Back in school!

Alright so folks, now we (I Deepak Kei Yu) are back at where we started, and Yasushi is on his way back right now.

SO the trip was once in a life time but more on that later!

Lets go back to where I left off
Yes, Miami

That place is just too good!
the beach, the breeze, and everything else

the beach gets full early in the morning (Specific time is unknown since we never get up before 12)
and then people start leaving around 5 since the weather gets colder

we were there around 2pm and here is what it looks like

I hav no clue who those people are nor Am I interested to find out =)
Just like the view
After a little beach, we were hungry since we didnt eat anything before going to the beach

we went around the downtown area and found this promising restaurant

I order cajun chicken and shrimp pasta (9.99)

Taste GREAT! Totally Approved!

Then we went back to the beach =)

wer

We then met up with Tomo, another waseda kid whos travelling around U alone

He lost soo much weight!

and his face is just Priceless! (no pun intended Yu)

Since the food was so good, we went back there again the next morning

Cheers to miami! and happy chrismas!

Then it was the end of miami, sadly this was a wet Christmas :( so we stayed in the room most of the time)

So After miami, Yasushi decided to split up to go on his course which is quite unknown to me atm

the rest of us stick together and go to orlando

again there was nothing much going on in here

we slept a night and continue to columbia,

As expected we are doing really bad on timing to NY

so we left there right away to DC

In DC I got quite sick =(

it was painful Y_Y and then it was sooo cold there (hint as bad as wisconsin)

we landed on the bad side of the DC so it looks pretty sketchy, we then decided that we should leave

so we did.

we got to NY on 29 =) hooray!

Got to my brothers apartment

Then we felt like home =)

i rested for a while to recover my body and took some advil,

other people went outside to find some food

then we just chill

on 30th we went out to Rockefeller center in search of a gamestop

We only found nintendo world where Yu was VERY HAPPY to find

the thing was if you add all the ages of the people in there together (not including the moms) it is still less than Yu's age

Yes.. they were little kids..

So then he spent time in there and I and deepak went to Rockefeller tree

we saw some KFC earlier while walking towards the tree, none of us remember where it was

so i said, if it is our fate to eat the KFC, we ll run into it again

So we did!

Yea and It was close to the grand central station

Now then we just went back to our place and rest for the night

On the 31st,

I was battling with myself between going to Time Square or not since there were just many people and the terrorist works on holidays...

At last I gave in, and went to Time-Square with K around 7.00pm, other stayed home

But by the time I got there... time square was already filled with 1000+ people

I got into the 7th ave on 58th street (12 streets from the actual time square)

So yes i saw the ball

.. it was ahh.. ... . like a dot?

anyways, the people were still flowing in, and i got closer and closer!

i got to 54th street in 2 hours!

Cool huh? 30 mins a street?

I and K talked about leaving again and again.. but none of us did anything since noone wants to make THE DECISION ... so we do what every good students would do when they have 2 choices left in a an exam question....

We Fliped a coin..

 

It turns out, we should go.

 So we did, and before i leave, I did what i have to do!

YES! I AM A ROCK STAR!! =)  (apparently i can keep moving forward by getting out of the crowed just no one knew)

So we got out and we kept on walking back to the apartment,

but we saw this balls thing, which i donno what you call em (u know to decorate a tree?)

so we took picture and apparently, it came out quite well =)

Last look at the ball across the street, 

See that blue color dot? thats the ball...

Then we went back, got a beer and down a vodka counting for new year!

Happy new year to those who are reading!!

We decided to leave on first on Jan

So we did

we left NY on 1st at 1.30 pm

The bus was supposed to take 26 hours
and reached appleton by 3.20 pm of 2nd

well, we missed that by a bit,

we got to appleton by 11.00pm of 2nd

long story short, it was one hell of a ride,

However, the feeling of being home again is SO GOOD!

I nearly CRY!

As soon as i saw the familiar setting of my room undisturbed

"It is over!"

As great as it feels to be back, I have also collected a lot of good memories and pictures and knowledge that would otherwise never been told to me.

I felt really good about the whole trip and thank you all for reading this.

I probably not going to update this blog any more

However, it is possible that next week I and K will go down to Milwakee for some motocycle show

If i do, I will post those here too.

Cheers!

Thanks for reading, any comments or question, please let me know.

Byte,

My apology

It has been pretty long since my last update, and I am really sorry for that
I actually had a chance to update it but then I was sick and didnt feel like updating otherwise the blog might sound really sad=)

anyways, I am still not able to update anything right now, but just stay put
 I am pretty sure I can do it by sunday.

here is a brief catch up
We went from maimi to oralando
then we went to Columbia but the timing was quite off, so we decided to skip it to dc

after 26+ hours we got to DC and since the timing was still off, we only stayed there a day and didnt get to go around....

then we left for newyork
here we celebrate the new year!
and today is 1st
we are heading back to Appleton as I am writting it

Yep I am on Greyhound bus
YES IT HAS WIRELESS INTERNET!!!
I knowwww!! SOoooooOO cool!! right?
and it also have a plug outlet so i can keep using this laptop for as long as i please, or as long as i am on the road...

but since my laptop is under the bus.. i borrowed deepak's laptop

thus no pictures and i didnt want to go too deep in what happened
so stay put until sunday!

I will be back with full flavor stories!
Byte escaped (quietly)

Miami Beach

So we are about to leave Miami in about an hour

Its about 80 out and the sun is shining.. yea take that you wisconsinite

but yea we are about to head back up so....

anyways.
So as soon as we arrived, K and I went to the beach right away (it was like 11 pm)
Very breezy and not too cold. We got a bottle of beer each and just sit there and drink.
Great time...

so then in the morning of the next day we were a bit late to get up so we didnt quite do much
we went out to the beach and check out the late afternoon beach..
Then we went to eat some pizza  for the late evening

and that was the first day


I will write the rest tonight since we got to leave now
byte brb...

Something I missed

I cannot believe I forgot to tell you all about this

Beware PANAMA CITY!! (Hotel)

Well.. So we did not go straight from New Orleans to Orlando.

We made a quick detour at Panama city as the ride gets a bit longgggg

So we arrived in Panama city about night time.
We walked around and found a run down hotel where it looks good enough for us and is still really cheap.
We checked in and the price was $42 a night...
Cheap right?
Nope!

Why? (I am glad you asked)
The owner is of course without a doubt Indian... just like the other places we went to

we slept there one night,
and as expected at 10.40am (check out 11.00) the owner came and knock on our door and tell us we have to check out

so we did, since we thought to ourselves that we should go find some better looking hotel around

After a Mile of nothing, we decided to go back to the same place (we have to spend 3 days in Panama City)

We checked in for 2 more nights,

Since we have 5 people sleeping in a 2 double beds room, it is our tradition that one must sleep on the floor.
This is decided by drawing cards, the lowest one sleep on the floor and then the rest draw the card for the next night... so on...

 Well... I was lucky enough to avoid the floor until the last night there.

When we were about to go to sleep,
deepak found something under his bed.
A COCKROACH!!!



WHAT?



YES!!! COCKROACH

AND I AM GOING TO SLEEP ON THE FLOOR......!!!!

since none of us want to do anything to it,
and I need to feel safe,
I decided to draw a random card from a deck
and said that if its a 3 of club, something is going to happen tonight

chances are 1/52 right?
...

it was 3 of club...

so we decided that we have to remove it... =) and we did, and threw it outside (hopefully it didnt come back in, in the night.)

Well, that is that for the lovely panama city

beware of the Roaches!! (and cheap hotels)

Well, at this moment we are at Miami

I want to go clubbing but, noone else feel up for it =(
so too bad.........

but more on that and pictures later!

Byte out!

Miami Tomorrow

Well, it has been a while since I last updated it, sorry about that...

Let's see, where I left off..

Alright so I guess that last post was in Amalliro..
Oh Man! Amarillo!!! No hope NO HOPE!!!
That place is crazy.. I didnt even take a picture... I mean...

Here.. for those of you from Appleton, its like college Ave, with all the stores closed, and without people walking around.

Yep, the only people I encounter were the other Deepac and Yu...

and there was only 1 Inn ... of course ran by indians :)

Deepac gets some indian music running in his head every time they speak.

The thing that you should expect from the indians!
1.) they will call you at 9.00am to tell you that 11.00am is the check-out time, without your request
2.) they will call you at 10.30am to tell you that ... oh wait.. its the same thing as above...

Of course in the process, wake all of us up....

well, I am glad we were done with that...

Then we left Amarillo ... took us 12.00 hours, reached Houston around 7.00 am
we searched and searched... cant find any hotel cheap around there...
and then there were some sketchy mexican cab drivers trying to get us to some cheaper hotel...
but when i mean sketchy i mean.. gangster sketchy... as if they were looking for another gang to fight with....

So after all, we tried but fail to find any good priced hotel with good location...
we looked up the next bus from Houston to New Orleans,
it was at 11 am... So we decided we want to go.

Got on the bus, stayed for about 5 hours more..

Got off at New Orleans, close to the  French Quarter but sadly there werent any cheap hotels so we took a cab down about 2 miles and stayed at a cheap hotel.

The desk clerk was indian too but fortunately he didnt call usin the morning :)

Alright so we slept and in the evening of the next day we went out to the bourbon street

Well so we head straight to the Jackson Square

And then we walked to the ocean (sea, river? donno the one that is next to jackson Square)

It was really really foggy, and we saw a boat coming from nowhere. it looks really really BIG and it was heading straight to the bridge u see in the picture.
We waited to see what will happen since it looks like the boat is too big to go under the bridge..

20 mins later... it reached the bridge and it was TINY....

so yea.. i guess it was further than we thought...

now then it was already dark and we were hungry.
We looked up restaurant around and one of them seem promising.

so we tried to decide what to order, I said jumbolaya is what we should try here, then yasushi said he will try it, Yu said he wanna try that too, I was thinking to myself ... me too... goddamn it... alright i ll  order something else

3 minutes later...

there were 3 jumbolaya on the table (for all of us) ...

yep i gave in... i wanna eat that too lol...

so we ate it, it was pretty good

Then we were going to hit the bars in the bourbon street...

guess what?
All the bars are filled with people above 35
there werent any under 35 .. so yea. we decided it is not a place for us...
and for some reason we couldnt find the preservation hall.. so we just left the street and walked along the downtown area...

And of course it couldnt get any worse right?
WRONG...

it started to rain and it got harder and harder... =(

the end result?

I know I know.. what the hell is wrong with my face... sorry... i was wet..really really wet...
Oh.. while we were waiting for the trolly, the stop was like a little shade with the wall raised a little bit..

the car came behind us splash our legs as you might spot in the picture, our legs were also wet...

now that s done, we went back, and sleep.

we got off.. and then left.. to Orlando

And there was nothing much happens here actually,

since its really expensive to go anywhere now that we are running low on the resource

In any case, we tally up our expenses (hotels and taxi to hotels only)

came up with $374.548 per person
so, not too bad, actually

although, yasushi probably spent much more than that.

Alright, I hope this post is a little more interesting than the older ones.

(p.s. Bruce, so when should I be expecting my 10% that I lose? =))

Thank you for reading,
Byte out!

Update!

Sorry for not updating this blog for a long time, there weren't that many internet access oppotunity.
Ok so now we are at Amarillo TX
The town is ... dead?? i mean there is really nothing here... dont come here =)

anyways back to where we were
after the last blog, we part with Mike's family in the morning.

We got to Las Vegas around 5pm
so we checked in to the plaza hotel in downtown Las Vegas

That was the view from our window
we spent most of our night around downtown
The next day we went down to the Strips
starting at mandaley bay

Then we took the train to Lexor

And then we found this hotel (donno what the name is)

It looks like a disney castle
Then we went to New York in Las Vegas

Then we saw this roller coaster called Manhattan Express, which is quite big!
I, Yasushi, and Keiske decided to ride it!!
It was AWESOME!!! ($14)

  That red rail is the express
Then we kept walking along the strips

the towers are tilted =)

 

Then we reached Paris!

  

Then we kept moving until we reach Bellagio

We were a bit too late, so as soon as we could take the picture there.. the fountain was done...
Nonetheless, we get a pretty darn good picture

Then we kept going

And found Vinice
Then we were done for the night,
we headed back to the hotel, and spent time in the downtown.

We decided after 2 nights in Vegas that "What happened in Vegas stays in Vegas"  =)
The thing is that I and Deepac won a jackpot $1,000,000

 

But we took the offer double or nothing on a coin flip
we lost....
So let say we did not win or lose too much =)
I however, enjoyed the time I spent there even if it was a bit costly (if u know what i mean)

The next morning we checked out and boarded the bus to Flagstuff

When we reach Flagstuff, it was 4 am in the morning.
We checked into hotel and discussed about options to get to grand canyon.
Sadly, the road was icy and neither Yu or I are willing to risk driving so the only option left was to get there by public transportation.

the catch was that it was at least 50 per person and timing was not very convenient.

I, Deepac and Yu decided to not go, and Yasushi and Keiske decided to stay and go on the public transportation.

So then we split up, I D and U came to Amarillo TX right away to avoid long bus ride as oppose to going to Houston without any stops.

We ll meet up again in Houston if everything goes according to the plan.

At least we went around Flagstuff before we left
Oh I failed to mention that the place is COLD... not cold... COLD... really really COLD

 
Well, now we are at Amarillo, and it is like a dead town...
Not kidding, I would not go out at night!
it is as if there will be zombies running around.

Anyways, this blog is soooo much work...
I will try to keep it updated..
but for now,
Byte out!

(p.s. thanks Bruce, we tried to win big but not quite there yet) =)

San Frans + LA

Hey!
Sorry about the delay, I have not been able to use the internet for a while + i got lazier every day
Anyways, so, right now, I am at Mike's house in LA.
Mike is a sophomore in Lawrence and Yasushi knew him well.
So he was very kind to let us stay with him for 2 nights.

Anyways, let start where we left off and I can tell all the amazing things his family did for us once we get there

So... after the last blog, I went out to find something to do in San Francisco with everyone else.

Yasushi wanted to go to a fisherman market so he took off with K
I and D and U werent that interested so we went out on our own.
A couple blocks down the street we found Union Square,

and there was open ice-skate ring...
YES!
I LOVE ICE-SKATING!
so after an hour of talking, i convinced D to join me to the ring, It D's first time!!
Yu was just being a p**** if you know what i mean...

 

And right before we were done, I notice these 3 really cute girls (the other one took our pictures) were ice-skating and taking pictures, so!
I ran over and take picture with them =) No names, No numbers, No questions... Just Pictures
Kinda regret it now that i think about it.... I should have asked their names lol But it was the most random thing I done yet =) so i am pretty happy about it... and hope to continue this way every city..

then, we took a walk around the town a bit,
and we found a HUGE RED christmas tree

Then we went back to the hotel and sleep for the night...

In the morning of the next day
Yasushi came up with the idea of biking around the city.
Keiske went with him.
I deepak and Yu werent into cycling so much so we decided to take the bus instead.
so we split up and I D Uwent to eat at asian express, and Y K met up with Nozomi (which I had no idea was gonna be there), and went to eat at some japanese place.

I D Y decided to take it easy so we went back to chill at the hotel for a bit, and around 2 hours later, we hopped onto a bus to Golden Gate Bridge!

So then, we met up with Y K and N on the way

Then we were done, and we headed back to hotel, we drink a little bit before we went to bed, and as usual
Yu were drunk and passed out before anyone else.
I was quite drunk too, but it lasted only at most 1 hour.
Then Yasushi went with Nozomi to walk her back to her hostel.

now here there is not much detail but in the morning yasushi called that he is sick...
and ended staying 1 more day in San Frans where Nozomi was staying there "by chance"

We did not have the liberty of being sick, nor do we have someone to look after us =( so we decided to leave to LA.

Thankfully, Yasushi's friend Mike and his parents were very kind to let us stay even though, we didnt not quite know them.

As soon as we reach Mike was already there and he drove us to his house which is about 30- 45 mins away
It was a big house!

So then we settled in
They fed us with Salmon! Yumm!

and then we got to know each other
Bruce (Mikes' father) and Nancy (Mike's mother) were just awesome!

Mike left his room to sleep on the couch for us to sleep comfortably!!!

in the morning, nancy made us some breakfast (the meal we forgot it exists)
It was really good!!! remind us of the breakfast that never came in Minneapolis (read the older blog about it)

so then we took off,
first to Venice Beach

Then we went on to the Getty (hope i spell it right)
This is an art museum but we were more attracted to the architecture of the building than those display inside

At this point I kinda took solo pictures a lot since my friends werent that into pictures

After that we head to Thai Town
Let me say this.... It is a DUMP
DONT GO THERE!
Its like... ahh 10 thai restaurants in 2 blocks.. and oh wait... that s it!

 

Anyways.. that s that, then we went Hollywood!!!!

yep!
Whats next?, i'm glad u asked

BRUCE LEE!

 

After all the hollywood stuff, we went back to mikes house and have a feast! at which point, we met up with yasushi again.

Thank mikes family, today has been a very good day for us.
tomorrow, we will leave for Las Vegas
We are skipping San Diego since the only attraction we know of is Zoo...??
so we can spent more number of days in las vegas and earn some money.
Thanks to certain someone (no name) we learn how to play blackjack better now=)

Oh! and special thank to mike's mom, nancy, did all the laundry for us!!!!!! Hooray~!

Well, now I am tired...
So Peace!