Watts Tower, and Sandy in a House on a Hill

As a last bit of tourism before turning my back on LA, I drove a cross-section across the city, from Beverly Hills and the yet-more-luxurious Belaire through south-central LA to the Watts Towers, built from old crockery, bottles and other junk by an Italian immigrant in the first half of the 20th Century.

On my way out of Los Angeles, I had an unplanned but fun stop over to visit my ex-Ihouse-neighbour Sandy at her parents' place in Hidden Hills, a gated community to the North West of the city. The house is high on a hill; as I sat there sipping a strong Lebanese coffee, eagles were circling around. Here's Sandy together with her father:

The Strange and Fascinating Land of SoCal

In California, its common to talk about SoCal (LA, San Diego, Santa Barbara) and NorCal (San Francisco and the entire Bay Area, Sacramento, Santa Cruz). It's also common to turn your nose up on the one from the other. SoCal is all about traffic jams and Hollywood, Butox and silicon, beaches and bimbos. NorCal is about Silicon Valley geeks, hipsters and the great Smug Alert.

Long before I first went to California, I asked my friend Jackie about why NoCal was called NoCal and not MidCal, since there's about as much coast to the North of San Francisco as to the South.
"Honey", she said, "for us, San Francisco is where California ends. North of that, its all one huge dope field".

I'd spent my entire time on the west in 2007 in NoCal (and some weeks of it in the huge dope field too), and the wanderlust for the new and strange was now strong on me. I had to get down to SoCal and see the real California, not perpetually cold and foggy San Francisco, which has about as much beach-and-palm-tree culture as New York. As an added, powerful incentive, the fabulous Stefanie (whose room I stayed in San Francisco) was in LA/Hermosa Beach for the summer, taking care of her ailing grandmother.

So I worked my way through the 4th of July and took a Friday off in early August to drive down the coast on the old Highway 1, through the fire-ravaged Big Sur coast, where I camped the night, and then down further south through the border town of San Luis Obispo, and then I was there in the land of all of our collective dreams: SoCal. And driving into Hollywood was an eerie feeling, like I'd come back to a place that I knew so well, even though I'd never been there before. This was the America as its seen in movies and on TV.

I went down down laden with the prejudices all NorCalians have (even the part time NorCalians): it will be an one giant traffic-snarled metropolis and a bunch of superficial air heads working for Hollywood. And LA was a giant traffic-snarled metropolis, but I loved it. It reminded me of Johannesburg: vast, sprawling, in-your-face with bumper-to-bumper traffic across 5-lane freeways at midnight, full of ostentatious wealth. Except it had a giant beach, and lots and lots of palm trees.


It was on the giant beach that Stefanie introduced me to SoCal beach culture in the form of the amazing Hermosa Beach Volleyball Tournament. It went something like this: dress up in (skimpy) costumes to form Beach Volleyball teams. Be pretty good at what you do at the beginning, but drink as much as you can in the course of the day, illicitly, like beer from plastic bike bottles or vodka infused into pineapple, or tiny, innocent-looking bottles of sake, so by the end of the day your team can hardly stand, let alone hit a ball across the net. Spice the event up further by introducing penalties by which your team can make up losses; penalties range from 'bum crack beer' (pour beer down the back of your team mates and drink it from between their legs) through 'mayonnaise madness' (squirt mayonnaise all over your body and roll in the sand) to 'girls making out in the sand', this last one ultimately destroying the neighboring volleyball team because all the male members forget their game and stumbled over, fascinated, to have a look. It was hilarious.

(Stefanie and I just watched)

Alyssa and Me

As a reminder of the good stuff on the East Coast (friends ... and muffins) here is a photo from my next-to-last day in New York, which I spent with Alyssa (or should I say: she spent it with me). It was her birthday-in-anticipation. We went to an exhibition by David Byrne, of The Talking Heads, and saw him, almost on exhibit: there was a flash-crowd-paparazzi effect when he appeared which could only happen in a world in which everyone is carrying cameras.

Sunday 7AM, hard at work with a group of 16 year old school kids

... there I was early Sunday morning, running bright orange cones and caution tape down the length of the Golden Gate Park. I was working as a volunteer for the day on behalf of the San Francisco Aids Walk. I've been volunteering a lot this summer, for the first time in my life. The day was fun (although maybe not everyones idea of it)

Hiking to Alamere Falls, Point Reyes

One of the many great things about working for Google is that you can find people who are interested and enthusiastic about doing any number of different things. On Saturday, I went for a hike at the Point Reyes National Sea Shore north of San Francisco with a group of other Googlers whom I hadn't met before. This is Clara, Greg, me and Alex.

It was a pleasant hike ... along the way we saw this little guy (not sure if he's a fox or a coyote, I suspect the latter) who was really curios and hung around us for a while. Here are some more photos on Flickr.

Kayak Reunion

Since coming to America, my kayak, which I was using regularly in Amsterdam, has been in storage. A stall in New York is (like many other things there) way too expensive for me to afford as a student. I finally got the opportunity to get it out its case and put it together on Sunday - I am storing it at a place in Sausalito, on the bay just north of San Francisco across the Golden Gate Bridge. I'd been there before (night kayak with Laurie last year), and although it takes about an hour by bike to get there, its a much better location than in the city.

I thought it would be less of a novelty here than it was in the Netherlands (its collapsable, and looks really sleek when you put it together) but I got a lot of people coming up and asking me about it as I was putting it together. Which took time - over two hours, in fact. "That will be a pleasure well earned!", said one man. "If you had one of those tupperware boats, you'd be in the water already". I had forgotten the pedals (its been two years) so I had to take it half apart again once it was almost together.


It was a pleasure well earned - I went up the bay to the north, past crowds of plump seals with fur which looked like the cheap leopard-skin blankets which we had as kids, sunning themselves in the late afternoon sun. They are fun to watch; they bark and sometimes have a spat: huge animals slapping feebly at each other with dainty flippers.

Just beyond the seals was another colony: of eclectic boat houses. These are nothing like I'd experienced in the Netherlands. This example was like something out of a Grimm Brothers fairytale (and yes, it is floating on the water). Some were way out into the bay, floating by themselves, like the new age pyramid below.

Mission District

I live in the Mission in San Francisco. This is one of the best areas for a large number of reasons: its flat and sunny in a hilly and foggy city; it has a huge variety of cheap delicious food, great book stores and cafes and some of the best bars in the city. What's not to like about it?


It also has a huge amount of street art and murals. I spent part of today just walking around and taking some of them in. Here are a couple of photos from the walk on Flickr:

One of the projects I'd like to do before leaving here is getting a photo series of the some of the taquerias in the neighbourhood.

Fire Arts Festival, Oakland

I'd had the Fire Arts Festival recommended to me in my first stay in San Francisco, so this year I made a point of forking out for the expensive ($45) ticket and headed across the San Francisco Bay to Oakland for an evening of ... fire. It was pretty much what the name says, although the name could really have been the Amazing Incredible Fire Art Spectacle without much exaggeration. Towering vortexes of flames (so huge they reached up to the overhead suburban rail, and caused the drivers to slow down and have a look, passengers plastered against the windows), giant sculptures repeatedly emoliated in flame, perpetually burning cacti and people dancing with high-voltage electric discharge were just a few of the things I saw.

Somethings, like the fire-spitting fire engine and the steam punk tree house, were familiar from Burning Man 2007. It was great to see them again, especially since I had made the decision not to go back to Burning Man this year. I didn't realize how much the Crucible Workshop, which hosts this event, contributed to Burning Man - and this seems to be one of their major fund raiser activities.
There are more photographs on my Flickr page.

Bike Loop with good Closing Music

I have my Marin Bear Valley with me this time around. Its been getting increasingly in need of care and attention in New York (I didn't really fix it in any way for two years), so its been a real enjoyment to spend some time - and money - getting it fixed. New tyres, saddle, pedals, brakes, and on Saturday a new drive system (gear cones and chain). To celebrate it I took it for a 40km ride on Sunday, doing a loop around San Francisco to Lake Merced in the south west corner of the city, and then up along the Pacific coast. The photo of the crockery car is something I encountered on the way - its a city of eccentrics.

California is one of those cities (like Barcelona) which turns its back to the coast
and this is the first time I've seen the Pacific since coming back here. The suburb alongside the beach is called 'Sunset', which is a way of reminding people that live there that in the evenings in other places, such a thing occurs. In San Francisco, all you get is a deepening of the gloom as the fog blows in each afternoon. The beach itself is sandy, but that about the best thing you can say about it. The water is freezing cold and there are vicious back currents which make swimming risky.

My trip took me to the gorgeous Golden Gate park, which is San Francisco's equivalent to Central Park, and then (by plan) to the amazing Amoeba Records, in the Haight-Ashbury (back in the 1960's, this area was the center of the 'Summer of Love). Amoeba is a warehouse sized space packed full of music and DVD's, all of which you can listen to in their entirety at listening stations. This makes it both a very amazing place and a dangerous one, especially when - like me - you haven't bought any music for a while and the urge to do so is strong upon you. I walked out, two hours later and with $150 less in my account, with a varied selection of new and used CD's (if you're interested: King Kahn & The Shrines, Trentemøller Chronicles, Birdy Nam Nam, Bonny "Prince" Billy (Lie Down in the Light), Walter Meego (Voyager), Amadou & Mariam (from Mali, with contributions from Manu Chao) and Damien Jurado (On My Way to Absence).

Music isn't the only thing I've been spending money on recently. After a long time being a student, the temptation to spend when you're suddently on a full salary again is strong. Witness the bike, the $100 shirt and the $500 reading glasses (although that last item is more an example of what you have to pay in chronically under-insured America).

Working on the 4th of July

I spent the 4th of July holiday at Google at work, because I wanted to avoid the crowded weekend and get another day off some other time ... it was an eerie experience being alone in a big building normally fully of people and activity, but not an unpleasant one.

I only saw parts of the celebration around me: red-white-and-blued kids getting on the train, the beginnings of a parade in Redwood City (en route to work), and then, on my return to San Francisco, my suburb - The Mission - turned into a warzone of firecrackers, fireworks, billowing smoke and patrolling police everywhere (private fireworks are illegal here, but it doesn't seem to be strictly enforced). I escaped by going to have a meal with friends on Potrero Hill, which is biking hell but has grand views down into central San Francisco - where somewhere among all the fog, the official firework celebration was going up into the air.

In the Mission

Back at Google ... back in San Francisco ... and back at the same house with the same great people I got to know last summer. Stefanie - a middle school teacher - was heading off to Costa Rica for the summer but her grandmother is in a bad way so she is staying with her family in Los Angeles instead (I'm in her room). She came up to visit for the weekends; here she is in her West-African Made-in-India dashiki "Freedom Size" which she got for an event at her school, and now servers her as pajamas ...