Cured Meats, Chunky Beats, and a whole lotta love in the Suite.

Bonjour, Hola, Cheerio! I just wanted to let people know that not only did we make it to Madrid (and now Paris) but we have had QUITE a few adventures already.

Brief recap:

In the Philly airport I met a man (our eyes locked across the bar and we bonded over blue moons) and we discovered that we were on the same flight to Madrid- so we drank some more, hopped on the plane, and he convinced the woman next to him that she should really take my middle seat three rows back so that I could have her window. Somehow it worked and over the next 8 hours we fell in love. Thank god we did, because when I landed at 8am i learned that my phone didnt work and I had no way to locate becki and Ryan, who were flying into Madrid at noon. luckily this man helped me text becki a very specific location to find me, and crisis averted. He flew home to Pamplona (no he does not run with the bulls, I asked) and ryan, becki, and i took off for our hotel. The front desk girl took about 3 seconds before she convinced becki to upgrade us to a suite that came with our own personal "experience manager." Jose was his name, and fun was his game. He taught us to use our Wii, play with the ipod, and he showed us around the "moxi bar" (because it was bigger than a mini bar).  He also suggested that all three of us share the king bed (cue eyebrow raising and winking) and then he skipped out the door. We think Jose was pretty gay.
We then went for tapas where we ate our daily serving of cured meats. That night we went clubbing. Think men in no shirts and women in their underpants on a stage with a smoke machine dancing to "chunky beats." Ryan promptly bought a bottle of vodka and commissioned me to be his pimp, bringing hot austrian girls back to the table who wanted nothing to do with him. Thats the last thing I remember was the three of us being propositioned by a random creepy man who I think wanted to kill ryan and have his way with becki and i, immediately followed by becki getting heckled on the street while i cowered in fear behind ryan.
Then came Saturday, where we went shopping and then stopped in for a casual cafe con leche, but the tables quickly turned when Ryan challenged me to a beer chugging contest and the entire day became a tapas/bar crawl through Madrid. Below you will notice Ry Guy and I choosing our meats at "El Museo del Jamon" (the HAM MUSEUM).

Today we woke up around 11 and dragged ourselves to the airport but I managed to vomit in our hotel room, our hotel basement, the restaurant, the cab, the airports (both madrid and paris), the airplane, in my own mouth, and in my bag on the bus. This was all due to my severe dehydration mixed with low blood sugar and overall overindulgence of the sauce. 
In other news, we have seen more hot men since we arrived in Paris at 6pm tonight than we did the entire time in Madrid. Becki took particular interest in the guy who checked us in (he was tres bien) but we are more interested in the Airplane Pilots we saw getting into an elevator after dinner tonight. I made a beeline for them (we had been on our way to creepily walk by the front desk and spy on our check in guy) but when we saw them we changed our direction. However we chickened out and didnt jump into their elevator so that was a waste. There is always tomorrow though.  We stopped into an Irish pub where I fell in love with the bartender although he wasnt all that impressed with me, and we tried to make our waiter love us at dinner but he mostly wanted no part of it. So thats been it so far- now we are snuggling in our big bed, watching le television, and resting up for a big day of sight seeing tomorrow.

This has been a real pain so I  probably won't blog again while I am away.

xoxo
Lee Gal and Barkilona

Cloudy with a chance of Sex Slavery

Well- this is it. My final goodbye before I hop on a plane and fly off to Europe, most likely never to be heard from again.
I just watched "Taken" again (Liam Neeson the badass rescuing his daughter from a life of sex slavery). I mainly watched this because I wanted to try to pick up a few tips on what NOT to do when I get to Paris. However, after seeing how things went down, I realized that chances are, I'm going to be sold into sex slavery within moments of arriving. I mean lets break this down: 2 girls land in Paris, and a good looking man asks them to share a cab. Is this something that I would allow? Yes. Without a moments hesitation, yes. Even after seeing Taken, yes. Then the cab drops them off at the place they are staying and the nice looking man asks them if he and his presumably nice looking friends can come over that night to hang out/party/show them the town. Would I allow this? Yes. After seeing Taken, not so much. But at this point it won't really matter because the sex selling men can come find us at any time by simply asking the concierge where we are. I'd be willing to bet the hotel staff is in on it too. Plus I'm traveling with Becki, so lets be honest- she will probably hang a sign on our door inviting in any good looking men that want to hang out. Sorry Becki, I'm just playing the odds.
After thinking things through, I feel safer than the girls in Taken for three reasons.
1. It is probably a lot harder to take two screaming and struggling girls out of a hotel than it was to steal them away from a giant empty mansion- so they're gonna have to snag us somewhere else. Which I admit is a possibility.
2. We have chaperones in 2/3 cities- Ryan Hall has been tasked with guarding our virtue in Madrid, and Tyler's friend/ex roommate (I forget the actual connection) is in charge of keeping us off the street corners of Paris- and everyone knows that Londoners aren't into sex slaves.
3. I would be a TERRIBLE sex slave, and I'll make this clear to the people who are trying to sell me. This is probably my biggest saving grace. I mean, these girls in Taken were heavily sedated/drugged up and then put into rooms where men came to have their way with them. Now everybody knows that I don't do well with most drugs (pills/painkillers/sedatives, specifically), mainly because I turn into a sloppy disgusting raving lunatic. I can state several examples of this happening, my favorite being the time Valarie took me in a limosine to a fancy party at the Hard Rock Casino in Hollywood, FL, and I popped some kind of pill and then spent the evening clinging to a pillar with my eyes rolled in the back of my head, mumbling jibberish until she had to stuff me in a cab and take me to Paul's condo where I could try to regain my sanity. I don't see how any man would want to deal with that, no matter how much money he paid.

With all that said, I still don't feel 100% sure that we will make it home. I can see one of us (me) meeting some Londoner and marrying him on the spot, never to be heard from again because lets face it, British accents are my weakness. That is a proven fact- History has shown that I am completely helpless when someone talks British to me. Thats probably why I spend a lot of my time speaking in a fake (and terrible) British accent. Becki has a better history with the Brits than I do (example: the night she left me in the dust at 3am on the streetcorner with 2 british men, hers staring after her with a look of bewilderment on his face), but I guess we'll see! If you don't hear from me on or after the 25th/26th of February, I guess you can just assume one of these two possible scenarios has played out. Lets hope its the latter of the two- although I guess the silver lining to the sex slavery cloud is that I can retire early from climbing the corporate ladder. I realize that isn't the best case scenario, but what can I say- I'm an optimist!