Winter Wonderland

So after a hard semester of
at
I packed all my
and finally left for
with
to join
and
on a week-long ski trip in
(the top one!)

Now, I really, REALLY love to
, meaning I'd been looking forward to this trip since
(+- a few days)

I'm not going to talk about the ride there that took about 28 hours due to the bus breaking down and other shit -_-


The lodge and slopes were fantastic!
Great food and beer at the lodge, here's just some of the spread we got on Christmas Eve:

And of course, the slopes:
Bringing 'breathtaking' to a whole new level.

Those pics were taken at an awesome cafe up on the mountain; took a gondola thing all the way up:
where we had some awesome
French onion soup, chocolate fontant and creme brulee. Très bien!

Also, someone awesome
(no, not me, the other awesome) knitted me this neck heater thing:
Thaaaanks may!

Firstly, you should know that I brush my teeth with pure adrenaline and wrestle boars as an after-tea pastime, so I was itching to do the diamond slopes at Les Deux Alpes; they were fucking magnificent. We'd tried some of the intermediate slopes and they went pretty well, thanks to snowboarding classes at Cornell. All this made my accident all the more funny/embarrassing since it was on the goddamn BEGINNER SLOPE. FOR SHAME.

Here's more or less how it went:

I was doing shit like
when
and
decided to go all
on my sorry ass, turning my
into
which ensued in a lot of
and other expletives. 300 Euros, six weeks of healing and another month of physio right there. Whoop-dee-fuckmylife.


Thanks to some wonderful people, this little setback didn't ruin the trip.

Except for the one game of baLonergrams

Everyone was still all smiles!

Christmas was pretty sweet

Some bromance (?!??)

and good food and laughter was had by all.


Merry (belated) Christmas and a Happy 2011 to everyone!

Shanghai 2010: Part Two

Finally some free time! Thanksgiving break starts tomorrow, so I've got about five days to do nothing. Phew. So back to where I left off; at the World Expo in Shanghai, just had lunch on the rooftop of the French Pavilion.
Food was great and the building was really nice from outside, but the inside left a lot to be desired.
Random centrepieces and sculptures in every room, with famous photos and paintings along the walls. Honestly it's nothing that you can't see online.
Tourists were pretty funny though.

Yeaaaah quite a fail.
Whoop-dee-doo, went all the way to China and (could have) queued up for three hours to see Louis Vuitton bags!
They even dressed up some crazy lady to stand around and waggle her arms around, which was somehow supposed to promote LV. I don't get it.

Main point: It's a huge waste of time to line up and enter the pavilions.

The Malaysian Pavilion actually had a queue! Whoaaaa.

See the little 1Malaysia up there -_-

No idea what this is supposed to be.

Sweet, another China sign!

Are those.. crocs?!?

Did I mention how freaking hot it was at the Expo?

Thiiiiiis hot.

And another China stereotype: People sleep in random places everywhere.

So France was a fail. We decided to try one more pavilion; the only other pavilion where you could cut the queue by ordering food. Belgium!
Here we are drinking some nice Belgian beer and cider. Had some wonderful Belgian fries too. Fun fact: fries were invented in Belgium; they make the best fries in the world, they're double-fried and served with mayo.

At least we didn't have to buy overpriced meals to get in, just overpriced beers and fries. Here's the entrance from the restaurant:

So the Belgium pavilion was about the few things Belgium's famous for:

1. Diamonds and Jewellery

Gold tennis racquet anyone?

Sad jeweler working in a fishbowl. Poor guy would work on a diamond for a few minutes, hold it up for everyone to see, then work on it some more. All. Day. Long.

2. Chocolates

3. Smurfs (?!?!??)

Creepy damn things

4. Tintin! :D I have fond memories of reading lots of these as a kid.

Not like this

Yeah the Belgian pavilion was much better than the French one, though still not worth a 3-hour line.

Here's the outside of the Spanish one, made entirely out of wood or rattan or some other flammable thing.
4-hour queue, didn't bother.

Here's an awesome bridge connecting the two halves of Shanghai, Pudong and Puxi.
The colours were constantly changing and moving along the length of the bridge; it went full rainbow every now and then, pretty cool!

Another pavilion, Latvia.
Their performance included dudes getting floated around the top of the building by some massive fans somewhere inside.
Quite freaky to watch. Those things are just tubes that flap around in the wind, like the ones you see next to auto-showrooms.

Final expo picture of the night:
Fail, I say.

Okay, done for today! Check back soon for another update! (Riiight.)

Fun pics of the day:

Way too true

Dawwwwwww

You're a horrible, horrible person.