Pictures!

Everyone loves a lil photo action:


Jeff is next to me, then Dianna then Christian.


Vogueing at Universal Studios


Exhausted at Sea World. Did you know Sea World is owned by Anheuser-Busch? Yea! They have a beer house where guests over 21 are entitled for 2 free beers. Luckily for us, there were 3 bartenders. (Well, lucky for Jeff and Christian, since I don't drink beer and Christian is underage, hah!)


Dreaming of home...


Jeff takes cool shots. Sometimes.




Old man Jeff




One night at the beach, I felt something crawl on my leg. Look who it was!






I was so ecstatic!




No comment.


My coworkers. Magic Kindgom.


Jeff standing next to a woman on stilts. He's a lil on the tall side.

All pics located here.

Best Western is neither the best nor western. Discuss.

That was the worst hotel I have ever stayed in. My bathtub had just been painted (who knew people paint bathtubs, seriously?) and my entire room smelled of paint fumes. I asked to change but that complex was completely sold out and I wanted to stay near the 92 Italian kids that we were in charge of. So I opened the window (the only window) in my room that allowed a solid 2 inch aperture to "air out" my room. Of course, the bathroom was the furthest room from the window. Productive. I think I stayed in my room a total of 4 hours anyway that night, since I stayed with one of my coworkers who got sick that night. Jeff's room essentially didn't have a functioning bathroom, with a toilet that didn't flush and a shower drain that didn't drain. Dianna's room smelled like moldy cheese, some of our keys stopped working. You get the picture.

By the way, Dirty Jobs on Discovery Channel-- love that show. I fell asleep watching it and subsequently had a dream I was cleaning out a trommel. (Look it up.) It was strangely cathartic.

Orlando. Lord, what is there to say about this city? The part where most people stay is called International Drive (ie, the people that come for the theme parks.) It's just chock full of hotels, semi-fast food restaurants (ala TGIFs, Applebees, Toni Roma's, etc etc etc), ghetto convenient stores, and unkempt 99 cent Disney souvenir stories.

Although one thing that was a cool site: Wonderworks, if only for the architectural design alone (we didn't actually go in, just passed it while on the bus.) It's one of the few (if only) upside-down designed buildings in the world. It's worth a look.

Randomness that makes mouths happy

Some of my favorite things found on the internet:





953 Amazon.com Reviews of Tuscan Whole Milk, 1 Gallon

PeopleFallingOver.com/

RUUUUNNNNNN!!!!!! GET TO DA CHOPPA!!!!!!!!!!!

Rubbroll

Woo-woo, know what'm sayin?

Holy F***ing S^^@, it's a dinosaur, Jesus Christ, wtf


(haha, you just got rick roll'd!)

In case you're wondering, mom....

...I do miss home-cooked food, preferably prepared from scratch by you or me. It just needs to be made in front of me, not in some back kitchen of the Deviltown dining facility or a restaurant in downtown Vero. (Yea, we don't have a kitchenette in our suites-- a microwave and a mini-fridge. I'm actually a pro at microwave cooking now... Right, so now not only will I get skin cancer but also some type of cancer that nuking food promotes. Faaaantastic.)

The good news is that my legs are thinner; the bad news is that my tummy is fatter, as a result of too many starches since they don't offer me vegetarian options at the dining hall. I've resorted to skipping out on meals completely from the dining hall and eating yogurt with nuts and fruit, protein bars, and veggie patties, popcorn and a variety of other such foods that I can stick in the nuker, etc.

I swear, I'm ready to commandeer anyone's kitchen and cook up a feast for my coworkers Jeff, Christian and Dianna. Just 'cause I think they're so great. And that's the number 1 redeeming quality about my month-long stay here in Deviltown. :)

More Reasons Why I Hate Florida

Florida has to be the worst state in the Union. Ok, maybe 3rd or 4th, next to Mississippi, Alabama and give or take Arkansas. I really do love my job here but if someone told me I would never be able to see Florida ever again, I'd shake their hand firmly, slap them on their right shoulder blade, and with a shit-eating grin say "Thank You" in as many languages as I can spit out.

Let me explain why I'm here before I tell you all about Florida and the Floridiots that inhabit this state.

I'm currently working as a counselor and ESL teacher (English as a Second Language, for you special ones out there) for Rider University /Study Tours. Study Tours is the 2nd largest study abroad program in the world. (Don't ask me who no.1 is, I don't know.) Rider University is in Lawrenceville, NJ, about an hour and a half west (and slightly south) of NYC. (So that's why I had an apartment in Ewing, the town next to Lawrenceville, both of which are suburbs of Trenton and Princeton.) Anyway, kids from all across Europe (including the Middle East) come over to New York/Florida for 2-week blitzes of 3-hour ESL lessons 5 days a week and excursions 6 to 7 days a week. The kids are generally awesome. We miss them when they leave.

And now, onto my seemingly infinite list of "More Reasons Why I Hate Florida"... Enjoy:

• Because the breath-taking amount of obese people (their breath, not yours) is truly disgusting.
• Because in the supermarket, a single serving packet of celery, baby carrots, ranch dip and cubes of cheddar cheese came to over $5 whilst two jumbo chocochip cookies were $1. (See bullet point above this.)
• Because Disney World's Magic Kingdom only has 2 decent rides: Splash Mountain and Space Mountain (wow, good job with the name creativity, Disney.) I honestly can't understand why anyone above the age of 9 would want to come to Disney World at all. No, really. (Tower of Terror at MGM studios really is a cool ride though.)
• Because Space Mountain still looks like a roller coaster from the early 1980s, complete with a picture of a flying Chips-AHoy chocolate chip cookie posing as a meteor flying across space in the makeshift planetarium once you're inside the building waiting to get on the ride.
• Because SeaWorld's rollercoaster is named "Kraken." What kind of friggin name is that?! You couldn't think of a better one? Christ, people. Get me back to Mountain Creek and Six Flags. This crap sucks.
• Because there are usually no waves in the ocean, lots of sharks and other teeny, annoying little fish that like to run into you like a person who doesn't think there's a screen door in front of them (and then leaves some flaky skin from his nose sticking onto the screen like a greasy hand print on glass.)
• Because outside Miami (a city which I dually despise), West Palm Beach and Naples, there are no truly good restaurants nor lounges where one. Care for a meal? There's an Applebees around the corner. Ugh.
• Because nearly every store here belongs to a mega-corporation. The megalo- and agoraphobia-inducing strip malls absolutely sprawl across this god-forsaken state.
• Because the confederate flag is a daily sighting here. On t-shirts, front lawns, car windows and, if they had their way about it, on dollar bills, too.
• Did I mention all the horrifyingly fat people?
• Because the bugs are fucking HUGE. (Good thing the mosquitoes are slow though, stupid greedy fuckers. Jeff smashed one today with a soccer ball and human blood inside it splatted against the car seat. Did you know they would continue to suck blood until they die? Horrid little creatures. I mean, are they really a necessity to the natural order of things?)
• Because at midnight on the dot, every single night, Deviltown sprays all the lawns with recycled water. Guess what recycled water is recycled from? (Hint: it's not your sink or your shower.) I've been accidentally sprayed twice while trying to make a mad dash back to my suite. Talk about being shit on. Let's not even talk about the smell.
• Because the heathens that run Deviltown refuse to schedule the sprinklers any later than 12.

Just for shits and giggles, can anyone tell me what Arachibutyrophobia is? (Without using the internet or a dictionary, damnit!)

I'm sure there will be many more reasons published herein as to why I hate Florida. I'm just posting on 5 hours sleep. Naptime before Group 2 arrives tonight.

Ground Zero Beach

Vero Beach, FL: You've probably never heard of the town, but for the past three weeks, I've been living in a hotel suite at Dodgertown (where the LA Dodgers practice baseball) in Vero Beach. The not-so-affectionate nickname for it is Zero Beach. Self-explanatory.

It's about half way between Orlando and Miami, for one. But there's one big, big reason why VB is infamous: Next door to Dodgertown is a municipal airport complete with a flight training school named FlightSafety. Ring a bell yet? No?

Flight Safety Academy is the school that trained the 9-11 hijackers to fly.

Both the school and Dodgertown are bankrupt and desperately to sell themselves to anyone who will take it-- all of it. Brief description of Deviltown: 60s motel-model complex where the ball players stay and practice during the off-season but has now become a conference center, consisting of an atrocious dining hall complete with a Soup Nazi, two very pungent buildings bursting of moldy odors resulting from a constant war between the humidity vs the AC. Both buildings contain room of random sizes named after famous dead Dodgers baseball players with absolutely zero technology, save a Post-It board on an easel. At the beginning of next year, Dodgertown will no longer have the Dodgers, as they are moving away.

What will they do with all those plaques, signs, memorials, and shrines to the Dodgers?