Visit from my Hyper Island classmates
Monday was a holiday here in the US, Presidents Day, so we had a 3-day weekend. Our classmates who are doing their internships in San Francisco took this opportunity to come visit us down here in LA. Fortunately, the weather is really starting to warm up, and we had nothing but sun for the entire duration of their stay. In fact, I haven’t seen a cloud in a week…
We’re hooked up
Finally we have internet in our apartment! It took us an extreme amount of effort and patience to get it though. We ordered a subscription from 2 different companies and both companies managed to lose our orders. But third time was a charm, and today a guy came to the apartment to hook us up. We now have access to the internet through an, as the ads state, “blazing fast” connection of 6-10 mbit/s! Pretty amusing when you’re, as most swedes, used to having the option of 100+ mbit/s, but it’s good enough for our current needs.
Yesterday night was the monthly Art Walk event here in Downtown. During the Art Walk, almost every building in Downtown is open to the public, and jam packed with arts and crafts of all sorts, alongside live bands and DJ:s. It was really really great, and also really surreal, the streets were all of a sudden really crowded and there were hipsters on every corner… So strange that we haven’t seen any cool kids up until that night. I wonder where they hide during the days.
First time driving in Los Angeles
On sunday me and Sean borrowed Kirsten’s car and drove to IKEA to buy some furniture for our living room. It was my first time driving in LA (and my first time driving a Prius, felt like driving a space ship arcade game), but it all went pretty well, I didn’t crash anything and didn’t run anyone over. The roads here are so wide compared to Sweden, the streets in Downtown are wider than our freeways, and their freeways are wide enough to land Jumbojets next to eachother. 8 lanes in every direction!
Here’s a clip of us making our way back into Downtown LA.
One of the perks of being in the States
One of the big perks of being here is that almost everyday I get to try something that I’ve never done or had before. Yesterday at lunch Kirsten and Matt took me and Sean to a sausage place down in the Art District. As usual, from the outside it just looked like yet another shabby industry building, but well inside it looked more like a updated german beerhall. They had all sort of sausages, and I had to go for the strangest one I could find. So my choice fell on the rattlesnake/rabbit sausage. And I can honestly say it was pretty damn tasty, I could easily order it again.
Today Kirsten took us to a couple of thrift stores to see if we could find any furniture, unfortunately we just found crap and didn’t buy anything. Well, I bought a weird cubic box without a bottom that was split diagonally by a wall. I figured I could put magazines of whatever in it, but in retrospect I guess my old box fetish clouded my judgement once again…
When we were done with the thrift stores we went to Trader Joe’s, an awesome grocery store with only organic and locally grown stuff, and it was probably one of the best grocery stores I’ve ever been to. As soon as we get a car, I might just do most of my grocery shopping there.
Movits! & Zacke at Spaceland
Among other things that has happened these last few weeks, me and Sean met up with Movits! and Zacke a while back. If you didn’t already know, they are touring the states, and conveniently enough they played here in LA shortly after I arrived.
They told me that the show at Spaceland was one of the better ones so far, and I’ll take their word for it, the club was really boiling throughout the show. Very surreal to see my hometown friends recieveing this much appreciation and support on the other side of the globe from an audience that doesn’t understand a word they are singing about. But it’s nice to see them get the recognition they deserve, hopefully Sweden will catch on soon enough. There was a number of swedes in the audience too though, among others Alexander Skarsgård, which also was pretty funny.
Last part of the show. Since I saw them last, there had been a really noticeable improvement in their stage presence, and overall performance.
Zacke finally released his debut album yesterday by the way, which was worth the wait and definitely worth a listen.
Check him out at www.zackemusik.se
And of course check out Movits! video blog at www.firstwetakemanhattan.se, even though the bastards edited me out of the LA episode…
Quote of the Day
“Seriously, the people in LA are lagging like 2 secs”
- Sean
Long Story Fairly Long
Since I don’t yet have internet in my apartment it’s still pretty difficult to keep my blogging up with what’s going on. So I’ll just post the most important stuff and leave some out, otherwise I’ll still be blogging about march’s events in august.
So, as I’ve already mentioned we’ve found an apartment which is pretty damn awesome to say the least. The weird thing about Downtown LA is that depending on which side of the block you are on, you either dodge piss reeking crackheads or pass luxurious skyscrapers, cozy restaurants or coffeeshops. Well, not that many coffeeshops actually… and since I came to the states, I can count the cups of decent coffee I’ve had on one hand. It’s insane. People just drink espressos or some watered out brownish hot water which to me seems like the predecessor of what we today call coffee. If they drink coffee at all, that is… not too many people here seem to.
So much for only posting the important stuff I guess. What I meant to say is that the fact that we, in the middle of this highly contrasted melting pot of rich, poor and weird managed to find a place like this, is nothing short of a miracle. After we recieved the keys we learned that our apartment was the last one available in the entire building, and that other people were actually in line to get it. In other words, total awesomeness.
The apartment is on the eighth floor, with a view over the tallest skyscrapers in Downtown. It’s got 2 bedrooms, 2 bathrooms and everything is just recently renovated, and all the appliances were brand new. The oven, dishwasher and fridge still had all the plastic wrappers on. I went to IKEA with about $350 to spend, which bought me the bare necessities, a bed, a small desk, a chair and a few lamps. Gonna scour the thrift shops and buy the rest later. Here are some random images of how it looks right now:
Video tour of our new apartment
So here’s a quick tour of the new apartment, right after we got the keys and before we went to IKEA. More pics and some new stories coming during the weekend, just gotta catch my breath first… been working 15 hours overtime the last 2 days.
Google Sweden
Try typing “why are” into google.se, and then into google.com and compare the results in the suggestion window. Google Sweden definately knows what’s what. Especially enjoyed showing this around the office.
Long Story Short
Alright, it’s been about a week since my last post, and so much stuff has happened I’m not sure where to begin. So I’ll just tell you little by little, and it’s probably best to start where I left off.
The first ho(s)tel was called Stay Hotel, and was kind of carved out of a wing of a bigger hotel. It was supposed to, and I quote, “youthful, high-style, and high-tech”. Well… that depends on if you call windows high-tech. Our windows consisted of metal mesh and wooden shades. And since the police and fire station conveniently enough was just around the block, we fell asleep to a sweet serenade of screaming sirens and horns…
We spent 2 nights at that place. After that our boss Jose took pity on us and put us up at a slightly fancier adress, the Kyoto Grand Hotel. That was totally awesome and a real lifesaver (Thanks Jose!).
We checked out on saturday, because by then we had found a permanent apartment. More on that in the next post!
In the meantime, enjoy this hastily improvised panoramic view from our hotel room over Los Angeles.
Click image for full version