Monday of March 7, 2011 part II (The modern wonder of the world and other super fantastically awesome stuff)

I put my bags under the bus that would drive us around. It wasn't anything to talk about, so I won't. But it did have televisions! But we never used them. Anyways, we were introduced to our tour guide and drove off to one of the modern wonders of the world: The Golden Gate Bridge. Our tour guide explained to us how this is something special since a lot of people have not been on it in their life time. She also mentioned that the bridge had the highest suicide rate. I already knew most of the information that our tour guide told us, since our English teacher had us do research projects on different things in San Francisco. I did Muir Woods, but that was on Wednesday.

When I got off the bus, the golden gate bridge was sitting there in the distance. Seeing it in real life was pretty special like the tour guide said. As I was walking along I looked at the wires, and my eyes followed them up to the gate part (what do you call that? that big thing that sits over the bridge? Never mind). This made me pretty dizzy, walking and looking up at the top of the bridge while the wind nearly pushes you over. The wind was pretty hard. I couldn't imagine working on the bridge. When I looked to my right, I could see the entire city and then I could see Alcatraz; IN REAL LIFE!! It was awesome.

The walk was about 45 minutes long. The moment I walked off the bridge, the wind seemed to die down a little. We were now walking to our bus. The bus was going to take us to our first dinner at Pizza Market (I think that's what it was called). After dinner, we got back on the bus and headed for Union Square.

We didn't park right next to our destination, so we walked through San Fransisco, but not all of it of course. The sidewalks that I walked on were "paved with gold!". Well, I guess not paved with gold, but it had sparkles scattered everywhere on the sidewalk. Besides shops, another thing that populated this area was the buses and trolleys. I got to see one of the trolleys being turned int the opposite direction. After about five to ten minutes, we arrived at the mall. And the first thing that I saw were the words GODIVA. The best part of the entire mall.

Walking around the mall with just two other people was pure freedom. You could buy whatever the heck you wanted, and as long as you didn't get arrested you could do just about whatever the heck you wanted. The first thing I wanted to do was get some food. The first stop was a frozen yogurt place. It was pretty good. Next, we stopped at a coffee shop so that one of my friends could get some pastries. Our second to last stop was Borders. At first, there wasn't much to do, but then one of my friends screamed at the top of his lungs "THE ULTIMATE GUIDE TO CALL OF DUTY BLACK OPS BOOK!!!". I didn't really play any video games, so this didn't excite me as much as it excited my friends. I ended up reading a book full of "deep thoughts". They were pretty funny.

After five minutes of reading books (didn't think you'd hear me say that but I did), I struggled to grab the book out of my friend's hands. Our last stop would be GODIVA CHOCOLATE SHOP!!!! I ended up ordering a shake, of course that's not what it was called (it probably had fancier name). It was like going to heaven and then realizing that heaven was not as good as the shake so you made up your own world that was better than heaven and basked in the heat of the shake's awesomeness. It was that good.

When it was all over, we rode our bus to our hotel. It was La Quinta. It wasn't much, but all we would be doing is sleeping and watching T.V, so it didn't matter. It was a perfect first day, and I couldn't wait for Tuesday.

Monday of March 7, 2011 (The king of the skies)

The time is 5:00 a.m. My Ipod screams at me to get up, but it didn't scare me. I was so excited and tired at the same time that my stomach felt terrible, but I didn't notice. I felt like pure gold. I was heavy from excitement, and I was shining from cheek to cheek. My mom on the other hand, wasn't too happy about the early wake up. Life felt so surreal when I looked at the date. Of course, being what I am when I am excited, I freaked out. Everything was moving too slow for me. The only words that broke out of my mouth were "Hurry up", "Are we there yet?", "Are you sure you are going the right way", and "SPEED UP WE'RE GOING TO BE LATE!!!!" Finally we left the house, and drove to the airport.

For some reason I remember my first view of the airport. At that moment my entire trip flashed before my eyes. Words could not describe how excited I was. And then, like I had dreamed so many times before, I got my bag out of the bed of my mom's truck and walked inside Austin Airport.

As I walked to the escalator, I also took some time to absorb what the airport looked like. Since it was 6:45 a.m, it was empty and quiet. I looked to my right and I saw several screens that had three dimensional guitars and other musical objects pop out. I wasn't even wearing 3-D glasses. When I got to the Continental Airlines table I met up with two other classmates. It took about thirty minutes for everybody in my class to arrive. After another half hour of waiting and talking to my friends, we were finally moving to airport security! Fortunately everybody in our group was clean, we then waited at our gate.

Our first flight was to Houston, so our plane was pretty small. Boarding the plane felt like taking a 500 hour energy drink mixed a lot of Monster. I was cramped in my spot, but I had the window to my advantage. After the flight attendant talked to everyone about what to do in situations where you would probably die no matter what you put over your mouth, the plane was moving.

My seatbelt could barely hold back my excitement, O.K, I'm think you get the point. I couldn't think of anything more fun to do then this trip. I was sitting in my seat chewing some bubble gum and then the plane went from five to 5,000 miles an hour. I was glued to my seat, and could only move my head. The plane tilted up, like it was doing a wheelie, and then I felt empty. I was in the air. I looked out of my cozy window and saw cars driving down the street like marbles rolling down the hill. All of the buildings were now small and two-dimensional like on Google Maps. As we moved over the country side, squares of land evenly cut and each a different color moved the opposite direction. The coolest part was when the plane jumped over the clouds. I imagined that I was hovering over puffy snow. If you're reading this, I can't blame you for thinking that I am crazy for all of these details I fantasized over.

The plane ride was short, probably an hour long. When the plane landed in the George Bush Airport I noticed that it was much larger then the Austin Airport, and it had a MONORAIL! When I got to my next gate we (whenever you see the word "we", it refers to my class) were told to get lunch. We were also told that we had to be in at least groups of three if we ever walked away from the teacher. We also had to be back at a certain time. Out of all the healthy places at an airport (is that sarcasm?), I chose Wendy's; you know when its real!

If you didn't watch the video, after waiting for a long time I got kind of bored. But if I was bored waiting to get on the plane to San Francisco, you can already tell how easily bored I will get on a five hour plane ride to San Francisco. The plane that was going to take me to San Francisco was much larger then the first one. There were televisions implanted on the back of the seat in front of me. This got me excited because a movie was perfect for a long plane ride. It turned out that it was just showed television channels. That wasn't a bad thing, the bad thing was that you had to pay to watch anything at all. Fortunately they gave you the first five minutes for free, so I decided to make good use of that time and watch Dora the Explorer. Best five minutes ever spent.

The plane ride was fun for the first hour, but eventually it turned into a road trip without the view. I would have looked out the window the entire trip and would have been satisfied, but the person sitting next to me didn't like the sun in his eyes. As the trip came to an end, I managed to peek out of the window. What I saw was amazing. There were mountains covered with snow, immediately followed by desert. When I landed at the San Francisco airport I noticed that it too had a monorail! I also noticed that I was pretty tired. The trip had officially begun.

Sunday of March 6, 2011 (Anticipation Day)

My heart is running a marathon. The noise of a spectator can be heard, reading off the names of the lucky finishers. I could see my self crossing that line that separated long hours of studying, and the best five days of my life. Everything about this trip made my mind blow up. The fact that I was going to fly in an airplane put me in shock. The good kind of shock, like when the people on game shows find out that they won something. I think this was what alienated me from the rest of my class. I hadn't been on an airplane in so long, flying was much more meaningful. A lot of my classmates have been on a plane, or even to California in the past year. I was not thinking about any of these things. The only thoughts that were banging my head was leaving Austin, Texas and fitting all of this junk in my backpack.

I was going to be gone for five days. This would be the longest trip away from home (I think) ever. This would also be the hardest packing assignment that I would have to accomplish. Our first two flights would be with Continental, which doesn't take your bags for free. So my smallest bag, my backpack, would somehow need to carry about a weeks worth of clothes. I doubted that my backpack could manage, but that's what I thought when I saw fifteen clowns hop in a small car.

WARNING: The following paragraph is the most useless piece of literature ever written. Feel free to skip!

These are the things that I needed to pack:

• Five days worth of clothes
• Two jackets ("The coldest winter I ever spent was the summer in San Fransisco" -Mark Twain)
• Bathroom essentials (toothbrush, toothpaste, deodorant, you get the point)
• My camera, and its power cord
• A plastic bag for my dirty clothes
• My belt
• Two books: "Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde" by Robert Stevenson and "The Tell-Tale Heart" by Edgar Allan Poe

After I was done packing I decided to watch an Adam Sandler movie (Anger Management). I don't really know if the movie was actually that good, since I was mainly picturing myself in a world of freedom and AWESOMENESS!! When that was over, the worst part of the waiting process approached... sleep. Nine hours of tossing and turning and wishing that it was time to get up. And then when it was time to wake up, I didn't want to.

Introduction

Have you ever been on a vacation? Most of us have. But have you been on a vacation that leaves one or more memories stitched to your head? Well, I will never forget March 7 to March 11 of 2011. And what better way then to document everything on this blog, and as the stitches start to get old, this blog will still be here like it was just created.

So enjoy what you can and ignore what you can't, and I hope that this will inspire you to go one of these kinds of trips.

(oh yeah, sorry to ruin the moment, but if you want you can check my other blog that just talks about stuff at MY BLOG!!! )