J'aime Paris

**Warning: this is a Gloat Post**
So lastminutetravel.com is running this promotion where they are selling all their hotel inventory for $1 a night. The catch is the sale runs for only 15 minutes per day, and they don't advertise when that 15 minute window will be occurring. If you sign-up online they send hints and links to your email, but the hints made about as much sense as the most recent episode of LOST, so Ben and I gave up after minimal effort.

On Monday I logged into the website to cancel the account I'd set up, and the freaking timer was going for the sale, with three minutes left! The timer was even dramatically ticking, like a bomb. So with literally seconds to spare, and even though my hands were shaking with stress, I was able to book a hotel in Paris for 6 nights for $6!! I just have to say that my career path is even further justified, as I attribute my ability to type like the wind to my job training. Being able to navigate the web without using the mouse is helpful too.

So now we are flying for free, staying for free (a call from a lastminutetravel rep confirmed that they wouldn't even be charging the $6, and would pay all taxes and fees) and all we have to worry about is saving enough $$ to afford to stuff ourselves daily with croissants and crepes. We were last in Paris over eight years ago, so even though it's our favorite European city we've been putting off a return trip in favor of exploring other places. But with only 3 minutes to decide, it was definitely the first place that came to mind. This prize almost tops the Osaka $2.50 Hilton. Almost.

I really cannot believe we have been this lucky three times in a row!

ChicagObama

From Chicago New Year's 2008-2009

New Year's Eve found us in Chicago for the Hum reunion show! For a total of 48 hours we partied, toured the Art Institute, Obama-stalked, and ate deep-dish pizza for every meal (not kidding).

The Hum show (at a fairly small, appropriately Seattle-esque dingy sweatbox of a club) was an awesome beginning to 2009. Ben was hovering somewhere around the ceiling for most of the show. Hum begged off a second encore, complaining that they were too old (and too far past their bedtimes) to be proper rock stars. I walked down the aisle to a Hum song at our wedding, and we actually owned axolotls for a few years, so Hum has always been a part of our love story. This show was really special for us. And then on the train on the way home we had strangers sitting in our laps and offering us booze, so that was, uh, fun too.

Chicago is deep in the throes of a love affair with it's most/only honorable politician. Banners with the Shepard Fairey-designed portrait are hanging from the streetlamps everywhere (a banner was the first thing we saw coming up from the subway into downtown), and then of course there are the ubiquitous souvenirs.

I need that OMG shirt plz kthx.

Our hotel was pretty cheap, across the street from Obama's office (not kidding! we never saw anything exciting though), and spitting distance from the Art Institute and other major Chicago landmarks, so we spent the following day being nerdy tourists. The city is gorgeous but the temperature is not survivable, so our technique consisted of sprinting from doorway to doorway and whining when we had to walk more than a block without earmuffs.

The Chicago Art Institute is seriously awesome, even more so than previous visits because it is indoors and heated. The Impressionist collection is world-class, but since we saw it on our last visit we skipped that collection in favor of the galleries of American art. The collection has American Gothic as well as that Edward Hopper painting of the diner (forget the title now), but as usual the effect of seeing paintings that have been recycled and parodied into meaninglessness was fairly underwhelming. We spent the day playing the 'if you had a zillion dollars' game, the only rule being that you have to choose just one thing in each room that you would purchase. We take this game pretty seriously and will sit on benches contemplating two different paintings for as long as it takes to make the final decision. And of course anyone who goes to an art museum should always take Ben. I would miss like 90% of the awesome stuff if it weren't for him.

This week on LOST...

The highlight of our stay in Phuket was the daylong speedboat tour we took of the national parks in the area--parks comprised of dozens of tiny uninhabited islands, the crown jewel of which was Ko Phi Phi Leh, where the (crappy, but pretty) movie The Beach was filmed. This beach is without exaggeration the most beautiful place we have ever been. It's an almost perfectly round bay of huge limestone cliffs looming over a beach with sand white as paper. You can only enter the bay through a narrow entrance between the cliffs:
For the movie The Beach, they just photoshopped an extra cliff into the gap to close the circle and make the beach seem more isolated. I should add that Ko Phi Phi Leh is pronounced "Ko Pee Pee Lee" and this group of islands we saw on the trip are called the "Pee Pee" islands, which of course means that for at least the first hour of the trip we couldn't listen to our tour guide name the islands without giggling like 12-year-olds. Because we are just that stupid.




Ahh, Thailand: where paradise and Engrish collide. This boat is supposed to say James Bond. Everything in the Phuket/Ko Phi Phi area has stuff claiming the Bond name, since apparently one of the books was set here. The problem is the Thai language does not have standardized spelling, so signage in English (or Thai) is never consistently spelled. For instance, Ko Phi Phi Leh could also be spelled Ko Phi Phi Lee or Koh Phi Phi Leeh (makes it really obnoxious to find places using guidebook maps or Google Earth). Spellings we saw for James Bond:
Jame Bon,
Jam Bond,
James Bohnd'(?!).
Also, sandwiches are like the new trendy thing in Thailand, with Subway ripoffs everywhere. Spellings we saw for 'sandwich':
sandwhich,
sendwish,
sandwidge.
Also, be sure to avoid the 'sandwitch' because those are the very worst kinds of witches.