CA Day 11
January 13th, 2008 |Ok, my numbering was correct. Whatever. So here we go with day 11. The evening in the hostel was fun, I met this guy Bill in the dorm who joined me for the irish pub and we had two relaxing pints to not-so-very-irish live music, being a band that played … uhm … everything, including … PRINCE. Whatever.
The next day I got up early, at 7.30, because there was a meeting scheduled for hiking the Muir Woods, a redwood forest north of San Francisco. Ben offered me a ride and picked me up right in front of the hostel. Convenience. We then collected two more people and finally headed north. The weather was graceful, sunshine sunshine sunshine, and we crossed the Golden Gate by car, which I heavily recommend doing on a sunshine sunshine sunshine day. Sunshine.
At the Muir Woods we’ve been waiting for some time, due to the meeting wasn’t very organized from a time point of view. So there we waited. I picked up a coffee, because coffee was what I needed, and we killed some time with a 10min mini-mini-hike and by talking about stuff, including snowboarding and skating and sports in general. California is all about sports and music, everybody plays at least three instruments and is active in at least two of the following sports categories: Sth with a board / Sth out of running, biking, climbing or synchronous swimming.
Later the rest of the gang arrived and we had a really nice hike through this impressive redwood area, complimented by the usual couchsurfing-meeting-talks, like where people are from, what they do and whatnot. Turns out I’m hiking around with a guy working at Google (they ARE an amazing employer), an IT developing girl from NY, a girl from Italy planning her trip to vienna and a serious parcours-pro who’s likely to play in a hollywood movie somewhen in the foreseeable future, plus many, many more people.
Next stop – next couchsurfing-meeting. At a mexican food place where there be delicious shrimp tacos and strange sangria (tasting like cold mulled wine, which is totally wrong in the first place) plus the usual traveller-community couchsurfing gang. A really nice afternoon, that became even better when I had a voice mail from Morgan, telling me she’d host me for my last two bay area days. So I go back downtown, or better said: Ben dropped me off right there (cars ARE convenient) and I head for Cafe de la Press to use their comfy restrooms and to have a good coffee. Turns out their Mocha isn’t quite superior. No Mocha at Cafe de la Press. For no one. Never. Period.
Then I did my usual BART+walking thing to meet up with Morgan at her workplace. Turns out the Oakland-gang is heading for a concert-kind-of-thing to a place called “The Moon”. Maya has a car (convenience!) and so we get there easily, yet no one knows what this place is all about. Arriving at “The Moon” reveals the truth. There’s a huge, old factory building. When you enter you see a harldy lit hallway and a foyer to your left. Down the hallway lots of doors lead to creative studios. People are sewing, making clothes, painting, doing audio editing, all kinds of stuff. The foyer, which is a tiny (probably 3 by 5 meters), is decorated with … uhm, stuff. Photos to follow some day.
Matter of fact: The gang was great to hang out with, a bunch or really nice people, we had a great evening and it was a lot of fun and refreshing event. We ended up staying at a friend’s house, not at Morgan’s place, but since I’m couchsurfing anyways – what do I care? His name’s David and he was the “star” of the evening (we gathered for his guitar-session, but he didn’t seem that superior to me. On the other hand I’m not quite the specialist, so what). We arrived at his place around 2am and he did some serious cooking with various kinds of potatoes and onions, nice snack after a night out.
Despite my excessive training around christmas the whole running-around-all-day and not-eating-at-a-regular-basis thing weaken my drinking capabilities significantly, so I felt a little wasted after 5 beers already. But since booze isn’t the cheapest thing in life that’s probably not a bad thing. Uhm, talking eating I definitely should work out a way of regular nutrition. Someday I don’t eat until like 4pm, I tend to just forget to eat because I’m wandering around, see things or do stuff, but then when I realize my fault it hits me quite uncomfortable. There be more food.
Oh, did I mention the SUN IS SHINING? Shining, shining, shining. Sun sun sun. I love you all.