Travelin Monkey

Punta Del Este is a fantastic spot. The couple of days I spent there, mostly in Maldonado which is 5 km out of the Punta Del Este center, I saw 5 brazilian cruise ships show up and fill the area with Brazilians. In general, this is the rich area of South America. All the wealthy (and I mean WEALTHY) Argentineans and Brazilians show up for the summer here and either rent out apartments, cabins, or houses or go to the ones they own for the summer. They have a mini-harbour area with 5 clubs and bars next to each other, sorta like how it is in Boston. The area is relatively well priced when compared to Europe and the US, but in terms of South American prices, it’s expensive. In Montevideo you can get a 2 liter jug of sangria for about $100 pesos. In Punta Del Este, you are paying roughly $350 pesos for the same thing.

They have two beaches, La Brava and La Manza. La brava is similar to zuma, lots of waves, deep water, but very warm Atlantic water as opposed to Pacific. That beahc is usually full of the people that are staying around Punta Del Este centro.? La Manza is the calm beach, there usually isn’t a single wave, the water is mostly dead like a lake and rather shallow. This area is usually occupied by the people staying in Maldonado. Unfortunately, topless sunbathing isn’t and hasn’t ever been a fad in South America, althought I did find two women partaking in such pleasures. Fortunately, the women here tend to have smaller breasts than the American counterparts, but lucious, curvacious butts that they are NOT afraid to show off. Most women are in thongs at the beach, or really tiny itty bitty bikinins that might as well be called thongs!

Makes for some good times.

We left today to go pick up my sister’s boyfriend from the airport, but the dumbass missed his flight. He was flying on Copa Airlines, that has flights that leave at midnight. He was told to go to the airport at midnight on the 4th, which would be the 3rd at night going into the 4th. The dumbass misread everything and ended up thinking his flight was on the 4th at night leading into the 5th.

We are staying in Montevideo for a couple of days? to show him around. I had made reservations at Mercado Del Puerto for the 6th of January, the ‘three wise men’ day that they celebrate here in south america, but since the dumbass lost his flight, he wasn’t there. We got hammered yet again and went to pick him up with the worst hang over of our lives. We left to go dancing at 2 am, but I’ll leave that part of the story for later.

What can I say to sum up the last 24 hours?? Not much.. we have about 2 gigs worth of videos from last night and when we get back, we are going to splice everything together and make a DVD of this ridiculousness that we have lived…

It all started with 4 guys renting a car, following the games from country to country. No one thought much of anything when Ger beat Sweden. We all didn’t think much more when Argentina beat Mexico. But, then France won when we were in Strausberg, Italy won when we were in Milan, and we started to see a trend here…

Next, France beat Brasil in Nice` and we were on FIRE!! Paris saw Portugal and Germany’s defeat to the hands of the finalists, and I immediately looked at koko and said “Buddy, we HAVE to go to Rome. There is no doubt that ROME is the place for us!!”

And so we did as we felt proper. 2 days of tourist activities later, the big day was upon us. In sheer Romanesque activities, we feasted on pizzas, pastas, beer, wine, fruits, and ice cream in prepapration for the debauchery that would follow. A nap later, out came the 1 liter bottle of grey goose that would make its way with us to the Circo Massimo (circus maximus). The trains were packed, the people were ready… at MINIMUM 100,000 spectators (later we found out it was a grand total of 200,000 people) were all in front of 3 huge TVs. Standing up, all around the grassy fields…

Then it started… No one could believe that at minute 6 France already had a penalty kick in. But what a come back!! We all knew that it HAD to go to penalties. That would be the only way to settle this right; no cheap calls, no cheap goals. Just straight one on one….

We have every goal on video, with about 200,000 people chanting, screaming, and dancing. Like a herd, we made our way down the streets of Rome, past the Colloseum and to the major center where we found a 3 story water fountain. We hung out with the Italians and made friends with some girls, all of us drunk of our asses because grey goose was no more. The girls were dripping wet and we had no idea why, when they said “go to the fountain”

About 20-30 men and women stripped down to their underwear were splashing away, partying like they rightfully should!! And within a blink of an eye, all my clothes were off… thrown to raffi to hold and koko was to follow… splashing, partying, yelling off the top of our lungs in the Republica water fountain. We climbed up to the second story of the fountain and began to do more of the same. After a while, kok left leaving just me, rockin out with the Italianos…

Eventually, we all got clothed and continued through the melee of people looking for more action. There were a couple of problems:

1. we had no map (again)…
2. there were no buses, no taxis, and no metro..
3. somehow we had to walk our way from the colloseum to vatican city (picture walking from pier 39 to mount sutro) and then find the hotel!!
4. at around 4 am… we were all tired of walking, tired of partying.. and luckily found a taxi..

He screwed us hard with the price, but we still had about 10 km left in our walk and we gladly paid everything…….

And that is how the Road to the World Cup 2006 came to an end… When I graduated high school in 1998, I saw France beat Brazil in Paris, and with envy I looked upon the streets of Paris at the party and riots that were to follow. In 2002, I graduated undergrad and spent a month watching all the games from 6 am until 11 am. In Las Vegas, for the Fra vs URU game, at the bellagio sports bar, at 2 am I looked at sayat and said “in 4 years I will be a doctor and you will have your masters, lets celebrate with style, Germany 2006″ … 4 years later, here I am…

what an adventure!

next stop…. Amsterdam! WOO HOOO

soooo…. France is in the finals eh? When this whole thing started in early June, I never expected to see France vs Italy.. they took out some very strong teams, but I still don’t agree with that penalty kick on Portugal. How many francs does it cost to get you to the finals?? Ask Zidane… Benny boy, I bet you are happy

Imagine being in the Charles Stadium in Paris with 50,000-60,000 fans erupting when Zidane made that goal, then having the riot police show up 45 minutes after the game ended. It was RIDICULOUS. That same day, we booked flights to Rome from Frankfurt, went to bed at 1 am because the stupid hotel we chose had a curfew and it wouldn’t open the doors until 5 am, which was too late for us because we needed to drive 500 km to Frankfurt in the morning to make the stupid flight!!!

So, we burnt the day traveling, but Rome, ROME here we come!! OHHH and we made it on French TV rioting in the stadium. That’s the third time we made it on tv rioting, but you guys would never be able to see us..

Thats all France has from me. Now it is the buffangulos and the bambinas all the way !!! By the way, we have guessed right for 5 straight games on the winners, atteding the country who we thought would win the match I guess Italy already owns the title!!

It just gets crazier..

We left Nice towards Marseille and were looking for something to do, when 2 asses decided to car jack us. We were driving around when I noticed a guy wearing a white Armani Exchange shirt in a bad part of town, who crossed in front of our car really slowly. I thought this was strange and locked all the car doors, but my South American experience should have taught me better. We had hit the red light because of that and some guy showed up on the driver side, trying to open the car doors. He ended up taking our hub cap off, and when I opened the door to get it, the other guy wearing the Armani Exchange shirt who was apparently hiding behind the car, went in the car and took the GPS system bag. I pulled the emergency brake, push the other kid’s head into the car and ran after the punk with the bag. I caught him thanks to a local, and start to beat the crap out of him until he let go of everything. His friend started to run away, but decided to come back and I ate a knee to the face and ended up getting a black eye. But well worth it.

From there, I ran to the car with kok sitting in it with all our stuff. People were yelling things in French, I had no idea what they were saying, nor did I care. We immediately left to Lyon. It is like milan, a big shopping center, but it had this huge amazing church on top of a mountain. We walked up there at night in a thunder storm, which was awesome!! We had an amazing view of the city below us with the river dividing the city from the resteraunt area. You could almost feel the mideivilness of it all.

The next day we came to Paris and spent the day sight seeing until the Ger vs Ita game. GO ITALIA BABY!! What a way to punk the home country!! Because of that game, we are taking Amsterdam and Berlin out of the loop in our travel. After tonight, we are heading towards Frankfurt to return the car early and bought round trip tickets to Rome (thank you RyanAir!). We are going for Italia all the way now GO AZZURRI!! and have our flags waiting for the 9th…

After that, I go off to Amsterdam, koko goes back home, but it gets crazier and crazier here…

This one deserves its own entry..

We met up with raffi & kursh (other friends from los angeles) in Nice. They got there the same day we had and that was their first day on this vacation. We spent the day on the beach, which is gorgeous, and at night watching Englands sorry ass finally leave the tournament (go ronaldo). At night, we went to downtown Nice’ to catch the Fra vs Bra game, all ready to cheer for Brasil. I almost got killed yelling for Ronaldo & Ronaldhino hehe but i would have just told them i was German hahah
Anyhow, NO ONE expected France to win, so we knew the celebration would be NUTS. After searching and searching, we found the chaos in front of the beach. I started jumping into random people’s cars partying with them and going for rides on their hoods. It was very similar to what we saw in Milan, except that this was more chaos. Eventually, we ended up jumping on the hoods of every car that passed by, everyone having a great time (it’s all on tape baby). We had a bottle of Jackie with us and raff & i were getting TRASHED. The funny thing was, the contents of the whiskey bottle were warmer than the actual glass.

Fast forwarding a couple of hours, some drunken ass decided to plow through the crowd with his car and almost hit people going forward & reverse. A guy tried to throw a bottle at the car and ended up hitting the floor in front of me, raff, and kok. Raff was wearing shorts and got shrapnel to the legs, causing a 3 cm x 2 cm gash. Kok and I began our emergency training protocols drunk as all hell. That’s when the ass driver came back around, hit some guy dislocating his shoulder right in front of us, then hitting some other guy on a motorcycle causing him to fly off. This is when the riot police began to come..

We both stabilized Raffi; then I went to help the guy with the dislocated shoulder while kok stabilized the guy from the bike. Once we had all 3 of them under control, i called an ambulance to the scene. 2 riot cops showed up and started to beat the shit out of a rioter on a motorcycle. We needed help, so I decided to go get them… and BAM.. sprayed in the face with mace. I started telling them in broken French that we needed an ambulance and took them to the guys, sneezing and tearing at that point. Once the ambulance came, kok & i took a ride with raff and the other 2 guys to the ER, where they stitched up raff and took care of the other 2. We ended up coming home all bloodied up at 4 am..

What a night…

The next day we headed to Monte Carlo which is AMAZING!!! The drive is definately worth it, and they even had a soccer field over a cliff overlooking the ocean!! There isn’t much to do there, except enjoy it for the day. We also checked out Cannes….. but it is expensive to go on to the really small sandy beached (most of them have huge rocks)

Sandro took off to Moscow and raff & kursh are in Milan right now. Kok and I drove all morning and are in Lyon. Tomorrow we head out to Paris to watch the Fra vs Por game in Paris!!

WOW..

Words can’t express what the last couple of days have been like, but I’ll give it a go….

From Strausberg, we headed towards Switzerland on our way to Italy. We are following the countries we think are going to play and win, so we party with the locals… hehhe

We had some time to kill and didn’t want to drive 12 hours straight to Italy, so we stopped off in Geneva. It’s a neat town, busy during the day but dead at night. There wasn’t much to do there, we spent the day exploring then rested after dinner. We even saw a Haitian group fighting with each other and caught it on tape!

We woke up at midnight, had something to eat, then headed out towads Italy at 3 am. We passed through a 14 km tunnel through Mont Blanc and ended up in Italy. I must say that the contry has done me very well every time I have visited!!

We got to Venice at 9 am, I drove from 4 am until 9 am, spent 3 hours walking around, then headed to the Armo museaum they had there and got a personal tour. It turns out that the guy lived in Argentina for 15 years and knows Adolfo. From Venice we drove to Milan, ate dinner, and crashed early for the debacuhery that would be Italy and Ukraine.

Milan is an amazingly beautiful city. They have a ridiculous castle in the middle of the town with some old churches surrounded by miles and miles of shops. It is like the Rodeo drive of Italy. We found this old church and were randomly exploring, when we crossed a couple having sex in the middle of the grass. Not hidden, secret sex, but straight out the girl was on all 4s in the middle of the park in the middle of the day!! So, I sat down to watch and these idiots started calling me a perv.. to which i responded “they are having sex in front of an old cathedral in the middle of the park in the middle of the day and I am the perv for watching?”

Either way, from there we went to a pub to watch Argentina’s sorry ass lose their way out of the world cup!! Holy shit was everyone mad at me when I started to cheer, especially sandro who almost cried!! hahahahha We left the pub and went to an argentinean steak houe for dinner, where we watched the Ita vs UKR game. Sayat & sandro left to go home because sayats grandpa passed and he was taking an emergency flight back to LA in the morning and sandro didn’t want to party and we needed a driver!!!

sooooooooooo here comes riot #3. First was in Leipzig and the train station, then Strausberg, and now MILAN MILAN MILAN!!!
Italians are CRAZY. I got up on a statue to film and a cop yelled at me to get down. This becomes important later on. From there we started to yell and scream with the people. kok & i bought Italian flags and wore them as capes and started rioting. We blocked off 2 major intersections and were about 5,000 people total in the main square of Milan. We stopped cars and shook the hell out of them, some people even stopped the trolley to the point where the driver called the police for backup, who ended up getting their car destroyed!! We rioted for a while longer and I have some amazing footage of everything, when i saw a camera and decided i wanted to be on Italian tv… So, back we went to the original statue and semi-hoped on it again… the same freakin cop was there and now he wanted to arrest me!!

He asked for my document and i hesitated because i left the uruguayan id in the hotel and all i had was my US passport.. after 5 min he let me go with a warning. The people were growing in numbers and the chaos increasing.? Plus, we were tired and heading to Nice in the morning? So, we decided to go to the hotel.

Problems:
1) the tram we needed to take was the one we all destroyed
2) the metro closes at midnight
3) taxis were on strike
4) we had no map nor any idea where the hell we were!!

It’s interesting how quickly you can pick Italian up!! I eneded up finding a taxi willing to take us to the hotel. The next day we dropped sayat off and headed to Nice in the French Riviera..

I’ll continue the rest in a seperate entry because this one is long enough!!

Typing in every country in Europe is hard because each has a different keyboard setup so i have to fish for letters… and some of them get stuck too..

We made it to France, Strausburg. This is a neat little town that borders Germany. None of us wanted to be in the car 10 hours towards the French Riviera and decided to stop here. Last night we found a cafe that had people watching the game and cheered for Spain. Everything looked good until france came up 3 tors (that is what they call goals here). From there the streets of this small town erupted in singing?and dancing. People stood in a small alley and?we started to shake cars, cheer, and semi-riot. No cops were in sight so we went and found a turkish place to buy bier from. Sayat started to speak in turkish so they gave us a good price..

We spent the rest of the night partying. This one camera guy started to film us? We had no idea why and Sayat was wearing a dodgers?jersey. Koko started to jump up and down, next thing you know, a whole bunch of Frenchies are doing it with us and we are charging towards the camera?man.. hehe This was the first time we made it on tv!

Right now we are waiting for everyone to get dressed so?we can make it down to the French Riviera, after that we are going to Milan to watch Italia play.

where to start…

We got to Leipzig.. and got up for the world cup games.. we ended up in the fifa fan viewing center where we started to drink bier at like 10 am. sandro and sayat decided to leave because they didn’t want to stand around and watch the game, prefering the comfort of a pub, leaving kok and myself there for the Ger vs Sweden game. I had to take a made deuce (shaista), but there were 300 germans waiting in line to go pee at the only porta-potty in the entire place. I tried cutting in line, but that didn’t work out too well and I got booted out. I told kok, “man I have to go or else I will explode,” and we somehow managed to get my ass in the bathroom and he blocked the door, yelling shaista, while I took the quickest deuce of my life. The germans started to bang on the door and yell… then they all cheered when i got out.. the game was unbelievable.. when they scored a goal seeing he germans cheer was ridiculous.

After the game we were set to meet at the train station.. the Germans started to party here also and we joined in on the fun until it was time to go to our game. The match was awesome, very emotional. There were 40,000 mexicans and 3,000 argentineans.. and we were all scared for our safety.. hehe.. we tried everything to get on tv, but no go..

After the game we went to the car, changed and got our stuff at around 1 am and headed to party.. we were out until 6 am, that is when i found out i passed WREBs. We found this mexican girl that drank too much and passed out on the side of the road, unconcious and her friend going crazy. We stabilized her and i started to take vitals and inducing vomiting, her friend called the cops and I got her to vomit… but she also peed all over herself hehe..

From there we hopped on a train to praha (prague).. The first day was mostly sleeping and uneventful. We walked around at night and stuff. The second day we went to watch the games at the pubs and did a city tour, when we randomely bumped into Edward’s ex-girlfriend. We had a blast drinking with her and she showed us around Prague. We left to sleep and woke up today at 6 am to take the train back to prague.

Now we are on our way to France to watch the game and cheer for Spain in France proper..

After a 10 hour flight and a 6 hour search for Sayat in the Frankfurt airport, I went ahead and rented a car by myself. Koko & Sandro weren’t set to get in until 3 pm, Sayat was supposed to get in at 8 am, and me at 9 am. I spent until 1 pm looking for him, then decided to head out on my own in Frankfurt to exchange our tickets, to get tickets under our names. What should have been a 11 km and 5 min ride ended up being a 1 hour ordeal and a 45 km ride. Streets don’t run normally here.

I went back to the airport and found kok & sandro. we looked for sayat for an hour more, then decided to head out and see if he might have missed his flight. He landed at 3 pm, the ass!! Got too drunk and missed his morning flight! So, we hopped in the car with the GPS system named Tom Tom and headed towards Leipzig. Except, we all forgot it was a friday, and after sitting in a plane for 11 hours, standing around in the airport for 6 more, I found myself driving 3 knocked out asses in bumper to bumper traffic for 5 hours towards Leipzig. THE AUTOBON.. I hit 180 kmh with 3 fatasses and all our luggage, and STILL there were cars lapsing me! CRAZY!! (thats like 110 mph guys)..

We made it into leipzig at around 5 pm and started to look for a hotel. This city is like all the other german cities and we doubt we will spend any more time than we need to here. Germany is very open and green, lots of trees, and hardly any buildings.. except when you reach a city and suddenly you have buildings!! There isnt JACK to do anywhere in Leipzig, and the few mexicans and argentineans that are here ATTEMPT to party, but the entire god damn place is closed! We ended up finding a room, thank god, at 10 pm. They wanted $104 euro for the room, 2 people max. So, kok & I registered and found a staircase that opened to the road and snuck sayat & sandro in. We FINALLY had something to eat at MIDNIGHT.. these people didn’t want to eat until we had a place to sleep. That was the BEST meal of my life.. turkish food, good and cheap.

This place is expensive as all hell and we have no where to sleep tonight. Everything is booked, so we are thinking about staying up all night and training it to prague and spending a couple of days there. They dont allow our car in Czech republic and we don’t want to pay the ridiculous euro charge to take it. BTW, no one speaks that well of english, none of us brought a dictionary, Due Hast meinsh doesn’t get you too far.. and thank god for Tom Tom, or else we would have been SCREWED! We also decided to strictly speak armenian to these people, since they hardly understand english or spanish.. at least that way we instill fear!!

After months of planning, we are finally going to do it. Four years ago Sayat and I found ourselves at the Bellagio Hotel in Las Vegas watching Fra vs Uru, about to begin our post-grad education. I looked over and said “Why don’t we celebrate our graduations with style? Let’s go to Deutchland 2006!” And so began the turn of events that led to 4 tickets to Arg vs Mex June 24 and a trip through Europe 2006!!