautiful beach and an old town with lots of shops and restraunts and bars defintely a place I’d like to head back too at some stage. After strolling down to the beach and checking evrything our we had lunch at a cafe- it was so nice having proper food. The food at the campsite was apalling pretty much just chips and burgers which were cold, we didnt eat alot at the campsite at all. After exploring the shops for awhile we headed back for a siesta. We must’ve all been pooped because we slept right thru till just before dinner time. We met up with everyone and Mink’s sister Chon and her boyfriend for a big dinner, Dinner didnt end up being a huge success we had a few problems with bizarrre looking nachos and steak full of fat, luckily I had veal pasat so my meal was yum haha. We relized we’d had dinner a bit early as they tend to eat at around 10pm in spain and we’d gone round 8.30 so we went to go to the bars after and they were dead so we headed home to get a good nights sleep for a day at the beach the next day.

Just our luck after having our first sleep in with no alarms when we woke up the next day it was very overcast with the look of rain approaching. So me and hannah decided we’d head down to by breakie and it started raining on the way so since the beach was out we decided to browse thru some shops, they had some really nice ones some were quite expensive and others were reasonable, I got myself some new sandals & a hat.

After awhile we met up with everyone else and decided since it had stopped raining but was still cloudy we should do the mountain walk to explore the statues at the top of the hill and to see the great views of the whole town. It took us about an hour to reach the top with lots of stops along the way, we’d already done a huge amount of walking on the trip so there was a few sore legs. But once we reached the top the view was worth it would be even nicer on a sunny day looking down on the beach but hey at least the rain had stopped. The statue was pretty cool to it reminded us of the one at Rio De Jenero - a big jesus with his arms out and head down. After the steep climb down we had lunch, the food was average again- we’d by then come to the conclusion that the spanish food wasnt as great as we thought it was gona be. After our siesta we bought drinks from the diary and headed down to drink on the beach with a picnic since the sun had finally peaked out. This ended up being very fun and saved us money from drinking in a bar the entire night. We even made an interesting friend- Rasheet from Morraco, he just casually came up us after his swim still in speedos and said he wanted to marry us and now wants to move to NZ because we are such beautiful ladies. He couldnt get over how we all had light eyes, men over there are so used to all the women having brown eyes, Sarah’s blond hair blew him away but once he found out sarah had a “husband” as he put it, he moved onto me...I managed to convince him it would never work out between us because I drink Alcohol and party hard, and “his body is a temple” his words not mine, this made me laugh as I automatically thought of Brucey and just lost it. Eventually he wandered off after inviting us all to his home in morraco and then we all got the giggles imagining “the look on Mike and Claire’s face if Mills ever brought that home”.

We eventually headed into the bars, all the bars have awesome drink deals and they all try beat each other for the best deals so me,kim,sarah and james ended up sharing a giant cocktail drink between the us of it it was literally the size of my head and came up to my knees and the other 6 boys all did 50 shots between them for 12 euro. The partying tends to be in the streets between the bars so everyone buys there drinks and heads out on the street for the action. After bar hopping for awhile and some aimless walking around we finally headed home for another early start in the morning to catch our flight.

Next stop Portugal!

xxxxx

London Town

alexmills64 — Mon, 5 Jul 2010 06:31:00 GMT

Departed Auckland on Thursday July the 1st at 11.45pm- after saying all the sad farewell's at the airport I made my way thru to duty free to use my vouchers, soon realized I'd gone thru to late when it came over the speakers that it was my final boarding call!! so quickly bought my purchases and practically sprinted to the whitcoulls which was closed and then I started to notice all the other shops were shut so I thought aww it'll be ok the shops up top will be open....just my luck EVERYTHING was shut- so couldn't get a book, magazine pillow or ear plugs I managed to stop an indian man from shutting his stall to get a blow up pillow, he obviously notcied I was distressed and stop shutting up shop I asked him why the hell everythng was shut in a bloody airport he proceeded to laugh and say "ooo u just missed out the shops only shut 15 mins ago (the extra 15 mins that were spent in the bar!)" (in his pnujabi accent) You can imagine the face I had on when he said this, as a result he gave me free earplugs.

Finally got on the plane and found I had a young girl around my age sitting next to me- we got talking and realized we were the same age and doing exactly the same thing- meeting friends in London and then heading to spain! and her dad was a gold elite flyer aswell so thats how she'd got the seat, so that was a good start, than had the lovely plan dinner watched a movie and hit the sack, sleep was pretty damn uncomfortable so I dropped one of the sleeping pills and it seemed to do the trick, woke up at about 4amish so watched a couple more movies had breakie and then we were in Hong Kong this first flight was pretty painless and went fast. Once we arrived in Hong Kong at about 6.30am we had a stopopver for an hour n a half so enough time for me to find a book, pillow & a mag. But of course my luck again we went thru customs to hit the shops and the were ALL shut again so frustrating eventually they opened up shop 20 mins before we had to board so My plane pal - Terryn and I ran around the airport like mad woman trying to get everything the pillow shops didnt open in time and mac were only just opening up but I once again managed to convince the mac girl to sell me something I think she just wanted me to get outta the shop caz I was sweating like there was no tomorrow- good look! then we headed back to the plane. This flight was the most painful it just dragged and dragged and Terryn's seat had been changed for some unknown reason, so I watched like 7 movies in total saw sum pretty gud ones- boys you should watch Out of my league soo funny, and James watch clash of the titan's you'll love it. So finally arrived in london after the 13 hours, met up with Terryn in the customs line, we worked out on the plane that we both had to get the tube into the city- soo glad I had someone to do it with I was seriously dreading it, so we got our luggage- Terryn actualy had a shit load more didn't think this was possible but trust me it was- then we headed thru to the underground.

Bought my oyster train card and checked with the train guy if we were headed toward the right direction- he gave us a new route & then we were off. There were so many people getting on & off but luckily we'd timed it before it was rush hour so it wasn't as bad. I couldn't even sit on the seat with that large child on my back so kinda hung off the end of it, it was ridicously hot about 27 degrees and there's no aircon on the trains so I was once again a sweating beast and I'd started to notice my feet and swollen to twice the size & I now had cankles- sarah pissed herself when she saw them.

Said goodbye to Terryn exchanged numbers and jumped off the train to meet up with James & Sarah at the station then we headed back to our hotel- a cute little place in Paddington. After dropping off my backpack we heading out to meet Sara & Hannah in a park, and then made our way to the London Eye. This was very cool gave us a view of the whole city, we'd done quite a big of walking by now and we were all beginning to fade, so we decided we'd have dinner nearby and then head home. At dinner we all just hit a wall, the conversation at dinner didn't make any sense we were all nearly falling asleep in our plates so we paid quickly and got out of there and headed home. We crashed out so early and then woke up at 4am.

Got up at 7.30ish for our free breakie and then headed off for the day, we decided to head to oxford street to look at the shops, the city was absolute chaos, we went into primark to get my towels and look for white shorts for spain but it was so busy I got the towels and then left there was queue just to pay for items it was like shopping in NZ at Xmas time but 10 times worse I don't know how people were finding things, we quickly moved on and I managed to find sum white shorts for 3 pounds that are just going to be covered in sangria and thrown away again. Then we headed for topshop (we couldn't do to many shops we had James with us and serz had a sore foot) so I walked into this 3 storey shop and literally drooled it was everything I dreamed of and more nicole's gona love it too it has evrything you possibly need, I did a quick run round a found a few things, Can't wait to go back there properly!!

Then we found a nice sandwich shop got ourselves some big baguette rolls & drinks and headed to hyde park- it was 28 degrees and so humid! the park was beautiful and full of people to there were quite a few girls sun bathing in full bikini's weird sight to see when there's no water around but since there's no local beaches around here guess its the only place to do it! it was soon time to meet up with the other girlies :)

So we headed to a garden bar to meet mink & hannah- of course mink being mink she turned up and hour and a bit late (nothings changed!!) and chloe still wasnt ready (again nothings changed!) so once mink arrives decided hmm this bar isn't fun- everyone was watching the football and there were alot of screaming germans so we headed to a bigger garden bar in a nicer area- this bar was really cool so we all sat out in the sun drinking cider's. Was great seeing the girls there exactly the same there was alot of laughing and excited talk about the trip. All the NZ traveller's started to get a bit weary again around 9 so we headed home to get a good sleep & the other two went home to pack.

Next morning we got up early again since we keep waking up at 4am, and headed down to the internet cafe to check all the emails etc and then went to shepards bush mall, this mall was ginormous like bondi junction in sydney but 20 times bigger- so so cool I can already tell my wardrobe is going to become twice the size of the one at home, can't believe how cheap stuff is over here aswell don't worry didn't buy anything here Mum, sure I'll go back tho, then we headed back to hyde park again there was a big concert happening there with Jay Z, chase & status & 2many djs playing, it was sold out but we lay round outside in the sun and got to hear the music free :) then we headed home and I caught the train to meet chlo. Me and chlo headed off to Shepard's bush for a mexican dinner and Now I'm back at hers doing washing and finishing our packing we've found out we've gotta be up at 3.30am to be at the airport so we'll be in bed very shortly! that's all for now off to spain tomorrow and won't have access to a computer for awhile, but will write this up again when were in San sebastion.

Bye for now

Love Alexandra x

Photos: London

alexmills64 — Sun, 4 Jul 2010 09:30:00 GMT

The first few days in london