Travel Adventures

Tuesday, January 19, 2010

Sick of Blogging....but now I am back.

As you have noticed I haven't blogged for quite some time....I just got sick of it! Blogging about So You Think You Can Dance became time consuming and it was nearing the end of the semester...by the way I am glad with who won, I was happy with the top 3...any one of them could have won and I would have been happy! Anyways my first semester having a new major has ended and now I am on a 2 year plan to get my bachelor's! This year of 2010 I will be taking classes simultaneously through Scottsdale Community College and NAU on their Scottsdale Campus. Then 2011 I am planning to move to Flagstaff to complete my bachelor's and hopefully start on a life of wondrous traveling! My first stop I want to make Disney world...I have already been here but I want to do the Disney College Program! I think it would be an incredible opportunity and an amazing thing to put on your resume! After that I am hoping to move overseas and pursue my dream life of traveling! I have started reading this book:

I am only in the England section so far but every place of the world is filled with such amazing things I can't wait to experience them! This book is going to take me awhile to read! I only read about a couple places a night and there are 1000! From this book I am sure I will think of new places I want to visit and experience that aren't on my list already!

Sunday, November 15, 2009

Murder Mystery Mayhem

A little while back I blogged about maybe thinking of doing a murder mystery party and this past weekend me and my friend Alana pulled off a very successful Murder Mystery event! We had 37 people in total(including us) come and we made them come up with names and background stories. Then we took those and made a scavenger hunt with clues to who wasn't the murderer and which weapon was not used, so at the end they would be left with one weapon and one person. Since we had so many people we divided them up into 5 groups of 7 and they all had to go around and hunt for the clues. While people were coming in and mingling we had a mugshot area set up and we took every one's mug shots and they received them on a card stock paper with their background story at the end of the night. We had food for them to eat while they mingled and awesome 40's and 40's inspired music playing as well. When it was time for the murder to happen, we turned off the lights, had someone scream, then our friend Cassie was kind enough to be our victim and let us put fake blood on her while she played dead on the floor and the butler read the rhyme to the game. After that we split everyone into groups and let them go off and figure out the clues. It took about an hour, I would say and then one group figured it out first and won. We had a prize basket for them. After that we took a few group pictures, and then had people vote for awards that we had made up. Some people left right after the awards and some people stuck around for awhile and hung out. It was such a great party and almost everyone came up to me or Alana and told us what an awesome job we did, we even got applauded at one point! It was so much fun! The best part was how into it everyone that came was, everyone dressed up and played their part! Here are pictures of our award winners and some random ones of the night.

Mrs. White Award-Most proper and orderly

Col. Mustard Award-Dashing and most outspoken

Professor Plum Award-Smartest and Scatterbrained

On the left was Miss Scarlet Award-Sexiest Dress and Most flirtatious attitude and on the right was the Mrs. Peacock Award-Most extravagant and uptight

Mr. Green Award-Smooth Talker

I can't remembered what we called the award but she got it for being our victim of the evening

Most Sinister Villain Award-and her weapon of choice was the candlestick

Some decorations

The food

Some random pictures of the night

The entire party!

Sunday, October 18, 2009

Murder Mystery Game Night

So me and my best friend have been wanting to do a mystery murder dinner type of night forever now! I have never actually been to one but hear they can be really fun! So we got talking with our other good friends this weekend and after playing the game Clue, decided we actually want to plan one and really go all out for it! We have decided to just have refreshments, not a full blown dinner, and have the murder mystery game start at a specific time. We want to do it 40's and Clue inspired, so everyone who comes has to participate in the dressing up and the actual game. We aren't quite sure how we are going to do the murder mystery game yet, I was hoping to google it and get some ideas, google has the answer for everything! We also want to send out actual invitations, people love getting stuff in the mail! So if anyone has done anything like this before, has any ideas to help us out, or wants to come please let me know!

Wednesday, October 7, 2009

Cultures

So in my hotel and restaurant management class we are doing a career plan assignment throughout the course of the semester and on career plan module # 2, we had to pick 3 careers we think suited us and also write two paragraphs on why working overseas is beneficial to being the hospitality industry. So it got me thinking about what cultures I want to experience, and let me tell there is a lot! I really want to experience the Latin countries, even though they can be annoying sometimes but if you learn the language and really get to know the culture I believe it becomes easy! My teacher said once in class that we should live overseas for at least 2 years in another country, which I am totally fine with that! I want to live in so many other countries and learn new languages, (I already know the basics of 2), experience different cultures and gain a respect for them. As you know I did live 5 months in Italy and at times it was annoying but I really did love it! I want to go back and really experience more than I did before! I think my mistake was going with people I knew, no offense to them, but I think I would have experienced the culture more if I went on my own. Now I know if I go to other countries that I can do it alone, when I studied abroad I was still pretty shy, and was unsure whether I was confident enough to do something like that without having the support of friends. Now that I did it with friends I believe I can do it by myself and get so much more out of it for me. Anyways here are flags of countries I would love to live in! I thought it would be fun to see who could guess all the flags without peeking on the Internet! I know not a lot of people read this so it will be easy to win! haha and I will make you cookies or something if you guess them all right! I probably make the best chocolate chip cookies ever or you can just get the satisfaction of knowing flags of other countries whatever you want haha.....anyways guess away! I will wait a week to see if anyone guesses...

10.

Monday, September 21, 2009

San Diego

Well I meant to post about San Diego right after the Vegas post, but my life got really crazy busy all of the sudden, but here is the post a week later! Kathi and I went to San Diego the weekend of the 11th, our plan was to stay in a hostel for $21 a night for 3 nights. We drove the 6 hours to San Diego on the Friday the 11th and found our hostel, it was called the Ocean Beach International Hostel. We get there and go in to check in, we are told the computers are down but to come back a little later. I asked how long the computers would be down....they didn't know, they asked me if I had a car...I said yes, and they said good you can keep your luggage in there. They told me to go down to the beach or something and we could come back at 5 and have dinner for free there since we were staying there. So we went down to Ocean Beach, which was literally just down the street from the hostel. We just sat on the beach relaxing, people watching, and taking pictures. We saw this one random guy, wearing green knee socks, basketball shorts, and a sweatshirt, he also had a backpack with him. He walked with his arms straight down at his sides without moving them at all. He put his backpack down, took his sweatshirt, shirt, socks, and shoes off and proceeded to walk into the ocean the way I just described. I tried to take a picture of him walking but I think he saw me so I didn't haha. After we sat there watching this man walk weirdly it was about time to go back to the hostel to eat dinner and see if we could check in. So I go ask if we can check in and they say nope our computers are still down, so me and Kathi start walking down the hallway to the back of the hostel to eat dinner and this creepy guy comes out of no where and asks us if we are staying there and if we are going to eat and I said yes dinners at 5 right, he told me yes and to hurry and get there before the food ran out...I think it was 4:59 when he said this, then he walked into a room. We go to the back where there are a bunch of picnic tables under a tent and some creepy guy who I am pretty sure works there with his shirt off hitting on every girl who walks past him. And he is having all these people sign up for beer pong, and a sign right behind him says no alcohol or loud parties, noise brings cops. Then we go get in line to get burgers and this crazy man lady(she looked like a man but was a lady) is cooking them and she freaks out because someone used the same spatula to get the meat burgers as the veggie burgers and this poor foreign girl asks why she can't do that and the lady goes off about how she doesn't want the nasty meat on her veggie burgers. (lady why are you the one bbqing if you have such strong feelings about meat?) Then she told us (yelled) that we had to write our name down and our room number...so me and Kathi just wrote down our name, because we aren't even checked in at this place! So we ate and then left to go walk around again and as we were walking down the street this bum starts talking to us and gets so close to me that I almost have to touch him to get around him! We walk down the beach and find this park that has a bunch of little kids that are cheer leading and playing football so we sat on the bleachers like creepers and watched them. We decided if the computers are still down we are going to call my mom and ask her to help us find a hotel! We go back to the beach and I see the weird knee sock man with another bum....turns out he was a bum bathing in the ocean, he starts drinking an empty caprisun out of the garbage(that's what tipped me off to him being a bum). Caprisun bum and his friend start talking to this ghetto looking lady that tells them they have a tent down on the beach and the Caprisun bum's friend his like hey can we join you and the ghetto lady is like yeah man! So me and Kathi are getting more and more creeped out by the minute of this place! When we get back the computers are up and running but we decide to call my mom anyways, my mom travels a lot so she had 2 free nights at a Marriott hotel. We tell her we feel like we are going to get murdered or raped at this creepy hostel so she helps out and we only stayed 2 nights in San Diego in a nice fancy Marriott Hotel! After the first day there things went much more smoothly, we went to Sea World, Coronado Island, and Seaport Village! It was really fun and bottom line don't stay in a hostel in the United States, this one was worse than the worst hostel I stayed in in Europe! But we got a free dinner out of it!

Here are pictures from San Diego:

Ocean Beach