back to our regularly scheduled program

For Spring Break, I will be hanging out in New York and London before heading off to Paris.

I know I previously mentioned my aversion to being a tourist, but this is kind of legit.

For one, I will be going with my boyfriend. I probably won’t be seeing him very often over the next year, so we decided to go somewhere special in the little time that we have. “Going somewhere special” is harder than it sounds if you’re a pair of busy college students who live on-campus (even if he does have a car).

Secondly, I will meeting a friend in London (he’s doing Stanford in Paris, too) to see a play called Equus. (It’s the one that features Harry Potter in the buff.) We’ve been planning this for a while. Tourism isn’t so bad if it isn’t your main reason for traveling.

Thirdly, I haven’t been to NYC in a while (since the beginning of last summer) and I miss it tons. My parents moved from New Jersey to California soon after I started attending Stanford, so I haven’t had many chances to visit my East Coast friends since then. And my guy got tickets to Avenue Q and Spamalot so I’m excited.

We’ve got the flights and most of the theater arrangements. The thing is,

we don’t have any hotel reservations yet.

Yikes? Yeah. I’m working on it. We have a no-hostel and no-sketchy place agreement, so it’s gonna be pricey. Here are my booking resources:

New York:
LiveJournal – nyc_for_free
NY craigslist – Manhattan: sublets/temporary
Time Out:New York – hotels
hotels.com – NYC last-minute deals
and just plain word of mouth.

London:
Expedia hotels
Time Out:London – hotels
Frommer’s Europe on $70 a Day (from the library)
Frommer’s online guides – London (hotels)
The London Bed & Breakfast Agency Limited
and some more word of mouth.

If you have any more ideas, please do tell me.

how the hell do i get the money to do this, anyway? part two

WordPress is pretty sneaky– and very wise– in preventing people from using form HTML to post buttons and little images on their blogs. Their main reason for doing this was to prevent security breaches, but as a bonus it also prevents cluttered-looking blogs filled with ads.

Because of this, I had to find some ways to get a few moneymaking links in here without being too pushy with the affiliate ads. And it’s worked beautifully, except for the part where some sites ask for you to mail or fax them W-9 forms before you can get your checks. But hey, I’m be willing to drop a few cents and a lot of my personal information to make a few bucks. (College students are desperate.)

The following plugs are also conveniently located on the sidebar underneath the pretty pictures. (For everything, please click on the links so I can get referral fees if you buy something, okay?)

Here they are so far, one by one:

- Make a PayPal donation to the “Help Bianca Stay Off Parisian Streets” Fund.

I’ve got PBS-like incentives for you to donate:

$3. If you donate three US dollars or more and include your e-mail address in the ‘Notes’ section of the payment form, you get an e-postcard made from a picture I’ll take somewhere in Europe.

$5. If you donate five dollars or more and include a mailing address, you get a postcard from somewhere in Europe.

$10. If you donate ten dollars or more and include a mailing address, you get a short letter and a used ticket stub of some sort, probably from the Paris Métro or a movie or museum. I supposed you can suggest what kind of stub you want, but I won’t make any guarantees that I can get it.

$25. If you donate twenty-five dollars or more and include your e-mail and instructions in the Notes section, I will send you a picture(s) of myself doing your bidding in an area of Paris of your choosing. Caveats: It can’t require money to do, it can’t be adult content, and it shouldn’t involve me having to risk my life and limb in any way.

$30. If you donate thirty dollars or more with your e-mail and instructions in the Notes section, I’ll do the $25 thing and send you a thirty-second video of me doing it.

- Buy something from Amazon.com by clicking on the link! Seriously, you can buy almost anything, as long as it’s in your shopping cart within 24 hours of clicking on the link (and before clicking on anyone else’s referral links). I get paid in Amazon gift certificates, but it’s better than getting a $15 deduction for sending a check to my house. I also happen to use Amazon a lot for buying my textbooks.

- Buy something from Skype, like a SkypeIn number to take calls online, SkypeOut to make calls online (just get Skype Credit), any number of Skype or Wifi phones, headsets, webcams and other accessories. Since it’s so dirt cheap to make calls through Skype, I’ll probably be using this tons when I’m in Europe.

- Shop at ThinkGeek, which has a great collection of such amazingly geeky stuff. An LED binary clock? Yeah, they’ve got it. I personally love their adorable plush microbes. The common cold I think is the cutest.

- Shop at YesAsia, the Amazon.com of Chinese, Japanese and Korean popular music and videos. The latest Oricon hits? They’ve got ‘em, ready for delivery to those of you in the U.S. and Canada (and beyond!). They’ve also got DVD boxed collections of the latest shows, such as my favorite cheesy Korean drama Goong (a.k.a. Palace, a.k.a. Princess Hours– I don’t know why it has so many names).

- Buy a BustedTees shirt through the link. They’re funny shirts that are usually puns or college-type jokes. (My boyfriend got his “Jesus Hates the Yankees” shirt from here. I don’t hug him when he wears it. :) Threadless is also a good place for these kinds of shirts with maybe more cool wordless designs, but unfortunately they don’t have an affiliate program.

- Get something from CafePress. It’s a bunch of personalized merchandise, so you can even make your own. They have better-quality shirts than Zazzle and are more established than Printfection.

Once I mail out some W-9s, there’ll be more of these to come. I pretty much like all of the stuff that I’ll be an affiliate of, so don’t be afraid to click ‘n’ buy.

bitching about passports and visas

Before I begin to recount this long tale of frustration and woe, I have to note three things that are directly attributable to me that definitely didn’t help my situation.

1. I don’t have a driver’s license.

2. I procrastinated on applying for my visa and passport until pretty much the last possible moment.

3. I put off logging my work hours for months at a time, so that prevented me from being paid, which prevented me from getting my money into my debit card.

Anyway.

Once upon a time I got accepted into a program called Stanford-in-Paris (colloquially), and they gave me step-by-step instructions on how to apply for a six-month visa if I wanted a temporary residence permit (carte de séjour). Unfortunately, I didn’t look at these instructions until about five weeks before my departure date, so my visa appointment at the French consulate is slated for maybe three days before I leave for New York, then London, then Paris. (Yep, I’m doing the touristy thing for Spring Break, but that’s mostly not my fault. More on my itinerary later.)

On top of that, my passport was set to expire next January while I wanted to stay in France until next March, so my mother told me to get an expedited passport renewal. It’s about $200 and was supposed to take about two weeks. But when I got to the post office to do it exactly two weeks before my appointment with the French Consulate, I discovered I was lacking a few key things:

- A driver’s license or state ID. (I’d just applied for a state ID the week before, but it still hadn’t come in the mail.) If you don’t have this, you need to bring someone you’ve known for 2+ years and who does have valid ID. I had to bring my mother to sign an affidavit that claimed I was legit.

- Cash. You need either a debit card or cold, hard cash to pay for the damn thing. (Credit cards not accepted.) I also had to get my mother to front the money, but that’s how she rolls anyway.

Once I gathered the materials (and person), I returned an hour later to the post office to finally get my passport renewed. (It’s sort of like an RPG!) But get this: they’d JUST gotten a fax from the San Francisco Passport Agency that said expedited passports no longer take 2 weeks, but 3-4. They got this fax literally ten minutes before I got my mom to come to campus to sign the affidavit.

I don’t know whether that was a godsend or someone up there’s idea of a joke, but the deal was called off and I’m renewing my passport from France… once I get my temporary residence permit and can mail my passport (with the 6-month visa still in it) back to the US for renewal without fear of deportation.

And besides, I signed up for a visa appointment online with the SF French Consulate under my old passport number, and if they discovered that I got a new one in the meantime things might get complicated.

Funny how things work out sometimes.