CA Days 44-48: Drowning, somewhat

It all started to get some weird kind of spin at the AMTRAK station in San Diego, when I bought my ticket to L.A. and checked in my huge backpack, since I had about three hours left to kill and no desire to carry the whole thing around until then. I paid $29 opposed to the $20 I was facing when I looked up the prices online a couple hours ago, which seemed weird, but all I wanted was that ticket and to get rid of my luggage, so I didn’t think about it much.

When trying to check in the backpack I suddenly faced two cops, a woman and a man, instead of the luggage-guy, and was a little confused when the guy looked at me with his police-ish sunglasses and gave me a crisp and surely not really friendly “Can we help you somehow?”, but the tension fell off of them when I looked at him with a grin and said “Well, I wanna check in this backpack”, so they moved out of the way and pointed me to a way overweight guy who obviously was in charge of the luggage handling. The rest was just a check-in.

Freed of the weight on my back I headed towards my next destination, which was a post office to pick up some more postcards and finally send out the whole bunch, so they would – at least by chance – arrive back home before I do myself. This also wasn’t quite a problem and about twenty minutes later I found myself in a small cafe, with a sandwich and a mocha (the only coffee you can be sure is drinkable in american cafes) and a stack of no less than twenty postcards in front of me, most of them chosen individually for a specific person, with some “usual” postcards inbetween for the people I couldn’t find something special for.

Writing postcards can become quite a bit of work and I learned a new lesson here. On my next trip I’ll pick up some postcards every once in a while, like two or three every time I find some matching ones, write them and send them off. So not only won’t the whole thing stack up to a huge pile of work, but also I can really focus on writing something nice and there’ll be postcards from many different places arriving back home. This time all the cards are from San Diego, but in the end this is the place where I did the most things, spent the most time and certainly the one I got to know and like best, so at least my mass-sending is reasonable.

Another fact I explored with this is that sending postcards from the states is a cheap thing to do. Buying all those guys was about $4 or $5 and the stamps cost me no more than $5.40, which makes a total of about $10 for twenty intercontinental postcards. I would’ve expected it to be more, so this was a good thing. With the work done and only about an hour and a half left to the train departure I decided to go back to the AMTRAK station and kill the remaining time continuing my third book on the trip, being “Hell’s Angels” by Hunter S. Thompson (the first was “Rum Diary” also by HST and “Choke” by Chuck Palahniuk, the author of “Fight Club”).

And that was when it occured to me. Why I felt like something would be wrong since I bought my ticket. Why that ticket was $29 instead of the expected $20. It struck me like a lightning: I didn’t want to go all the way to L.A., I was only intended to go as far as Anaheim, which is about 2/3 of the way, making sense in a matter of $29 instead of $20 also. Despite the $9 wasted on the ticket this didn’t seem to be a problem at all, but then another thing came to mind: I had checked in my luggage for L.A. also. So I hurried over to the overweight luggage-guy, just to find out that my backpack has been put on the next possible train north so it would already be ready for pick-up when I would get off, which of course meant that it would be in L.A. while I was about to get off in Anaheim.

Now this is when I, once again, have to praise AMTRAK. For their service, this time. While investigating if we can still catch my luggage the guy took me out to the current train with his luggage-wagon, then when it turned out it’s already on the way he called L.A. and told them to put the backpack on the next train back south to Anaheim and since time was working along it would be there just with me, as if it was planned like that in the first place. A couple minutes later, when i was back in the hall reading my book, he came to me again “Oh, good I found you! Just wanted to give you the numbers of the guys in L.A., in case something goes wrong” and he wrote down two names and phone numbers.

Confident about meeting up with my luggage at my actual destination I boarded the 4pm northbound pacific coastliner and off we went, on a smooth ride in a comfortable train once again. I ended up sitting beside a blonde girl who was talking on the phone most of the time, mentioning that she was starving during one of the calls. When I offered her half a sandwich before I got off in Anaheim and I knew i wouldn’t eat it later, she assured she was fine, no hunger. People do weird things if they are confronted with friendliness.

In Anaheim my luggage hadn’t arrived yet, the train was about twenty minutes late, so I would either have to wait or could pick up my stuff tomorrow. Elizabeth, my host, picked me up at the AMTRAK station, so I thought it was about her to decide. “I’ll be waiting in a blue car”, she said. It would’ve been easier to find her if she had said “the BMW Z4″, since that’s certainly not what I expected after reading her profile which said she is a social worker and dances salsa in her free time. I know a lot of social workers, in fact I know some very well, and none of them drives a BMW Z4, it’s just not how it works somehow. Later it turned out that she isn’t really doing classical social work, but she manages the programs of social organisations for the government, or something like that.

It took no more than a couple minutes until it was clear that this would be a good time here in north Orange County, since Elizabeth was sarcastic, ironic, full of energy, a little crazy and after all great fun to hang around with. We ended up picking up my luggage about half an hour or so later, after she got a gift card and some more stuff as presents for her parents which she was about to meet later in the evening for a family dinner and joking around about her not having a valentine’s date despite she had multiple offers to be taken out to a McDonald’s. How could only she refuse the tempting invitation to a happy meal, colorful balloons and a cardboard-crown?

Her apartment continued the lifestyle the BMW indicated. It’s in an apartment complex with a pool, gym and hot tub, the furniture is modern and tasteful, a huge flat screen tv is the flagship of the crisp-picture HDTV and surround-sound delivering home theatre. I was already looking forward to jump into the hot tub when I suddenly started to feel a cold emerging. It was that uncomfortable feeling of being cold, of being freezing cold without really freezing and within minutes I felt weak and my feet were about to deny their duty of carrying me around and I got as tired as one can get.

It was a real bummer and suddenly, only half an hour after I already pictured myself in the hot tub, reality was much less comforting and I actually found myself lying on the couch, covered with two blankets, wrapped into my mummy-sleeping bag all the way including the hoody, coughing, with a rinsing nose, drinking hot tea and trying to sweat as to get this goddamn virus out of my body as soon as possible. And despite I was tired to exhaustion I somehow couldn’t fall asleep.

Around 1am Elizabeth came home from her family-dinner and instead of a promised midnight-snack she found a bibbering thing of pityful coughing on her couch, sweating and trying to get some sleep. What a picture that must’ve been … She brought me another blanket and when I assured her I didn’t need anything else and most likely would be fine tomorrow she went to sleep, and so tried I. She would have a meeting the next day in Hollywood and offered me to take me out there, I could then spend the day walking around and she would pick me up after the meeting again – as good as it could get for the car-less traveller, so I was eager to get well until morning.

Being eager to get well wasn’t quite enough and so I found myself the next morning, still coughing, still with a rinsing nose, but at least not freezing anymore. I got up and it didn’t take Elizabeth anything more than one look at me to figure out she would go to Hollywood on her own. This isn’t quite a great situation when couchsurfing, because you never know how people think of you being in their apartment when they’re out for whatever else. Some aren’t comfortable with that and I really wasn’t in the mood to move anywhere that day, so if Elizabeth would have insisted that I get out until she comes home I would’ve been in a really awkward situation.

Lucky enough she didn’t even mention anything like that, but furthermore reached deep into her medicine cabinet and presented me a selection of pills and powders, all labelled to assure me that I’d be a newborn little healthy baby if practically I only touched the packages. Of course that easy it wasn’t, but at least I could be sure to have some solid chemical support in my little inside war and the day would be all about filling myself with vitamines, forcing myself to eat something despite the non-appetite-syndrome that such a cold carries along, not moving too much and drinking lots of hot tea to hydrate again from all I sweat out last night and was about to sweat out today.

And so I spent the whole day doing nothing, watching TV, sweating. When Elizabeth came home I had to testify why I didn’t finish the orange juice and therefore missed out on crucial vitamin-c, but after three glasses I just couldn’t see anymore orange juice. To hell with vitamin-c. I felt better but not really well, however I don’t like to play the “poor, pityful sick guy” so I just played it over and oppressed that damn cold as good as I could, with the coughing and sneezing breaking my disguise every once in a while. Elizabeth was tired from her meeting, so we just talked a bit and went to bed early to catch some regenerating sleep.

It was like a black hole on my trip, this damn cold. It sucked me out of all the travel-enthusiasm and still isn’t totally gone, so I’m walking around Venice Beach now, coughing, sneezing and still feeling a little weird. It’s awkward to buy medicine in a foreign country. I don’t know the products and half the words on the boxes are medicine-terms I can’t really translate, only guess. Also, a usual “pharmacy” here is organized like a grocery store. You can ask where to find the aspirin and they will show you, but if you seek some advice on what might cure your cold you can’t expect much support. This left me with some pills I’m now eating, having no idea if they really help, but at least there’s got to be some placebo-effect with them, since I just decided to believe they do their job, and some dragees I just will throw away, since they have a “numbing” effect on my whole mouth and, besides that, taste awful and nothing like “lemon & lime”, what the package promises.

Oh, Venice Beach, right. On saturday Elizabeth dropped me off at a Metro station, Metro being the basic L.A. public transportation system. The train took about an hour to take me downtown, but only cost $1.25, opposed to $9 on AMTRAK, so what? I didn’t have a place arranged for saturday night, so I looked up a nice hostel somewhere within good reach of the Metro-System and since Venice Beach was a highly recommended place to stay by various people anyways I decided to go with this. A good decision, by the way, since this is the Beach-Freak-Show. Walking down the beachwalk is like wandering through a huge open-air circus, and in fact that’s what it is.

There’s “artists” of all kinds, weird characters including a guy with corona-glasses and a beermug-hat who rings a bell and sings “Jingle Bells, Jingle Bells – help me get drunk!” while he swings the bucket people are supposed to throw some money into, every once in a while breaking with the lines and shouting “Help me go to the liquor store!”. At least he’s honest, damnit. And then there’s Tony Vega, or Tony the fireman, which I already knew from YouTube – Videos, who pulls off a real great and fun show here on the street right besides the beach, to earn a few dollars. It is outlaw-land, stuffed with hippies and fuck-ups, real artists and bums who try to make a buck, all kinds of people. Skaters from the ages of 5 up to the age of 80, whatever you can imagine, you’ll find it at Venice Beach and whatever quirk you have, you’ll just fit right in with the crowd down here.

On sunday I was supposed to stay with a couchsurfer in L.A., unfortunately I got no reply to my messages, so I extended my hostel stay for another night, which really bummed me a bit this time, since I finally feel broke. Probably that’s a good thing and in the end will turn out to be not nearly as bad as I think by now, but on the other hand I find myself thinking “damn, I could’ve really saved some money in Vegas, who the hell needs the damn Bellagio, at least the Circus Circus would’ve been a fun place to stay”, stuff like that. But damn it, all that was fun and I’ll not allow myself to fall into a bad mood and regret things now. It’s only a couple more days on this trip and I plan to damn enjoy them, money or no money, so yesterday I headed out to a bar and had a glass of scotch for $9. I tipped an additional $2 and I felt good while sitting there and enjoying the drink. It’s probably the best medicine I can get without studying a “English-German Dictionary for Pharmacists”, and I even doubt that would help.

Today I eventually got in touch with Alaina, my supposed-to-be-host since yesterday, and it turns out she had a car accident last week and so there were other things to worry about than couchsurfing, which I understand. She’ll pick me up today and from tomorrow on I’m sorted again, so finally I should be fine without any hostels and such and the only big expense still ahead will be the Universial Studios and I shall be damned and doomed and sodomized with rodents if I don’t do that. Looking forward to the next couple days this will most likely be my last entry while here in the states. The next time I’ll write chances are I’ll be sitting in our living room back home in Vienna, on our huge comfy couch, surrounded by our superior painted orange wall, opposite the gecko, my feet on the dark-brown couch table and enjoying the comfort of being home, just for a couple days, until I start to plot the next journeys and feel the need to get out again …

So don’t you worry, my little rodent friends, for I’ll be home by the 24th and soon there will be a massive party to celebrate my return. The bar still is full of booze and I am thirsty for a good old austrian priaglerei. Prepare yourselfs and look forward to meet again your favourite long-haired blogging traveller, what is a reference to me.

“Everything worth doing is worth being done right.” – HST

I love you all.