I come back to the U.S. in about 3 weeks, my plane ticket has been bought! :) I am so excited!!
July 23rd I arrive in NYC... from there I still have some more planning to do haha... Buffalo, Cleveland, Erie, Detroit and Marquette are all mandatory stops :D I can't wait to see you all!!

on second thoughts, perhaps i can post the link on here? hold on, i will try it right away.

FINALLY!

i posted my pictures on facebook. i think that's where i'll be posting them from now on. i can upload whole folders at once (instead of 5 at a time) and even with 12 times the pictures, it's MUCH faster!!! :)
right now, there are 60 pictures of belfast, 60 of london and 60 of dublin. i still plan on posting rome and barcelona and a bunch more too sometime this week. you can either find me on facebook yourself (i think you have to be a facebook user in order to do this) OR if you send me your e-mail address i can just send you the links to the albums from now on so you don't have to sign up for anything at all. alishamcmahon@gmail.com
i'm sooo happy summer is coming!

FML

I hate blogs. I hate facebook. I hate Walgreens. I think it might be quicker if you just buy a plane ticket and come see them yourself. I am so mad right now...

i didn't forget. i tried uploading pictures 3x in the last 20 mins... no luck. i'll try again tomorrow.

Spain/Italy

I promise I will load pictures tomorrow of my past 2 trips. I just got back home from Italy tonight, and I am so tired! It was an awesome vacation though and I saw absolutely EVERYTHING I wanted to see :) So many beautiful pictures.
And just as a side note to everyone: I want to say I'm really very sorry for being so bad at updating this. I know it's been almost 2 months (and this is really the only communication anyone ever gets from me) and I'm terrible at updating it. Just know that even if I don't write and post all the time (or seemingly never) I still think of you often and you'll have tons of pictures and things to see/hear about when I get back! Plus, I'm mailing a lot of you postcards tomorrow (if I have your address that is!) to make up for it. Love, Alisha

Over 60 pictures posted in the last 24 hrs

Lots of updates... make sure you check the older posts to see the pictures I just put up of Christmas Eve and even before that!
I'm going to Barcelona, Spain this weekend so I should have even MORE new pictures to post by next week as well!
I hope you all had a wonderful Christmas and will have a great 2009. I missed my family and friends a great deal especially these past couple of weeks... it didn't even feel like the holidays without you, but I had a fantastic time. I hope you enjoy the pictures. Lots of love, Alisha.

The pictures I didn't get to take

Oh yeah, I also saw Les Invalides, and the tomb where Napoleon is buried. The Georges Pompidou building as well. But, I ran out of room on my phone to take pictures (and I didn't bring my laptop to upload them)! I'm going to try and get a memory card soon so I can stop taking pictures with my cell phone.

New Years Eve

I rang in 2009 in Geneva
A delicious fruity cake we bought and ate with our friends for dinner before going out! It was sooo good!
It finally snowed in Thoiry (there was snow when i got back from Paris on the 29th)!

The Louvre!

The Louvre... the tour books aren't lying when they say this is the best museum in the world. Literally, I think I could spend 8 hours a day every day for a month in the museum and never get bored or see the same things twice. There's everything from Ancient Egyptian and Roman art to Da Vinci to Picasso to a wing of the Louvre untouched and preserved from when it was a 14th century castle originally. There are sculptures and paintings. Hundreds of paintings 20 ft by 40ft high and wide that are so huge and realistic that they must've taken a lifetime apiece to complete. It was so overwhelming. You're not supposed to take any pictures, but I snuck a few of the hallways and the Mona Lisa with my phone.

Just two of your average Louvre ceilings (seriously!)

The Mona Lisa.

The Opera, riding the Metro, and Harry's New York Bar

The Opera (during the day, dusk, and night). My friends' hotel (where I stayed for some of the nights) was right by it.


We took the metro everywhere (especially from the house where I stayed for Christmas).
This is a picture from inside Harry's New York Bar. I was incredibly excited to see this place... some of my favorite people (including F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, George Gershwin, etc) actually drank and wrote here. It's just amazing to think I've now been in the exact same place they once were. Living history.

A sea of people walking the Champs Elysees.
This picture is for my mom. (She loves Godiva chocolates, and who would've thought they even exist in Paris... although I'm sure real homemade Parisian chocolate is much better.)
These are the HIGH HIGH HIGH end boutiques.
Like, we're talking Dior in this area is cheap stuff... I saw a store that sold nothing but gloves and upward of 1000 Euros (more than 1300 or 1400 USD) at that.

Notre Dame

A few of the gargoyles.

I keep forgetting to tell you this was my first Christmas without SNOW!

Flowers outside the bus stop on Dec 26th!

The Seine.

A glimpse of the Eiffel Tower as seen from the Pantheon.

The Champs Elysees and ice skating

The Champs Elysees on Christmas Night which was just PACKED with people EVERYWHERE!



A huge palace/building with ice skating outside that reminded me of Rockefeller Center in NY :)

General Blog tips you may or may not know:

1. I always neglect to mention (for I often assume most of you guys already know) that to see the pictures much bigger than they are all you have to do is click on them!
And 2. the link at the bottom that says "older posts" or whatever is to view previously posted pictures.

Le Pantheon (where Voltaire is burried)

The inside was amazing too, but they wouldn't let you take pictures :(

The Eiffel Tower

Honestly, I always thought the Eiffel tower was a little bit ugly and kind of plain. I was pleasantly surprised though by it's non-radio tower like appearance. Not at all what I thought. The detail is actually very pretty up close. It has a bunch of scrolls in the iron work and decoration when you see it in person that I'd never seen anyone capture in pictures. I really don't see why everyone always takes the far away shots of the whole monument. The detailing is much prettier!