A-MER-ICA

Alriiiight, I haven't contacted a single soul since I came here. Mostly due to Maddie's laptop being in her car, and her car being mysteriously moved by her friend, thereby removing my access to internet. And it's taken a little bit of time to get my phone up and running; not due to any external difficulties, it's just that spending $40 to get a mobile and 120 minutes of international call time means that you've gotta wait a couple days to get it activated.

If I spoke to any of you about how worried I was at getting through customs, then I was an idiot. Honestly, the guy barely even looked at me, I forgot I had food in my bag and I sent my backpack through a metal scanner with a distinctively shiv-like pen in it and nobody said anything. Hell, when they asked if there was anything to declare, I remembered I had vegemite but the girl didn't even care what that was. Well, she was curious when I said vegemite but as soon as I started talking about it, she just glazed over then said "Whatever, just go through." Funny thing really, I thought it was banned due to riboflavin or whatever. The Whalley ability to make people's eyes glaze over comes in handy sometimes.

First day was really just showing up at DC, having Maddie sweep me off my feet, almost getting lost on the way back to the hotel then heading up to the room. I stayed up as late as I possibly could - five PM - then I crashed. So did Maddie. We both woke up at about midnight, then watched a DVD, then crashed again until about 9am, and sleep has been totally regular since then.

The plane was half great, due to the massive selection of blockbuster movies to watch for free on the back of the chair in front of me, and half terrible, what with the 50 year old Korean man who was acting like a tiny kid and moving the chair back and forth like craaaaaaazy and the fact that they were mostly bad movies. Except for 300 and Meet The Robinsons, which were both great.

I had an American burger. It was greasy and awesome and I totally tipped a dude and the n he said my jeans were cool and they totally were. We took the fries up to the hotel room. We woke up with this giant-ass bag of greasy as hell fries stinking the room up. It kicked ass.

Today, the four of us went to the Smithsonian and we checked out the museum of modern art, which is always fun to do with friends purely for the bullshitting up reasons and motives behind artworks, before heading off the the planes and space museum that had a totally better and more official sounding name, but I can't remember it so it will forevermore be the planes and space museum. It was neat, I saw things that had actually BEEN ON the MOON. Thennnnnnn we went through a bit of another museum and checked out all these things about Americans in history that mean jack diddly to me but the others seemed to like it. I saw a couple famous trumpets though and totally took mobile phone pictures of them. Dizzy Gillespie's trumpet had a weird bend in it. Who knew!

We then went to a DIFFERENT museum (and I took a cell phone picture of the boner statue and of this really pretty art gallery and a couple other places) and saw some stuffed Australian animals and I told everyone how much I'd beat them up. Don't tell the Americans that I totally can't actually beat them up. It'd break my heart.

I need to go do other things now like wash this weird black stain that the metro line put on my hand, and eat a baby ruth chocolate bar, and drink some black cherry rum, and go swim in the hotel pool beause it's like 90 degrees outside. That's really just about 32, so it's not too bad, but it's pretty dang humid here in Washington, D.C.

My phone seems to have just set itself up to be able to do local calls, so I just called Maddie and found out my phone number - here it is including all the numbers you'd need to dial from an Australian phone to get in contact with it. Just write this down and call it to get me, but you totally won't be able to for two more days. It takes two days for international contacting to start up. Don't call me until I call one of you sort of thing.

Anyway; ze number: 0018-1919-946-2565


I asked Maddie how to say "I love you all" in Spanish but she's a girl and girls are pretty dumb. I love you all! Ciao!