Day 1

Right, so here is my account of the twenty two days that made up my contiki holiday around Europe. I have tried to cover all the things that were defining moments to me on the trip as well as fitting it all together in chronological order.

The people that made up the crew were mainly gap students doing a year of work in schools in England mainly from Australia and South Africa. There were also a couple of Kiwis, Koreans, Taiwanese girls, Poms and a Canadian. Notable people from the tour were:
South African trio that I hung out with a fair bit – François, Karl and Michael. Michael was called Stats as his last name was Statharkis, but it was misprinted on the contiki shirt as Stags – so that’s what I called him. He was really funny, but subdued.
Jaya – a thirty three year old Indian girl who works in Dubai – I talked to her a fair bit over the trip.
Caitlin – Stopped in Europe on the way to Canada to do a year exchange – she’s a maths major
Taz – A girl from a small town in SA, Chefs apprentice, good fun.
Laura and Sherry – two Taiwanese girls that spoke a limited amount of English, but enough to have a conversation with – Stags and I played around with them a fair bit.
Rhian and Jo - two pommy school mates who travelled together – Jo got ‘friendly’ with Harley on the trip so I hung out a fair bit with Rhian towards the end. Both good fun.

Day 1:
After leaving my Great Aunts place at five thirty in the morning I made it to the hotel where we were departing with five minutes to spare and boarded the coach. No one sat next to me which was a little disappointing, but I got chatting to a girl behind me from South Australia who was spending her gap year over hear working in a school as were as it turned out about half of the rest of the people on the tour. As we headed out of London Christina our tour manager who looked a lot like Sandy from Grease and had her general fun and up beat and friendly persona gave a quick spiel about what we were likely to expect on the trip – how monuments and other things that we were keen to see could well be covered in scaffolding and that Europe wasn’t always sunny and did rain a fair bit, and that if any of this did happen we were to accept it all and say ‘O well’, and that things in Europe were likely to be different to what we are used to – food, customs, sleeping quarters and that this was ‘not wrong, just different’ – these two sayings were repeated frequently along the trip, and did help things run smoother and stopped people whinging a lot. Towards the end of the trip I started to sit next to Rhian who is from England and I ripped on her a fair bit for being a whinging Pom, so she made a concerted effort to try and avoid the stereotype – the ‘O well’ saying helped her a lot there.
After driving past the place where golf was invented, we arrived at the white cliffs of Dover and got our passports checked and headed off to France via the ferry. While in Paris i saw the Louve, Arc de Triumph (the most hectic round about in the world!) and my highlight of Paris and almost of the whole trip – the Cabaret show. The Moulin Rouge was pretty close to the Nouvelle Eve (the name of the show that we were seeing) but is apparently twice as expensive. The price kept a lot of people from our trip from attending and, as it was only about 14 people went. The others missed out big time. The signing and dancing was all pretty impressive, as I have never seen so many long legged, bare breasted women before – but what really made the show worth while were the other performers, clowns, magicians and jugglers. These two brothers were juggling on stage doing lots of fancy through the legs tricks and so on and it was all pretty impressive, then they called for a volunteer from the slightly intoxicated, mainly Australian crowd. A typical Aussie larrikin stepped up laughing and yelling to his mates, and joked around when the brothers put a broad brimmed had on his head, one armed glasses on his face and a cigarette in his mouth and told him to sit very still on a chair. He continued to joke around as the brothers threw the juggling pins within 10cm of the back of his head to each other, it wasn’t until they started throwing them in front of his head that he stopped moving entirely and the colour drained from his face and the cigarette in his mouth began to quiver. The brothers threw the pins closer and closer to the Aussie bloke until one of the pins knocked the hat right off his head, and then knocked the quivering cancer stick right out of his mouth. By this time the volunteer’s eyes were wide open and he looked terrified as he knew what they were going to try next – I too was dumbfounded, surely they could not knock the sunglasses right off his face, but sure enough they did, perhaps even just nicking the volunteers nose in the process, and me and the group of guys that I was sitting with all stood up to applaud, as that stunt was certainly worth it.