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Bunnyshop Hearts: The Mongol Rally

So we are going to stop talking about our summer adventure just about now, and even our little Donate Cow over there will be going into the metaphorical, electronic dustbin, but! We could not recommend anything more highly, and this year's sign-ups are happening tomorrow—that's Halloween—at 9 a.m. ET. At least we think it is. It's 14:00 GMT. Everything's all weird with Daylight Savings Time. Anyway: If anyone is thinking about doing it ... we will say that we seriously wavered, and we were thisclose to not doing it, not least because we thought we had a job we were very excited about. Needless to say, they blew us off, we remained underemployed, and we have nice pictures of Mongolia instead of a retirement package. We still prefer the former. (We are not entirely confident what our position on this will be in about 40 years.)

Anyone thinking about doing it—and we have been short on details: It's a four-week drive in a tiny little car from London to Mongolia, however you choose to go, in very short—and it was fucking awesome as anything. And we will also say that if we were in a position to be looking for a smart, hot, funny, single person to talk to, and we were a heterosexual woman (or, now that we think about it, a gay man), this is the world's top concentration of them. We're convinced.

All the details are here.

The $500 Shopbop Raffle, Continued

We have been entirely derelict in properly pimping our humungous $500 Shopbop raffle! Here's the deal: Donate $5 to our Mongolian charities by clicking on the cow in the upper left corner—it's a long story, but Send-A-Cow and Mercy Corps Mongolia will do their best with our cash to make life better for poor communities there and in Africa—and for each $5, you get one ticket for a $500 gift certificate to Shopbop.

If that wasn't confusing enough, if you buy the book—and you totally want to buy the book!—and then email \ scan the receipt to us, our mom will make the donation on your behalf AND we'll give you a raffle ticket. Win-win-win-win-etc!

Our $500 gift certificate will purchase anything in this look. We wish it were "everything in this look," but ... argh. Anyway: we are, we will mention here, just ridiculously enamored of the brown boots and black everywhere else. Juicy Couture boots, $450

Holy Shit, It's a Raffle!

Well, that headline should do wonders for us in the maturity sweepstakes. Anyhoo: It is, unbelievably, the return of our massive giveaway. We had a few glitches with our past one, as winner A. would likely sadly attest, but we're thinking we're hitting nothing but net, in the sense that we are pretty sure this is a good thing, with this one.

As we said, a raffle: We again hate to be the elderly aunt with the slideshow, but we're wrapping up our fundraising for two eminently worthwhile charities: Send-a-Cow and Mercy Corps Mongolia. These are nice Mongolians:

Who own a felt-making tent and were very nice and did not even mind when we spent like three hours choosing between two $15 rugs, and have directly benefited from one of these two organizations. (Hint: They did not own a cow.) So how it works: donate $5, by clicking on the cow in the upper left hand corner. For every $5, each donor will get a raffle ticket. In three weeks, we will have a video drawing (really!) which we'll post on the site, and will serve as the winner-announcement. Very very important notice! Anyone who donated in the first run, please do not worry: You will absolutely get raffle tickets for the donations you have already made. (As well as our neverending thanks.)

We're thinking of this as a win-win. Actually, a win-win-win, since Shopbop, our giveaway dealer of choice, is our giveaway of choice because (a) they're one of our favorites and (b), more crucially, a percentage of what we're paying for the gift certificate will also go to our fundraising efforts.

Anyway. We get super stressed out asking people for money (even for something as unavoidably good as these two organizations), but we're thinking this might actually be less annoying than our crafts contests of seasons past.

So! Either click on the cow, or just send a PayPal donation to teambadidea@gmail.com. We'll take care of the rest. Deadline: 10/9!

Above, some of the things we might buy, if we were able to win our own contest. (Which we're not.) Samantha Treacy dress, $280, and Dolce Vita croc-print pumps, $138

Back!

And so! It has been perhaps the longest six weeks of our life, but we are back, if not in America than a country surprisingly populated with Louis Vuitton stores while actually remaining, you know, Communist, and we are here to say: hello! And: We missed you! And: everything else!

We had all these clever (er, "clever") things to say on this return but now we find ourselves rather fumbling for words, perhaps because we have spent the last six weeks boring our room\teammate to tears with extended, occasionally mimed renditions of every emotionally significant event of our lives since and including middle school. It is quite odd, really, spending basically every moment of your day with someone, and then not spending it with that someone, although we will say that both experiences are rewarding. For example, if our roommate were here, with us, in Shanghai, and not in San Francisco, we would not have been dancing around to the new Kanye West song and discovered the joys of spilling a glass of water all over our laptop. And we would also not have discovered that the only way we can avoid biting our lower lip while dancing is to put our fingers on our temples and pull back our hair. This is very confusing.

Over the next few weeks we will, of course, aim to bore the shit out of everyone here, as we have tortured our poor room\teammate the last month or so, and we will have more to say than anyone thought possible about the qualities of Mongolian cuisine, or the taxi driver who held our poor passport ransom for like $5 (it's like, dude, if you're going to go the trouble, we would have paid up for $100), or the marvelous people we met along the way, many of whom are pictured here. All we will say about this tremendous assembly is that it includes (a) a man who rode a cow, (b) another who literally made us throw up, and (c) the most appealing Republican we have ever met. We are, as usual, holding the camera, although we are thinking it would be pretty funny if it turned out we were a boy. Funny weird, etc.

All we will say, before everything else we will say, is that adventure is tops. And that Kiehl's eye treatment goes a long way to ensuring feelings of humanness, etc., after sleeping in a car on the side of a Russian highway.

Lil Bunny will, thank Christ, continue on here this week as we make our way to the western hemisphere. We thank her for her ongoing, and probably fruitless, work to keep this site going despite all our incompetent efforts to the contrary.

XOBS

Let's Go Team Bad Idea!

So Team Bad Idea (which is comprised of your regularly scheduled writer and a trauma nurse/very MacGyver like friend) and their Nissan Micra are still chugging along on their way. Last we heard, we believe they are in Moscow. Their email and internet service is going to be dodgy for the next week or so, so we thought it'd be awesome if anyone who wanted to post encouragement or cheer them along or what have you to do it here! We truly love Team Bad Idea, and we commend them for their sense of adventure.  Leave them a comment - we'll make sure they see it (somehow!). And we will not be offended if you tell your regularly scheduled writer that you miss her. We do too! Oh - the picture shown was taken by your r.s.w in Berlin. We love it too!

-LIL BUNNY

Our Imminent Departure, and The Things We Wish We Had Wish Us

Holy fucking shit! So we leave for Mongolia tomorrow. That is freaking insane. Can we say, at the moment that we are writing this, we have no idea where our driving partner is, or if he has managed to procure us a car. We are so, so, so fucked. We have, however, managed to purchase insurance for our laptop, which, we have realized, is as much a part of us as those daemons in the Philip Pullman novels. (Except that if it is taken from us, apparently we can get replacement value for it. Er, unlike the daemons.)

Never fear about the regular Bunnyshop updates—er, that "fear" would be the right reaction, if not "ignorance of" etc. In fact, it will probably be more regular than ever, since we have stockpiled quite a bit of it and also left the site in the undeniably capable hands of someone to whom we are actually related, in the sororal sense, hereafter referred to as Lil' Bunny. This name was, obviously, our selection, after she turned down ones that sounded "dirty". Well, okay.

So the next few weeks are going to be (really!) chock-full of exciting discounts and the like—beginning on Monday, a special discount, at the most special of stores. We're thinking everyone else is going on vacation at one point or another, so hopefully no one will mind too much. Hopefully no one will notice us gone at all. And then we'll be back way before fall shopping starts in earnest.

And now for the rest of the day, because we have to pack, and buy bug repellant, and figure out what to do if we get rabies, the top five things we left at home, and desperately want back.

#1: Our Kiehl's conditioner. We have not conditioned our hair for seven days, and the way things are going, we will not condition it for four more weeks. However, our hair is really quite nice and wavy. We are wondering if the moral of this story is that conditioner is a big scam. We would like opinions on this, if anyone has them.

Above: Kiehl's leave-in conditioner, $17

Our Stoop Sale Review

We just thought we would share a couple super-fun pictures from our super-super-super fun stoop sale last weekend, benefiting our Mongolia efforts!

It was a surprisingly smashing success as far as we are concerned, especially as we had hoped to raise at least $20. Low expectations, we are finding, are the key to happiness. Our favorite part was saying "It's for charity" whenever someone would try to bargain with us, even after our friend Katie told us our prices were too high. But yay Lexi and Brandon and everyone else stopping by, especially the woman who made this excellently adorable skirt and has a blog we were sure to check out as soon as we put all of our un-purchased books back on our shelves. (Entirely too many books, by the way.)

Her blog: Sewing in the City.

Our Mongolia-fundraising efforts continue, and we are so unbelievably happy when anyone clicks that cow to the right and donates even $5, all of which goes to Mercy Corps Mongolia and our very favorite-ly named organization ever, Send-a-Cow.

We go on and on and on about Mongolia here.

So About Mongolia

We thought we would use this space to answer some recently raised questions:

This is confusing. Wouldn't the gas money alone buy several cows? (Not to mention the airfare) Why don't you just, say bike the Silk Road instead? Or stay home and donate all of the money?

Please note, i am not casting aspersions upon your noble intentions. I'm just confused at their usefulness.

This is a totally fair question, because we have thought the same thing. We are thinking of it this way: The expenses for the trip, which we're fronting ourselves, are like a sunk cost—hopefully, when all the camping is done \ press airfares are calculated, we won't be spending that much more than we would otherwise have spent on our rent. So we're sort of paying for our own (currently terrifying) adventure.

And then the $2000 we (we pray, we pray) successfully raise, that's not a sunk cost—we wouldn't have raised that money if we weren't doing this, and at least for, say, our friend B., he would absolutely have spent that money instead on porn and beer.

We hope that makes sense. We are doing all those things, like off-setting our carbon usage and all that. Really we are doing it because we read about someone else doing it, and we were like, Holy shit, that sounds awesome. (And terrifying.)

And oh! We keep saying that this is offically part of the Mongol Rally.

what's your driving route, btw? eastern europe is so interesting, or are you coasting more northerly across the top, then down?

This is our route map—we are the light blue and pink. So, Siberia. Ha! Siberia. We just came off the wait-list, which is why we are sort of scrambling, but thanks to the basically broken US Passport Office, we don't have time to get the visas together for anything but just Mongolia and Russia.

And then:

i think a fundraiser could probably get more people to donate, and in turn, more funds than if you just donated the money straight out. it's a cool idea!

We should say here that we are just about the worst fundraisers of all time. We would like to say, if anyone has an idea, we would love to hear it. We are, in fact, having a stoop sale on Saturday (if you're in Park Slope, come by!) Here was our plan: We were going to have a 'summer of discounts,' and we were going to get all these places we like to give us discounts all summer, and then you would only get access to the discount if you'd donated money to the Mongolia thing, but then we really felt like that was weird and extortion-y—so obviously we're doing it, this week with Blaec, and we have a ton more lined up for the rest of the summer. (If there's anyone you'd like to request let us know, again—but the comments from last time really helped, and a lot of them are totally coming through.) So anyway—we thought that was weird, so we're relying on people's outsized generosity. And we guess we say again: If you have any love for Bunnyshop—we would never charge some lame fee for anything or whatever, but if you do, we would just be overjoyed if you sent some money our way, all of which will go directly to Mercy Corps Mongolia and Send-A-Cow. (And again! We cannot get over the cow thing!)

Everyone who donates will appear on our sponsor page, unless they would like not to, and they—if you've already sent in, just let us know—are invited to use it as an advertising space. In fact! We will discuss this more, but see the ads on this page? If anyone would like to rent a similarly-sized space for their Etsy page, anything they're selling or whatever, just let us know. We'll donate the space, and any fees will go straight to the charities.

All we will say is that we got all teary when the first donor arrived—N.L., we love you!—but then also with the rest of them, and it would be so excellent if there was more crying to be done. Click on the cows to donate, and more information here.

So This Is The Thing

This summer, we are driving from London to Mongolia. It is a little ridiculous. We are worried about mosquitoes, and flat tires, and, most of all, really and truly most of all, where we are going to find our Diet Dr. Pepper.

We are doing this to raise money for two charities: Send-A-Cow (it pretty much does as advertised) and Mercy Corps Mongolia, which tries to help impoverished Mongolians from becoming even more impoverished. The new site discussing all this is here, and we would just like to say, if you have any love in your heart for the Bunnyshop endeavor—we were telling one of our college friends how we were absolutely certain that the Bunnyshop community could gather the funds to send a cow to a poor family in Africa, and our friend was being a total asshole and saying that our community did not exist. Furthermore, he said that for each Bunnyshop reader who donated anything above $1, he would donate $5. We would really like to kick him in the ass with this. Let us say that if half the people who read this send over a dollar (or more! or more!), he will owe us a lot of money, so we would say: If you have any Bunnyshop love in your heart, if you would like to do something nice for a poor African family, if you would like us help to take money out of our friend's pocket, we would just swoon with happiness if you might click on the cow above and send over a couple bucks. We would never ever consider making Bunnyshop a pay-per-read site (er, that's why we don't read Salon anymore) and we promise never to shake you down for something other than Mongolia related. Even a dollar would be hugely appreciated.

Donations via PayPal by clicking on the cow. Clicking on the cow! We are so into the whole cow thing at the moment.

We are very slowly trying to get publicity for our endeavor so ... anybody out there who knows a writer looking to do a story about two people driving to Mongolia, email us.

More, boring info about donating $$ here.

One thing we could really use, but we note strongly this is for our team benefit, rather than the organizations' benefit, is a donation of any unwanted airline miles, as it is ridiculously expensive getting back from Mongolia, as you can likely well imagine. If you might be able to help out there, please let us know.

There will soon be tote bags! That is the lie, anyway, we keep telling ourselves.

Our regular Bunnyshop programming will return momentarily.