A World in White Gets Underway

Greetings from the past! It's still 2008 here. All of you 2009 people are just jumping the gun. Ah, 2008, we shall miss you. You were a year of many funny things, which I shall not talk about for ages and ages and ages, because there were a lot of them. But there were things like these:

But why am I telling you these things? You were all there for them. I should probably bring some fresh news.

Okay, after all the massive Christmas shopping and feasting was over, we went into the Grand Chateau de Versailles. I've been into the park like four times now, it's so massive. But this time we were seeing the main bit. Man, were those people rich. Every ceiling is painted with some mythological figure, there's a massive chandelier in every room, everything is painted in gold leaf, it's insane. Right now, there's also an art exhibition there of this dude, Jeff Koons, who does all these weird statues. Like this, for example.That is a porcelain statue of Michael Jackson and his monkey, in the middle of the Grand Chateau de Versailles. The majority of Versaillians hate the exhibition. I can see where they're coming from, giant stautes of pink balloon dogs don't really match the decor.As I mentioned last time, I went to the Eiffel Tower. Apparently, at this time of year, and in this part of the country, the temperature is usually around 5-10 degrees. It is extremely rare for it to be as cold as it is now, where it is consistently between about -2 and 3 degrees. Lucky us. It is also extremely lucky that we decided to buy tickets that only let you use the stairs of the Eiffel Tower, and not the elevator, as the tickets were cheaper and the line was shorter. So we climbed all the 668 odd steps to the second storey. It was just about the coldest I've ever been. Especially since the sun was setting. Pretty, though. But it was too cold to keep climbing, so we snuck onto the elevator going down. We planned to pretend to be Finnish if they checked our tickets. Not my idea. Luckily they didn't.
We also went to see Australia the other day. Without subtitles, I didn't quite get the entire plot, I was just muchly amused to watch David Wenham and Hugh Jackman talk, with french coming out. Also, the number of times people kept syaing "Mrs Boss" with a french accent was funny. And the french voice-over lady trying to imitate Nicole Kidman trying to sing 'Somewhere Over the Rainbow'. Oh, David Wenham, why you gotta be so shifty? It would've been nice to hear some good old Strine, but oh well.

The kids here got a Wii for Christmas. Some friends lent them some games, too. I come halfway around the world, and what do I do? I play Brawl.

We're going off to a NYE party tonight in Paris, man, it's going to be so freaking cold. But who knows, maybe they'll have brownies.
--Caitlin