Of plastic, freaks and tacos

LA is our nomination for ‘most overrated city in the world’ – huge, dirty, car dominated and as plastic as its most celebrated inhabitants, the movie, tv and music stars and all their wannabe hangers-on.

Melrose Ave

We had a couple of days at Santa Monica and Venice Beach followed by a couple in West Hollywood at The Standard www.standardhotel.com, pretty good value and they’re ‘so hot right now’ you can even get a tatt at their hair salon / drug store.
Highlights were: the buskers including one who just played a tape and stood there swaying and the Jewish Orthodox rap crew; the Getty Museum; shopping Melrose Ave; newspapers, taxis and billboards covered with advertising for every type of plastic surgery imaginable; pharmacies with DIY botox and collagen injections.

We had dinner and cocktails on Sunset Boulevard and saw “Goodnight and Goodluck” in Santa Monica (which got ovations from the lefty audience).

Taxi: $20; shirt: $15; finding Chuck Norris' star: priceless. If only we’d had a concrete saw, oh well, make do with http://www.chucknorris.com/

One of the most entertaining moments was chatting to our airport shuttle drivers who were either Chef’s parents from South Park or the Klumps. We weren't sorry to be leaving; LA had seemed like a good idea at the time.

We hopped up north to San Francisco to test Dan’s generosity (of course he passed with flying colours) and deposited ourselves in his place in leafy Fremont. It’s more like the mid west there than SFO but he seems pretty comfy, throws himself into his work and everything is convenient and clean and of course SFO is not far away on the BART.

Chinatown

Dan’s technique for dealing with the blandness of Fremont is to spice up the evenings with as much blood as possible by watching gorillas pound each other to death on TV in the Ultimate Fighting Championship, while he offsets his work stresses during the day by hitting on impressionable young office staff.

Our approach to Fremont was to sleep in and watch trash television like Judge Extreme Akim decide who gets the baseball bat of justice to bash their opponent while Kato Kalin (OJ Simpson’s houseguest) adds sideline comments. Oh and we discovered that we have Restless Leg Syndrome and there’s a medication we need to take to treat it.

Extreme hands down judgement

Dan took us on excursions to the Napa Valley, bars and nightclubs, Haight / Ashbury (original 60s hippy area a la Newtown), North Beach (Italian area), golf at Berkeley and drinks at Berkeley Marina with Ines and Luis (Spaniards working with Dan); and to the Castro and Mission areas (a la Darlinghurst) for Halloween.

Dan, C and Anya waiting for a taxi at about 4am

Dan captures C looking happy and me with a stupid expression while going for a hike near his place

For Halloween, all the streets were full of costumed freaks. C borrowed the spider hat below from a friend whereas I’ve been growing my hair for a while now. Here we are in a Mission taqueria (taco shop).

All that and some preparations for our road trip kept us busy for about a week.

We then picked up the car from San Jose, bargained our way into a Chevy Trailblazer SUV, thanked Dan and tried to convince him to visit us here in Spain and headed off for a town called Mariposa (butterfly in Spanish) next to Yosemite. The pic below is when we set off, little did she know the starvation and trials that lay ahead on our three week journey to the other side of the country!