Earthquake!
Last week I experienced my first “big” earthquake! It was 6.9 on the Richter Scale with it’s epicentrum a couple of miles off the coast, not too far from Los Angeles. I got pretty seasick from the house rocking back and forth. Freaky!
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Hiking in Malibu
It’s actually been 2 weeks since this happened, but it’s worth posting. Me and Sean met up with Sergio, who we first met at the Movits! concert, for the march Art Walk. He brought 2 friends with him, Max and Sarah. Then Sergio had to bail (which later has been established as “pulling a Sergio”), so me and Sean just hung out with Max and Sarah for the rest of the evening. We pretty much instantly hit it off as we were cruising around the bars. We made tons of plans, as usual when drunk, but this time it actually felt like we were going to do most of them.
And only 2 days later the first plan was put to action, hiking in the mountains above Malibu.
We went up a hill, down a valley, and up a trail, following a stream of water which eventually brought us to a pool of water where a waterfall was flowing down form the mountain above.
It seemed like most people didn’t go higher than that, but we decided to climb the mountain to get to the waterfalls source. After some climbing we managed to get to an even bigger waterfall. And behind the waterfall was a cave!
The waterfall from behind. The awesomeness doesn’t really show in the clip, but it was just amazing.
The rock was covered in some cozy green stuff, but it wasnt slippery as I first imagined, so climbing was easy. Staying dry was impossible though, I was soaked when we were done climbing the waterfall.
This is as high as we could get. We couldn’t get on top of the waterfall, but we got on top of the cliff next to it. If you look closely, you¨ll see that the rock we are sitting on is just shooting out straight into mid air, and below is a really deep canyon. Far behind us you can see some houses on a hill, which gives you a hint on how high up we are, and behind that is only ocean and sky.
Ever so eventful
A lot of stuff has been going on lately. I’ve made a bunch of new friends, been hiking in both Malibu (where we found a waterfall and climbed into a cave behind it! Stunning!) and the Hollywood Hills (where Max had built his own zipline, which we got to ride! Stupendous! Marvelous! Magnificent!!!), among other things. These events are documented on both film and in pictures, will post them shortly.
(Seriously, shortly!)
Slow Sunday in Downtown
Today we went sightseeing a bit in Downtown. MOCA, The Museum of Contemporary Arts, is located just a few blocks from us, so we decided to go check it out. It wasn’t as great as I expected though. The Modern Museum in Stockholm was actually a lot better in my opinion. Both bigger and more diverse. Besides the MOCA in Downtown, there is also another one down in Little Tokyo. Our tickets allowed admission to both museums, so we took a stroll to Little Tokyo and had a look. This one was slightly better, but most of the stuff was just plain boring. Then again, I’m usually not impressed at all with modern art, in fact I found at least 50% of what we saw today to be utter bullshit. Well, on our way back from there we found this awesome wall painting though. Notice the resemblance?
On our way back up to Downtown(yes, down is up) we went by an entrance to a minimall in Little Tokyo that we had seen before but never actually entered, so we decided to eat dinner there. We ate at the Ramen place in the picture, which only had 3 things on the menu… and they were all noodle soups.A funny thing was that after you decided which soup you wanted, you also had to tell the waitress how spicy you wanted it on a scale of 1-7. I picked the Soy Soup with a hotness of 4, which was spicy enough to make me cry and cough throughout the meal… And I consider myself fairly resistant to spicy food. I don’t even want to know what a 7 is.
This is on our back home after the noodle soup, which actually was the best noodle soup I’ve ever had. Here’s looking east on Spring Street, i.e. “our street”. Our apartment building is just beyond the red lights to the right.
Yellow Raspberries
Here’s another nice little curiosity that I stumbled upon. Yellow raspberries! They taste exactly the same as regular raspberries though. It’s interesting how you can fool your brain depending on just the color of what you eat. When your brain is execting one thing and your taste buds disagree.
Trader Joes for the Win
Time passes pretty fast here. Or actually, it works both ways. The 5 weeks I’ve spent here just flew by, yet it feels like I haven’t seen Sweden in ages. There is a lot of stuff I miss back home. First and foremost my girlfriend, and of course my friends and my family. And just the convenience of being able to being fully able to conversate with people without stuttering and brainfreezes, to know what everything in the stores is and what it means, etc.
But what I do not miss is grocery shopping in Stockholm. Neither making a daytrip via at least two-three means of public transportation to Willys only to suffer broken paper bags from the wet snow halfway home, nor paying insane overprices at ICA Alvikstorg för some crappy X-tra fishsticks. Grocery shopping here is first of all really cheap, but the best thing is the huge range and variety of food available. And even the most exotic (contextual… probably applies mostly to Swedes) organic stuff is really affordable. It’s such a relief to be able to walk into a grocery store and just pick whatever you want knowing that you don’t have to eat ramen noodles for the next week if you buy that cranberry/orange bread that just begs to be eaten.
Below is some of the cool stuff I bought from Trader Joe’s on our last run.
Mango/Passionfruit Müsli! Haven’t tried it yet though. And I managed to find Kefir at long last, it’s probably the closest I will get to “fil” ’round these parts.
$5 per pack!!! How awesome is that? I’m gonna get wicked intelligent after my stay in the US…
Dying from awesomeness overdose here. And look at the potatoes, they’re so small! Awesome!!!
I love these. They’re like mutated tomatoes or something.
Pear shaped tomatoes! It doesn’t get much better.
Well, actually it does. Transformers Band-aids!!! Optimus Prime!!!
Bicycle, bicycle
Kirsten and Matt were kind enough to loan us their bikes, so on saturday we headed north to some park we drove by earlier that seemed pretty nice. We went there, sat down in the afternoon sun, chilled and enjoyed the view. Had we known its reputation before going there we probably would have thought twice about going, but it actually was totally fine. The park is closed to the public between 19 and 05, which probably makes sense…
Here’s what we believe to be an ice cream truck, that tune is still stuck in my head…
This is us heading back south after the park hangout. We went past downtown and headed for Little Tokyo to get some döner kebabs, but I convinced Sean that we should first take a little detour in an area we hadn’t explored yet on our way there. We turned a corner around a block and the clean and well lit streets immediately turned into pitch dark alleys with strung out people scattered on the sidewalk. We started to feel a bit anxious while entering the next block, and the first thing we see is a fist fight between 7-8 people in the middle of the street. Me and Sean agreed that it was pretty good time to turn the bikes around, so we went back up to the streets we knew, and then made it to Little Tokyo for the best kebab I’ve ever had, while pondering the importance of not turning the wrong corner. Anyways, a nice finish to a nice day.
Oh, I googled the shady area today by the way, and it turned out to be one of the roads leading into Compton after a few km… We may litterally have dodged a bullet there.
How to Use a Can Opener
I would describe myself as a fairly intelligent and intellectual person. School has always been pretty easy for me, I’ve scored well above average on various IQ test and such, and I would probably survive for at least a while if stranded on desert island.
If it didn’t require me to operate a can opener, that is.
It took both me and Sean 10 minutes of twisting, turning, hammering and cursing before we swallowed our manly pride and searched for “How to Use a Can Opener” on YouTube.
I’ve rarely felt so retarded in my life as when I figured out what was wrong. I mean, I’ve even used this type of can opener before, but something was different with this one. The damn handles were taped together with invisible tape. Thanks a lot IKEA!
How to Ruin a Perfectly Good Sunset
Bonus from Venice: