Why having a good backpack is a bad idea

Thursday, October 16th, 2008

A good backpack is so light and comfortable that you wont notice you're wearing it. Consequently it also means you don't notice when you're not wearing it anymore.

Today we went to Huntington Beach. We went for a long walk along the beach, and it was really nice, but very hot. After the beach trip we went up into town. The Huntington area, as you might guess from the pictures, is very posh and pretty much only has doctors and lawyers etc. living there. We went down main street, looked at the shops and had a caramel frappuccino, my most recent addiction, at Starbucks.
After checking out the Electric Chair, we decided to go home as it was going to take a while with rush hour and everything and we were getting hungry. Bit of a queue some places on the 605, but all in all a fairly smooth trip of about an hour... until we get home and notice my missing backpack.
Fuck.
My backpack had my insurance papers, Rosie's camera, my asthma meds (though I have a backup), and my Visa Waiver slip - kinda vital we get it back all in all.
Quick intensive think: I took it off when I sat down to snort my crackuccino, it could still be at Starbucks! Called number services, asked for Starbucks in Huntington on Main, got a fax. Called again, asked for another number, they only had that one. Checked Starbucks web page, fax number again. Then we called Starbucks customer services and got a friendly guy named Ben. After talking to him for over 20 minutes, him running all over the place, calling different stores nearby, involving his boss, trying all numbers they have an FINALLY getting through to them via MSN and sending another store's employee over to their store, I can safely say that Starbucks' customer services totally rock, I was WELL impressed. Having been in a customer service job myself I know how important it is to get positive feedback, so I wrote a glowing mail to Ben's boss as soon as we got home after all this, and he mailed us back thanking for the letter and letting us know that he'd be sure to reward Ben.
Say what you will about Starbucks, but customer service like that is rare and should be rewarded, I'll make it a point to go there for all my caffeine and sugar dope needs in the future.
We raced back to the Starbucks, retrieved the backpack, got a couple of sandwiches, and back home again.
It's funny, because just before entering Starbucks originally, I had been thinking how the area was so posh, clean and neat that you could probably leave a bag with money strapped to the outside on a street corner unattended for an hour, without anyone touching it. I mean no poor person could afford to live within 30 miles of that place, and the cops on each corner would be sure to remove any homeless people in the area. Maybe I was just subconsciously trying to test that theory?
Either that or I was just being an airhead, a notion which I am grudgingly willing to entertain.

Looks kinda like an amusement park, doesn't it?



Even the Starbucks is posh here.



Sometimes, you'd think Germany won that war...



What, the street's on rehab? What'd it do, go on a drink and drugs bender and smack up its girl? Nah, it's probably just trying to get popular and do what the big stars do.



Going out for a bite of air? Make sure you chew 5 times before you swallow, but don't inhale.



Imagine the theme from Beverly Hills 90210 running in the background.

Rant: Fire procedure? What fire procedure?

As impressed as I was with Starbucks customer services, as unimpressed I was with Wal*Mart's complete lack of any procedure in the event of a fire alarm going off.
As we stepped into the store on Friday, the alarm went off. 30 minutes ensued where people kept shopping, and employees were standing around looking confused at each other, but still doing their job. What the hell? You'd think a huge, nay GIGANTIC store like Walmart in CALIFORNIA - land of a million fires - would have a bloody fire evacuation procedure. Anyone who's worked in a large company is likely to know that a fire procedure is there to protect people, and it MUST be followed even if you personally cannot see the fire immediately. They should have been closing the tills, evacuating the area and telling the customers to get the fuck out until the alarm has been stopped and an all clear has been announced. It does not matter if it's an error, it does not matter if it's a drill - it should be happening. Instead they were picking their bellies and shrugging while looking at each other with "confused chicken" written all across their face. That kind of thing does not exactly inspire a lot of trust in a company (OK granted, I didn't have a lot of trust in Walmart as it is, but you know).

Lafari

October 14th-15th, 2008

Tuesday Rosie and I went to the L.A. Zoo. It was fairly large but undergoing extensive renovation, so many of the exhibits were closed. Considering the size of the place, there wasn't actually a lot of animals there because of this. Even so it was an excellent trip - the weather was gorgeous, and the zoo itself is beautiful. Palm trees and exotic plants and flowers everywhere, so even without a lot of different animals it made for a great walk.
Unfortunately I had only brought my tele-lens for the camera, so I could only do close-ups which means no shots of the environment. You'll just have to use your imagination ;)

A grumpy meerkat and Reggie the alligator. Reggie has been a real pain in L.A.'s butt for 3 years. He was found in a city lake, and it took over a year to catch him. Steve Irwin visited in the winter and had pledged to come back and give it a shot when the alligator would resurface in the spring, but died before he could make good on that promise.
Since they finally managed to capture him, Reggie has already escaped once.






Mufasa!
Ooohooh! ...say it again.
Mufasa, Mufasa, Mufasa!









'Sup foo?

When we got home we decided to go to the drive-in cinema later that evening, woohoo! I've never been to one of those and it seemed kinda mandatory now that I have some extra time in the states. It's a shame it's dying out (there aren't many of them left) because I really liked the experience. You drive up, pay for your tickets, and then you have access to two preset films at the screen of your choice. As soon as your car enters the area, it is able to pick up the soundtrack of the film through the radio at a preset radio frequency, in this case 106.5 MHz. The parking lot is rippled with small hills in the asphalt so you can park uphill and get a good view of the screen. Pretty nifty.
We saw Tropic Thunder, which I'd already seen with Mads and Gina, but Rosie hadn't yet and it bears watching an extra time. It is so damned funny in a completely retarded way, and if nothing else just seeing a balding Tom Cruise shakin' his booty to Ludacris' "Get Back" makes it worth the whole 90 minutes.

Since Wednesday was supposed to be the hottest day of the week (and possibly the hottest day left of the year) we'd decided to go to Huntington Beach for a swim. However when morning came it became clear that we weren't going anywhere, Rosie was not feeling well. To be honest though it fit me fine because it was big patch day in World of Warcraft, so it gave me time to play with that :P
When evening came she wasn't feeling up to cooking, and I rather not burn her mothers house down in an attempt to do so, so we decided to get take-out.
At an earlier date, when Rosie's brother Steve was here, I had suggested going to Taco Bell. A suggestion greeted with the vast, empty and frigid vacuum of deep space, accompanied by two burning stares as if I was caught between two binary star systems of red dwarfs.
...I don't think they like that place very much.
In light of that, I let Rosie suggest a take-out place for taco's. She suggested King Taco, which according to her family is the Mexican taco place of choice because they make it "just like back home".
I went for a classic burrito with minced beef, frijoles and rice, but was also intrigued by the lengua taco; Taco's with tongue. You could also get sheep-head, brain, neck, gizzard and cow brisket, but I decided to try out the tongue today. It's a bit funny because the meat is really nice, it's like somewhere in between beef an liver in taste. The weird thing about it is the texture - it IS tongue. It's spongy and a bit chewy even though it was clearly tender.
To quench our thirst we had Jamaica, which is an iced (in this case) tea made of hibiscus flower. Now that was great. It tasted much like cranberry, dry, but less bitter. This version of it was especially good because they hadn't gone overboard on the sugar so it wasn't excessively sweet. I can imagine it'd be a perfect drink for a hot day, and I can also imagine a million different ways to use it in cocktails ;)
Note to self: must investigate further.

Fin de semana

October 11th-12th, 2008

We didn't do anything big this weekend, so I'll just throw in some random pictures, mention some of the food I've tried, and drop a few notes such as:

Brendan "Look what I found" (holding a weathered toy)
Jonathan "Dude, what's that in your hair?"
Rosie "Honey, what IS that in your hair?"
Brendan "Oh I've been in a trashcan."

The joys of having a 6 year old around.

Saturday morning we went to a Mexican place for breakfast. Apparently it was a very traditional place that served traditional Mexican food. Rosie's mom and her two sisters go there every Saturday for breakfast, and Rosie and Brendan usually come along as well.
First lesson in traditional Mexican food: hot sauce is good as an appetizer for ALL meals. Thus; tortilla chips and hot sauce for breakfast. Ow. My poor white-boy tummy.

The rest of what we had was not much different from what you'd get at home. Fried eggs, bacon (made the Danish way, not the English), hash browns and pancakes with syrup. Yummy. You could get some "hot" food as well, but no one else ordered it so I didn't feel a great need to expose myself further to possible ridicule.

Orange Juice and hot sauce; goes down smooth. For the record I *did* survive, without a "ring of fire".

I also tried the guava fruit which I hadn't tasted before. You can probably get them in Europe as you can get most things, but I've not seen them before. Here they grow on a tree in Rosie's aunt's garden so we can just go and pluck them. The fruit is very fragrant and has a very sweet and perfumed smell. I was sniffing it for several minutes before I bit into it, it just smelled so good! The taste itself was not nearly as sweet as the smell, and had a slight dry tang to it. I think they would be good in food, but I wouldn't eat them straight off the tree.

Oh that smell, mmmm...

Sunday we headed to an indoor Mexican market in East L.A. ...and I didn't get stabbed or shot or anything! I was however asked to not take pictures inside for no apparent reason. Since they didn't have any signs about it, I did get a few before I was told not to however.
The market is simply, and appropriately, called El Mercado. Apparently half of it had been torn down within the last 4 months, so I didn't get the full experience complete with mariachi's. Bummer. What I did see was pretty cool though, they had a lot of interesting food - a lot of which I wouldn't touch even if threatened with a cattle prod.

Bottom picture to the right: The stuff in the top box is chicharrones AKA pork scratchings or flæskesvær =D Now THAT'S a proper size. They're awesome too, I've not even had them this good in Denmark.

We also found these; Tejocotes - candied quince (kvæder). They're extremely sweet and very very yummy. I'll definitely be getting more of those, they're much like kvædeflæsk.

At the end of the day Rosie took us out for ice cream in East L.A., at Foster's Old Fashion Freeze - the place where Rosie's dad used to take her when she was a kid.

The last video here is just driving down Fairgrove Avenue from the main road, all the way to the house. Not very interesting as such, I just made it for the hell of it.

Where the cool kids hang out

Friday, October 10th, 2008

Beach time! I've been in L.A. for all of 3 days so it's about time we headed to Venice Beach (and Muscle Beach to laugh at the beefcakes toppling over due to their disproportionately large upper bodies and tiny legs).

It also gave me a good chance to blind the population of bronze gods and goddesses with my skinny whitey-mac-white, pasty body. Mmmm.

It was only in the early twenty degrees or so and there was quite a strong inland wind, so we didn't go to take a swim, only to take a walk along the beach and the Venice Beach shops.

Miraculously I actually managed to get a slight tan, without any burn! I'm quite happy with that. We might try again during the week, where the temperature should be up in the mid-30's again, with the Santa Anna winds coming in, starting Sunday.

We walked all the way from Muscle Beach to the Santa Monica Pier, it was really nice. By the time we reached the pier it was past 1 PM so we were well hungry (having been up since 4 AM again), so we dropped in at a Bubba Gump Shrimp Co. for lunch. We didn't have anything fancy, we just needed some fuel for the walk back again.

Along the way we observed one of the natives fetching water for her village. Had we had a local guide with us, we are sure they would be able to discern which tribe she belongs to, from the clear markings on her body.

This is the view from the freeway going through an industrial quarter, past Downtown L.A. which is skyscrapers in the background.

Finally a tiny video showing a 360 degree view of the edge between the beach and the shopping strip.

Intermission

Thursday, October 9th, 2008

We just had a lie-in today. Slept extra long, watched some TV etc. I took a few pictures on the way out as I went with Rosie to pick up Brendan at school (her 6 year old son). Brendan has been doing homework every night instead of weekly as he's done previously, and the teacher wanted to know if Rosie was happy with the way that worked. So we're helping Brendan with his homework every night to make sure it gets done. The problem is actually not that he doesn't know how to do it for the most part, it's that it's near impossible to get him to focus on anything other than Monster Trucks for more than 3 minutes at a time :P
He's very energetic and great fun to be around... if you can follow his chain of thought after the 8th topic change within the space of a minute.

Below are a few pictures of the house on Fairgrove Avenue, inside and out. The driveway actually leads to 3 houses, all owned by members of Rosie's family. The first house on the property is owned by one of Rosie's cousins, Betty, whom I haven't met yet. The second house belongs to her aunt and uncle (Lola and Domingo), and the third house belongs to Rosie's mom Elvira, which is where we're staying.

This above, is Rosie's mom's house

...the garden...

...and the neighbour's banana's.

The living room

Kitchen

Brendan's room

And Elvira's room. Brendan usually sleeps here too, a fact for which Rosie and I are most grateful.

IHOP: The place to kill off unwanted diabetics

Wednesday, October 8th, 2008

We mostly just went shopping a lot today. It was pretty nice though because we woke up at 4 AM and stayed up since we'd gone to bed so early. Rosie had been having some PC issues so I fixed that to start out the day, and then at 7 AM we went out for breakfast at IHOP (International House of Pancakes). It was a bit weird to be up and about so early because there were almost no people anywhere as you'll see in the photo's.
We went to Best Buy to grab me a laptop, and some upgrades for Rosie's PC as I'd promised to spice it up a bit when I got here. Also I twisted her arm to buy a new chair at IKEA because her old one is terrible and probably from an age before the word "ergonomic" was invented.
We did a lot of shopping different places, and a lot of driving to and from Best Buy because we constantly forgot stuff, but the funny thing was that we saw a Chorizo (AKA a Mexican Cop) on the way to Best Buy and back... the same cop, 3 times, stopping a new car every time. At least you can't say he was lazy, but I was not about to test his mood by asking him to pose for a picture, so Chorizo-Posing must wait. I'm sure I'll find one loading up on churro's and doughnuts at 7-11 at some point, one who'll be too high on sugar to object.

Random pictures from the streets of La Puente and West Covina as we drove around to the different shops. The whole thing was almost deserted because it was so early.






These two above are of a Target which is a part of a mall in West Covina. This store and mall was not here a year ago, in fact the entire hillside was burned to the ground in the fires last year around this time. It's easy to see that they're used to disasters in this area, it only took a few months after the fires before the first store opened here. Somewhat different speed than what things are done at in England.




The Edward's Cinema devoid of life. Just like Friday nights. (not really)



Someone decorating for Halloween early.

It begins...

Tuesday, October 7th, 2008

Today I traveled from Nottingham to L.A.
The day becomes ridiculously long when you get up at 3 AM and stay up to 8 PM... +8 hours. When I arrived at LAX I was pretty much a zombie as I didn't get much sleep on the plane. I just tried to stay awake as long as I could after arriving, to see if I could turn around my day and help the jet lag.
No pictures today. Go to virgin-atlantic.com if you want to know what a plane looks like ;)

First!

Hi all, welcome to my blog :)

I never thought I'd actually become one of them "bloggers" but as it turns out it's the easiest way to share my pictures and day-to-day activities while here in L.A.
At first I wanted to make my own page manually, but then I properly thought about it. I COULD make such a page, but it would take a lot of time. Time in L.A. that could be better spent doing stuff and taking pictures to put ON such a blog. So instead I decided to not re-invent the wheel and just use someone else's.

Quick background for those who don't know:
I'm currently in La Puente in Los Angeles, to visit my girlfriend Rosie who lives here. I'll be staying for an extended vacation until december 29th. It's a great time of year to be here, because there's lots to do and see. Before leaving to go back home to Denmark, I'll have seen Halloween, Thanks Giving, Day of the Dead (a Mexican holiday), and Christmas here. If all goes well we'll also be going to Vegas, San Diego, San Francisco and perhaps Joshua Tree national park.

This page will function as a small diary where I'll post a few pictures and video's along the way, which are not likely to be great art. The pictures I take are just quick snaps with my travel camera, to show where I go and what I see. I'll do a few photo outings with my big camera too, but most of what's posted here will be quick and dirty.
There wont be entries for every day, because I'm not sure it's much fun to read about "we had a lie-in and then went to the mall and that was that day" a million times. I'll include everyday stuff like that, but not all the time.
Feel free to add comments and thoughts, or just a "hi" if you've peeked in :)

So with all of that out of the way - on with the show!