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Day 19 Memphis #2

September 1, 2015June 10, 2016SarahLeave a comment

I’m so surprised I made it on to the bus this morning for our tour of Graceland. Considering I didn’t get to sleep until after 5am I feel like I was such a trooper.I really enjoyed our trip to see Elvis Presley’s house. I learnt lots about him and actually came to the realization that he was really good looking back in the day. 😄The tour we did was an audio tour so you wear earphones and they give you each an iPad with directions taking you around the house and outside (you can’t go up to his actual bedroom though)
His daughter still sometimes comes and visits the house too so it’s nice it’s still being used.There’s stables in the backyard where he had his horses and a little memorial garden which he had for meditation but is now the burial site of him. Buried next to him are also his parents and grandmother.After the tour, a few of us went to this diner across the road. I was really hungry as I still hadn’t eaten since the average dinner the night before but when I saw their food I decided against it as it looked so average. A few others decided to get food from there (I’m looking at you Dave & Marisa) but they ended up hating it. Dave had to keep from throwing up in the bus.
Haha! 🙈

Once back on the bus we stopped off at the place that Martin Luther King got shot and I also went to the Rock & Roll museum.
I don’t have any pictures though coz my phone was really low on battery 😐 so here’s some off Google…. 27E7B36E00000578-3050969-image-a-29_1429799939319 2015-08-11-1439328397-7050115-rrmuseum When I’d finished the museum tour (another audio tour) I went and met up with Johnathon for lunch at this place called Slims.
I ordered a grilled cheese sandwich and fries and it was so freaking good I wish I got a photo!

After that we went in search of a liquor store but as it was Sunday none were open 😦
I had a few remaining bottles from the box that broke the day before (that somehow didn’t get smashed) so I went back to the hotel and joined Dave & Benjamin in their room for drinks after having a shower etc…We organised on our Contiki Facebook page to go out for dinner that night (as it was a free night) so 15 of us met up in the lobby and went to Aldo’s Pizza Pies restaurant for pizza.
It was really close to our hotel and the pizza was so good!!After pizza we all went back to Beale Street to watch some live music, have some drinks and then go to the clubs.
It was a Sunday night so it wasn’t as rowdy as the night before but I still got down on the dance floor 🙄

I think I was the only white girl dancing 🙆 haha.
I got to sleep just before 4am I think so a little earlier than the night before haha.

I’m now currently on the bus to New Orleans!
I made the bus just in time. I slept in 😦 so had to quickly rush to the bus without doing my hair or make up haha. There were 2 others as well that made it just as we were about to pull off.
Unfortunately for little Jonathan we left him behind as he didn’t make the bus by 8am.
He’s literally still in Memphis and has to make his own way to New Orleans now. Thank god that wasn’t me!

Day 18 – Memphis

August 31, 2015June 10, 2016Sarah1 Comment

So for this day – I actually wrote a whole blog on my phone and when I exited out of it, it didn’t get saved!!!

You know when you’re so angry you’re like “F*** this!!” and leave it. Well that’s what I’ve done with Day 18.

I will however do a quick re-cap of my first day in Memphis…

That whole Saturday it was pretty much a driving day with a stop off at Little Rock Nine school.
If you’d never heard of ‘Little Rock Nine’ like I hadn’t, it’s a reference to a group of nine African American students enrolled in Little Rock Central High School in 1957 by a lady called Daisy Bates.
The high school was originally an all-white Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas but when these nine students came along, it became the Little Rock Crisis because of their skin color.
In 1896 there was a law passed by the U.S. Supreme Court which stated that there could be schools just for white children and schools just for black children. However, the schools for black children were not as good and people thought this was unfair.

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When the Little Rock Nine turned up to school on the first day (Thanks to Daisy – an American civil rights activist) they got yelled at by other white students and blocked from entering the school by soldiers that the Arkansas governor Orval Faubus hired.
The students obviously hated it and returned home that day in tears.
This is when President Dwight Eisenhower stepped in. He sent the US Army to the school to protect the colored students so they could finally go to school and learn like everyone else.

They did get to study there eventually, but not without being bullied and called names by all the other students. Only 8 of the 9 students made it till the end of the year which I find very brave. I don’t think I could have done it.
However, after that first year the Governor closed all the public high schools in Little Rock as he thought it was better to have no schools at all than have mixed race schools in his town. Many people blamed the Little Rock Nine for this and the racism got even worse.
Obviously that was a very significant moment in history and even though things aren’t perfect today, we have come a long way.

Not all is bad for the Little Rock Nine though, one of the students ended up working for President Jimmy Carter as Assistant Secretary of Labor, Melba Beals became a reporter for NBC news, Thelma earned her master’s degree in Guidance and Counseling and Jefferson Thomas became an accountant for the United States Department of Defense.Once we’d spent a few hours at the Little Rock Center we headed to Memphis to our hotel.
When I got off the bus, I grabbed my bags from under the coach and also my box of alcohol I’d bought in Dallas.
However, as soon as I went to go inside the hotel, the box came apart from underneath and all the bottles smashed to the ground *Sigh* not a good start to Memphis.

As I’m writing this entry nearly a year later (took me awhile to get over this post being deleted obviously) I can’t really remember quite what I did that night.I know we all went out to dinner at this place called Kooky Canuck and it was terrible. I think Contiki usually takes their tour there when they’re in Memphis but it was really horrible. I think we went there because they do a ‘Big Burger Challenge’ where you can sign up to eat a massive burger and fries in a certain amount of time.
They did however have really big alcoholic beverages I enjoyed.After dinner, we walked to Beale Street which is known in Memphis as the heart of all Blues music and entertainment. It’s made up of three blocks of nightclubs, restaurants and shops in the heart of downtown Memphis.It’s one of the coolest places to go if you’re ever in Memphis.We all went to one club but we were literally the only people there (Maybe it was too early)
Myself and another girl Marisa ended up leaving the group to go and explore some other clubs as everyone wanted to stay
I remember we had such a fun night. We were taking Jello Shots and having drinks everywhere we went.
I think I went to sleep really late now that I think of it because I only had a few hours sleep until I had to wake up!

Day 17 – Dallas 2 (Texas)

August 29, 2015June 9, 2016Sarah1 Comment

I had a bit of a sleep in on Friday morning.
A lot of people on my Contiki went to the JFK museum because they were doing the Dallas Cowboy Stadium Tour at 2pm so wanted to get it over and done with earlier.
As I wasn’t, I went at 11.30am with a few other people.The JFK museum was actually pretty interesting. It was an audio tour and talked all about when Mr Kennedy was president, what the public thought of him and how he was assassinated. The museum is actually where they think he was shot from. And when I say ‘think’ it’s because there’s a few conspiracies around who actually shot him.

I don’t know too much about American presidents (as I live in New Zealand and it’s obviously not a big thing for us) but I learnt that John Fitzgerald Kennedy was the 35th President of the United States and he was assassinated at 12:30 p.m on Friday, November 22nd, 1963, in Dealey Plaza. (Which is where the museum is located)
Kennedy was fatally shot by Lee Harvey Oswald while traveling with his wife Jacqueline in a four-door convertible limousine
Untitled-210 Texas Governor John Connally, and Connally’s wife Nellie were also in the car with them but they weren’t hurt. It happened as Nellie (the First Lady of Texas) turned to President Kennedy, who was sitting behind her, and commented, “Mr. President, you can’t say Dallas doesn’t love you,” which President Kennedy acknowledged by replying “No, you certainly can’t.” Those were the last words ever spoken by John F. Kennedy. JFK_Dallas From Houston Street, the presidential limousine made the planned left turn onto Elm Street, allowing it access to the Stemmons Freeway exit. As it turned on Elm, the motorcade passed the Texas School Book Depository. Shots were fired at President Kennedy as they continued down Elm Street. About 80% of the witnesses recalled hearing three shots. John-F-Kennedy-Assassination-Reenactment A minority of the witnesses recognized the first gunshot they heard as weapon fire, but there was hardly any reaction to the first shot from a majority of the people in the crowd or those riding in the motorcade.
Many later said they heard what they first thought to be a firecracker, or the exhaust backfire of a vehicle, just after the President started waving.
I was talking to a girl on my tour and she was saying how apparently when this whole thing happened there was a lady taking photos while standing in the grass and when the gunfire happened she didn’t even move and she kept taking photos but to this day they’ve never found her. So that’s a bit suss…

A ten-month investigation from November 1963 to September 1964 by the Warren Commission concluded that Oswald acted alone in shooting Kennedy.

It’s worth having a look at the museum as you learn quite a bit about this event.
When I was finished, I went back to the hotel and me and another guy Robert (from Germany) who’s on my Contiki, caught the train to a mall 20 minutes away. I was desperate to find some cowboy boots still because we were heading to the Rodeo that night.Unfortunately I never got any 😦 I just couldn’t find any and we didn’t have that much time there before we had to get back to the hotel for the rodeo.
I did however see a Mac make up show going on briefly, ate a yummy sandwich and bought a mac foundation brush.When we got back to the hotel, I quickly got ready and the people who didn’t go to the stadium (me and 6 others) hopped on the bus to pick up the others who were finished with the stadium tour.
The bus was so hot when we got on!! I was sitting there fanning myself for so long while I sweated off half my make up. American Summer’s aye.When we got to the rodeo, we had about 2 hours in Fort Worth before the rodeo started so 12 of us all went and got dinner somewhere and visited a candy store haha.The rodeo started about 8pm with some bull riding which was fun to watch. We also watched horse riders lasso a baby calve and quickly tie 3 of its legs together. Whoever was the quickest basically won. It sounds horrible and I did feel quite bad watching as well all these poor animals.
But then i have to remember that they’ve been doing stuff like this for years, and I can’t really kick up a fuss coming into their country 😯 at least they untied them really quickly.When the rodeo was over, we all took the bus back to Dallas.
At the beginning I was keen to go our but I hadn’t started drinking and then wasn’t really feeling it by the time we got back to the hotel.
Instead, Paige, Marisa and I went in search for a grocery store for some Ben & Jerry’s ice cream. It was however closed so we walked to TGIFS and had some really yummy dessert. TGIF
I look very pale in that above picture coz of the flash on my camera haha!
Ben came and joined us later on as he had F all to do and hanging out with girls drinking water is heaps better than hanging out with his room mate Dave.