Off to Florida with Mas Yogi

Without an internet at home, I won’t be able to write blogs whenever I want. So what I’ll do is write my stuff using Words and bring this laptop to a wireless accessible area, like COPA. So yeah, I’m in Argentina already, the place that I was afraid to be before because of various reasons. Since it’s been 2 weeks since I got here, so I have a lot of things to write. I think I’ll do better with computer than actually writing it on a piece of paper :p

After my birthday, things got quite intense: packing, cleaning up mess after mess, corresponding with various people, and even till getting into stupid fights with Mas Yogi simply because I was too anxious and got panicked every now and then. Finally, after long nights figuring out what to bring and to leave behind, we both set off for New York on Sunday morning in Eli’s car (I wonder how many people actually have ridden his car, since he’s sort of the one and only int’l student (well, ex student) who has a car…). We met up with Kosin, who stays in a nice apartment somewhere in Manhattan, Phu, Boon and his shy girlfriend, Kenny. My main purpose in NYC was shopping (how obvious could it be!). But, I ended buying nothing but 2 raincoats for our Florida trip. It was funny how whenever we asked the people at the store about where we could find raincoats, they would ask us if it was raining outside???!!! It was really nice and warm when we’re there J Ooo.. I miss the sunshine… Anyway, that night, we ate at a small Chinese restaurant that has a very tasty “Chinese nabe” ---hot and spicy!!! OMG, next time I visit Chinatown, I must go again to that restaurant! Hahahha… now I’m hungry :p

We went back to Kosin’s with huge tummies, even Kosin changed the way he walks. Around 30 min. after we got to his apartment, Boon called and told us that the police towed his car! Ghee, I hate how the signs in NYC are so misleading that the next time we check our car, an empty space is what we find L So Boon and Kenny stayed over at Kosin’s as well… I was happy that Yogi got to meet up with his “green car” buddies a.k.a CLK :p Plus Kosin wasn’t working that Sunday, although he kept on checking his emails, like he said, “ just in case my boss wants me to be at the office….” L I can’t believe that a job as an I-banker actually exists in this world! How could someone work close to 24/7, staring at numbers, trying to speculate what will happen in the market, and those things that I will never understand… I know the compensation is HUGE… but working your ass while you’re young as soon as you graduate, OH… definitely not for me!!!

For some reasons, when I booked the flight, I wasn’t thinking much of the time. Due to the early flight we took, 720am from La Guardia, we decided to take a cab at 5am! I was assuming, from my conversation with a shuttle river, that it would take us 45min to get to LaGuardia. Apparently, after sitting down in a cab for 20 min, we saw the sign… La Guardia Int’l Airport! Hehehhe… I know how cranky Mas Yogi can be when he’s tired, so I had to put up with that till we got to Orlando. Oh yeah, the flight attendance of the plane from NY-Washington Dulles was really tall, but the airline placed him in a tiny lil’ flight that he has to duck every time he walks. Poor him… He kinda look like Denzel Washington :p hahhaha

Once we got to Orlando, we decided to eat first then rent the car, since Mas Yogi wanted to be able to return at a later hour when we got to Miami. Well, it made a lot of sense, till we saw the line of people wanting to rent cars from Alamo. I guess we all share the same thought—let’s we all rent from Alamo coz it’s cheap! We should’ve booked the car… hix…hix… coz we didn’t, I had to put up with Mas Yogi’s complains and wines about how expensive the rental was L Although at the end, he was happy with the car, plus I picked an interesting color, mmm… coklat orange car :p

We got to DaysInn and OMG, along the street where the hotel is, there are zillion of hotels and restaurants—from 2 star till 5 star hotels, from Chinese take out till a fancy American style family restaurant! :p That night we went to the Ripley’s Believe It or Not museum, which was a worth of a trip! There was a replica of a headless rooster that I think was able to live for 4 or 14 years, I dunno (I know 4 and 14 make so much difference, but the point is that the chicken survived without its head!). I took a picture with a replica of the tallest man on earth, and yeah, I looked really tiny in the picture :P

Disneyworld’s Day!!! I couldn’t believe that I was actually visiting Disneyworld. Mas Yogi wasn’t that excited, coz he’s not into Disney and he thinks it’s for kids :p well, I guess I’m still like a kid then :p hahahha…. It was a challenge trying to take pictures of the castle, but it was kinda a “dream” of every girl seeing with her own eyes the castle of Cinderella :p Mas Yogi couldn’t believe when I said that I wanted to see the show of Cinderella at this age, but again… it’s a fantasy of his lil’ Tia J

We took quite a lot of rides and definitely walked a lot in the amazingly HOT SUN! When I was there, I didn’t miss the sunshine, coz it was so hot that I got tanned :p anyway, I think Mas Yogi preferred the thrilled rides, but I was scared to death… so we ended up only taking the Splash Mountain :p ok, we also went into the Haunted Mansion which was disappointing L Mas Yogi trying to scare me was much scarier than the whole Haunted Mansion! I don’t know why I don’t remember the names of the rides we took at DisneyWorld L mmmm… leave this for later than.

My impression after taking a 2 hour walk around was that DisneyWorld looks so similar to Tokyo DisneyLand… the rides, the neighbouring sceneries! How interesting! I was kinda disappointed that I didn’t see much of new things, but still I liked it J Oh ya, I wanted to see the parade, but due to weather condition, it got delayed for almost 1 hour. It was cute seeing the classic characters came out J hhehehe…
For meals, since I know that it’d be ridiculously expensive to eat there, I took some bagels and apples from the breakfast at the hotel for our lunch :p how cheap???!!! And for dinner, we had to stick with the expensive chicken and burger… Oh ya, now I remember the ride that we took, it was something new called… something Stitch. It was pretty cool J Mas Yogi wanted to take the Disney train, so we did for 1.5 rounds :p then we left around 8ish. We decided to skip the fireworks, since we had to go to Universal Studios the next day.

In Orlando, there are a bunch of ticket discounts and variety of promotions in relation to Disney and Universal Studios. Well, restaurants and hotels are quite decent price just because of the booklet of discount coupons. Since tickets for Universal Studios, and Disney, were ridiculously expensive, we decided to go on a promo tour of a resort. We got there around 7.30am with big hope that the sales guy wouldn’t be some jerk! Apparently, it was a promotion of Timeshared system, where you buy a resort, then you can rent it through out the year and at the same time, you can also rent other people’s resorts in other places. Sounded interesting and promising to me, but COME ON???!!!! FOR US??? NO WAY??? So, this jerk tried his best to sell a room and ended up with disappointment L It was kinda insulting when he said that if we couldn’t buy this, then we could never afford anything else in our life. GIMME A BREAK! This guy was obviously working his ass to intimidate us, but our purpose was to grab cheap tickets! :p so after spending more than 3 hours, we had our $40 bucks tickets worth of $120, hehhehe…

Universal Studio was much smaller than Disney. I was kinda disappointed at first when we entered, plus our first ride, Twister, was quite boring! So, Twister… mmm… all we did was standing on the benches witnessing a flying cow and feeling huge wind blowing. L but then it got better! JAWS was awesome, especially cost I sat rite next to the spots where the sharks and fire came out! That was wicked J and Sherk 4D was amazing, I liked it a lot. Mas Yogi took the Mummy Returns ride, which I refused to go with, and I think he liked it J hehhehe… no more roller coaster rides for me, ever!!!! We ended our Universal Studio adventure with ET :p it was so cute, but we’re all drenched in water bcoz it was raining like crazy. Thanks to our NYC ponchos, we’re better than many people who had to either buy expensive Universal Studios ponchos or walk in the rain… We left around 6ish and had dinner at a Chinese buffet. As usual, we ended up eating sooo much stuff in the buffet and I was quite stuffed! :p


Miami trip story is coming up soon (dunno when tho…)