CA Days 23 – 27: Some little rest in San Diego

As I thought the stay with Danny is a welcome rest on my journey. He and his girlfriend Caley, who is already looking for the right ring, are have a very nice apartment, it is clean, heated, has a clean kitchen, clean bathroom, hot water, functioning shower and, to my total salvation, a guest bed. A bed. Finally I am able to move my feet while sleeping. I wake up and take a refreshing shower, one I’m really feeling clean after, and then relax on the couch with a hot coffee. For sure this part isn’t really travelling but rather vacation, however I can really use a little downtime, some little talking with someone I know and a solid base of operations to lay out the rest of my trip.

I decided to not go to New York at the end of my travels, for the simple reason that I don’t want it to end in a huge stressful act of short-time travelling around this huge town. I will go there somewhen else, when I have more time, when I’m rested and when I’m not at the end of a seven week couchsurfing trip. Danny is working a regular job, he’s out from 7am til 4pm, while Caley has a loose schedule at school, but I’m on my own for quite a time and can finally write some good, appropriate couch-requests and don’t have to feel like a sneaky eel trying to disguise a copy’n'paste message by personalizing a sentence or two.

On the first evening we just sat around and had a few beers while talking about all kinds of things. Willow, a long-term friend of Caley and Danny, also stayed here for the weekend on a business-trip, so the four of us had a couple nice conversations. We went to bed around midnight or so and started friday early, when Danny went to work and I got up with him. I did my usual first-day-in-a-new-city thing, that is: Walking around and exploring. San Diego is a far spread-out city, so walking here is a little different than walking in San Francisco, but Danny’s apartment isn’t that far from downtown so it only took me about half an hour to get there.

Usually a city has one major downtown-shopping-street, stuffed with all kinds of stores and cafes and food takeaways and whatnot, so I looked for this with the intention of browsing, surveilling the locals and getting myself new shoes, since the pair of those Hilfiger-Sneakers was total crap. After only seven months those shoes looked like a bum wore them for several years, they started to fall apart and were more than only worn-out. In comparison to the beige Levis-leather-sneakers I had before, who lasted for no shorter than 4 years and were basically still wearable, that’s a huge disappointment from an upper-class brand. And my first and last try on Hilfiger-Stuff.

What I settled with now are Puma-Sneakers, a sporty-looking version of a sneaker that’s sole is covered with little plastic nipples, who are kind-of massaging my feet with every step I take. Nice shoes. I always was pleading against Puma, but lately I somehow find stuff that fits and that I like more often, so here I am, a freshly born Puma-fan. Cheerio. Big party. Uhm, where was I?

The San Diego piers are a beautiful area. There’s a huge sailing haven filled with smaller to middle-sized boats and a fancy museum consisting of 5 ancient ships, which one can walk around on and in and find out lots of things about sailing, one of them being the “Star of India”, an ancient sailing ship that still takes out for a trip every once in a while, another one is a russian submarine where you can see and experience on how little space these marine soldiers did their duties. It’s a great thing to do and it’s worth every single penny of the 12$ admission fee.

Downtown San Diego doesn’t have a major shopping street. There’s a huge mall in the very center that has a strange layout and unconventional architecture, kind of like a maze, very confusing, and there’s shops every once in a while spread all over the streets of downtown, but no main street for that purpose. The gas lamp district is a neat area of the city that was kind of ignored as being the “poor and filthy” part of town for a long time, but has been revived and now has a nice atmosphere to it. Probably the biggest problem in San Diego is that there’s no such thing as a dedicated pedestrian area. The four to six lane streets run through the whole downtown area, without a place to rest or just browse, so it lacks of this “shopping street” feeling at all.

The skyline consists of three things: Mid-sized office skyscrapers, hotel complexes and construction cranes. This city is obviously growing and expanding and after some walking around and finding out about the pretty much constantly warm and dry climate it’s pretty obvious why. At the end of my walking I grabbed some okay tasting but overpriced sushi and tried to find a store where I can get shampoo in traveller-friendly bottles, but the american way is about a lot of other things, not about traveller-friendly packaging-sizes. So instead I bought beer.

Saturday was a day of activities. Danny took me to the San Diego Aquarium, where we killed a major part of the day walking around watching jellyfish, all kind of weird underwater-life and did a news report on tv, which can be viewed here. Afterwards I decided to extend my burger-experience and Danny knew the right place to do so: Krazee Burgers, a small burger place specialized on variety and exotic burgers. There’s buffalo, turkey and alligator burgers, many more unconventional flavors, and finally kangaroo, which I decided to try and found to be delicious. Not so much for the kangaroo-meat, I couldn’t find a special taste to it, but for the burger itself. It was a huge thing and despite I worked hard on it neither the buns broke apart nor stuff fell out and it was a good, solid burger until the very last bite.

Filled with meat and french fries our stomachs needed some digestive rest back home, where we decided to go out for some skating. Danny didn’t do so in a while and I … well, I called a skateboard my own 10 years ago and couldn’t figure it out back then, but was always curious to try again. So off we headed, to an easy skateable place where I wouldn’t necessarily break a leg or such. Turns out that Danny was still quite skilled, so soon I ended up trying to figure out how to basically ride the board while he was trying to figure out all kinds of flips and kicks and jumps and other more stylish things. I only fell once.

It was willow’s last evening and a schoolmate of Caley, she is studying art, who is into working with metal had announced an art-show in San Diego, so this was on the schedule. First when we got to the address there was nothing and we already joked around that he didn’t like Caley and gave her a fake-flyer and whatnot, when a guy walked over to us and asked “Are you confused?” which for sure was true, but the more I think about it the stupider his question seems to me. I mean … what the hell? You don’t walk over to strangers and ask them “Are you confused?”, how is that supposed to help? You ask “Are you looking for the art-show?” or such, something that relates to anything, not such a stupidish “I analyze your state of mind”-psychoboy kind of a question that itself confuses people, and therefore almost has to be considered manipulative. However he knew where the entrance was, in a back yard accessible from another street, so we finally ended up at the ominous art-show.

Actually what the art-show was was a small place with basically three rooms that were filled with stuff. At least three different guys showed their works, some of it being quite adorable, a lot of it being … uhm … “art”, you know? But hey, there was free beer and live-music, so why the hell not even stay for a while and listen to the bands? The first band we heard was pretty cool, a girl with a solid voice produced some blues- and pop-styled sounds with her base-player and drummer, the only problem being a small room packed with a hell lot of people without any air conditioning, so it was somewhat HOT in there and breathing wasn’t all that comfortable.

We grabbed some more beer when they stopped playing and waited for the next to come, due Danny knew the sax-player, which was Mr. two-sweater-man, and claimed this guy would be good. Finally they started. Playing free jazz. With a sax, drums, percussion, keyboard and another sax player. Mr. two-sweater-man actually IS a damn good sax-player, but the whole mix was a pain in the ears, especially this keyboard-guy in my opinion sucked, so what I did was I fled out the room after some blonde chick standing right beside me started to poke around as if she were on acid and hit me twice with her elbow while no one else in the room was moving at all.

Turns out my decision was quite good. Just minutes later Willow came out, I thought it was because of her tiredness and the room’s tiring atmosphere, but then Caley & Danny followed and then everybody else. Including the musicians carrying their instruments. It didn’t take long until I found out that Ms. Poke-on-Acid decided that it would be great fun to spice the party up a little, when she grabbed the fire extinguisher and filled the room with it’s toxic fire-extinguishing powder. Party over. Everyone gathered in front of the door to breath a little fresh air and when Ms. Acid got thrown out the place she waved and was all happy and cheered on how great fun the evening was and whatnot. I hope for her she really was on some kind of hard drug, otherwise she’ll either end up in a psychic clinic or as a bloody piece of meat in some art show’s back yard.

Willow almost was falling asleep already, so she just dropped us off at an irish pub near Danny’s place and drove home to get a little sleep before her brunch the next day. This irish pub in general was pretty ok, it just had two major flaws. Number one being an unattractive, slow, stupid and incompetent bartender girl that, after successfully ignoring us for bout 10 minutes made us take three times to get our order together, which really wasn’t very complicated (two guinnes + 1 newcastle) and due the being-out-of-newcastleness recommended a similar beer, which didn’t taste similar at all and was an ale instead of a normal beer after all, so she was one pain of a bartender. Oh, second flaw: No booze, only beer. So no Jameson for me.

We played pool, had fun fooling around about our lacking skills, cursing Danny for his skills (turns out he lived in a house with a pool table for quite some time), playing some Fußball (that’s actually how they call what we call “wuzzeln”) and having a beer, and another beer, and then some more beer. A good, funny evening I enjoyed a lot and that lead to a lazy sunday.

A lazy sunday with a lazyish late breakfast around 11. Danny and I wanted to go to Mexico, which basically means 15mins driving, parking, walking over the border, eating stuff in Tijuana and walking back to the car. However, the weather didn’t really comfort this plan of ours, so what we did instead was getting lunch at In & Out Burger. Now, In & Out Burger is a special kind of a burger chain. They have a simple and successful concept: 1 burger. There’s only “the In & Out Burger”. You can have it with or without cheese and you can stack it to a double burger, but that’s it. With it there come french fries, freshly cut from potatoes in front of your eyes. And that’s it. But due to the simplicity those burgers are damn good. They rank on #2 on my list, just behind the Kangaroo-Burger, and for a chain restaurant this is quite an achivement I’d say.

The menu of an In & Out Burger reads three items: “In & Out Burger”, “In & Out Burger without Cheese”, “In & Out Double Cheeseburger”, but the knowledgeable insider – or the well-informed tourist – can push things a little further. So what I wanted was a 5 by 5 animal style, as I was advised by Berto & Dimitri while staying with Melisa in San Francisco. Unfortunately they wouldn’t give me a 5 by 5, they’d only go as far as a 4 by 4, so I settled with that instead and will try the 5 by 5 again in Vegas, since I guess they are more likely to be a little fancy out there in the desert. If you wanna know what a 4 by 4 animal style is you’ll have to google “In & Out Burger” and find out yourself, I’m too lazy to list it here now. Haha!

Caley & Danny have a small fishtank with some little fellas swimming around, however there’s a major snail invasion going on, so Danny and I planned to go to a pet store and get them some snail eating fish to keep the situation under control. There’s a huge pet store in San Diego, funny enough right across the street from In & Out Burger, where we browsed around for many a minute, I think it’s been about an hour we just looked at tropical fish, searched for the snail-killing-thing and then went on to see some lizards and frogs. The snaileaters were out of stock, so what we did is we left empty-handed and headed back to Danny’s place to say goodbye to Willow, who was about to leave back to San Francisco soon.

I then moved from the couch to the office/guest room, which means from the sleeping bag to the guest bed, which means from travelling to vacation-sleeping-mode, which means space to move my feet, which means comfort, which is good. Which which which. And now it’s a rainy monday I’m spending with couch requests, photo-organization and uploading (go see here) and going to grab mexican food in the rare rain-breaks. Lazy day, lazy me, goodbye!

I love you all.