Living the life: the Californian style!

Sorry for again being late with a post on the blog. We just keep bumping into new experiences and are therefore very occupied. Our stay at Francois and Rachael's, and their kids 4-year-old Joshua and 2-year-old Erica, has been so great and they have been treating us very good and have been way too generous with us!
The last couple of days have mainly been used on surfing and lying on the beach getting a good tan. We arrived Tuesday 2 weeks ago from a wonderful stay in San Francisco to Los Angeles. The city Los Angeles is an enormous city - 200 km from one end to the other! The roads are all filled with cars to the edge - each family in the state of California has approximately 2.5 cars and there is 80.000.000 cars in total in the state!

So we arrived and took the train from the nearest metro station to the Greyhound bus station. There had been an accident between the second and third stop... We were directed to exit the train and either walk from the second to the third station or wait for a shuttle bus to pick us up. We choose to walk. The walk wasn't far, but we were in the middle of a huge crowd just walking on the street. We called Francois to tell him we were going to be late. Explaining the situation he just replied with: "Ah, that's LA. They don't know public transportation." Walking past the accident, there was an endless line of cars, and a lady stuck her head out the window and asked: "Are you being evacuated?!?" Actually a rather good question given the fact that hundreds of people were walking away from the accident and multiple helicopters were flying around the area. But man, the way she said it was just too funny! Anyways eventually we arrived to Long Beach and Francois and Joshua picked us up in the car. We went home, met Rachael and Erica and had a nice dinner. After that a shower and then straight to our big nice beds - you get so tired of siting in those greyhound busses!

Wednesday was dedicated to relaxing - we didn't do much and we needed some time to relax for sure! 4 weeks of pure tourism, experiencing, adventuring and socialising is exhausting - but in a really good way! We chilled out, took a walk with the dog and later a walk to the beach nearby, and had a good dinner with Rachael, Francois and the kids. Rachael and Francois had planned for us to borrow their old choccolate van and two of their surfboards so we would be able to drive arround LA and go surfing - they are so generous! Our plan for Thursday was therefore to drive the choccolate van to a smog test so the van could be properly registrated. We got up early to go to Rachael's bakery so we could take the van to the smog test from there. We found Francois' longboard and skated a bit on it until we were ready to go to the smog test. When we were ready the van wouldn't start! The battery was dead. Hmmm.. A good start! We tried with a batterycharger, but we couldn't get it to work. Rachael said we should wait to the day after; maybe Francois could get it going. So we gave up and borrowed Rachael's car and went down to Huntington Beach to surf for the first time. After a couple of hours we came out of the water exhausted. It went good, but the waves were powerful and paddling out past where the waves break was at times very frustrating. Unfortunately Kris didn't get up on the board, but being the first time he tried surfing no worries there. Having tried it before Marco got up a few times. But in short, we were both beginners indeed and hoped we would get better during our stay here. Later that day Francois and Rachael took us out to dinner at a French restaurant to eat some delicious crepes. After dinner Francois took us back to the bakery and fortunately got the van going, great.
The next day we got the van to the smog test and now we were ready to go wherever we wanted. Off to the beach we went for another surfing day.

The next couple of days merged a bit together with a lot of surfing, relaxing, a food tasting festival Rachael invited us to, where she also had a stand to promote her business. And almost the most important: a lot of home cooked great dinners- including Francois' South African barbecue! And even though we are beginners on the surfboards we've been having so much fun, and of course also getting better day by day (and getting more and more soar!)! - we've seen dolphins, seals and all kinds of seabirds whilst surfing, it's incredible! Next year we'll probably have big contracts signed with one of the major surf brands, just wait and see!

Monday morning at six o'clock we went out to the Long Beach airport to go flying! It was a plan that took shape late Sunday night, when some of Rachael and Francois' friends came by - one of them owning an airplane with 4 seats. Francois asked if he could show us LA from the sky and yes: we saw LA from the blue sky early next morning! We both got to steer the plane, and both got to take-off the plane from the airport! It was so cool, definitely one of the greatest experiences ever!
Coming back home from that awesome experience we set out to pick Amine and Laura up at Venice Beach to go to the Six Flags Magic Mountain amusement park. The park had some crazy rides with an endless amount of loops and other wild things - and we tried them all, including a roller coaster shooting you backwards up a humongous ramp with 160 km/h. After that we followed the girls back to Venice and had some nice Chinese food for dinner. Then we took a stroll down the Venice Beach Boardwalk with some very special characters filling the street. And then back home to Long Beach for a well deserved sleep after a long day with lots of excitement.

The next day we started out doing absolutely nothing, just hanging around the house. But after a while we went out and drove to Redondo Beach to visit Marco's stepmother's brother Joe. Him and his wife Vicki were very nice with us. We talked a bit, then they cooked us some lunch and after that they let us borrow two bikes to drive down to the nearby Hermosa Beach. It was very nice down there, and we enjoyed a great 2-4-1 burger and a beautiful sunset before returning the bikes back at Joe and Vicki's and getting back home for another good sleep.

Wednesday we had our last day with Laura and Amine just chilling in the sun at Venice Beach and doing a bit of surfing too. We've been very lucky meeting them - it's been fun times girls. We'll see you back in DK!

The next day was another lazy day until we went out surfing with Francois and the kids. The surf was not that big, but Francois gave us both some helpful tips to improve our surfing skills ;) Friday was almost the same, but we did some grocery shopping and cooked dinner for Francois, Rachael and the kids - just to show a little gratitude for how wonderful they've been treating us. During our stay we've been comparing Francois' South African language Africaan (very close to Dutch) and our Danish and it's amazing how many words are if not the exact same at least very similar in both languages. And when they asked about Danish food, and we said frikadeller, Francois replied with "we have frikadeller too." Of course they do. So we made them some frikadeller with some roasted potatoes and a salad, and fortunately they enjoyed it very much.

During the weekend we spent a lot of fun time with Francois, Rachael and the kids. First Saturday we rented some stand up paddle boards and went out in the ocean to try surf some waves. It was not easy to stand up on those boards even though they are very long and wide - we just kept bouncing from side to side and eventually falling off. So we were like 'screw the paddle', and tried doing some regular surfing instead. It was a lot of fun and not that hard due to the boards' bigness. But then we tried to master the paddle again and almost got a hang of it. It was a very good exercise, and we were indeed exhausted after another good day. Francois of course insisted on paying for our boards, we're just getting so spoiled. Sunday we went all together on a little road trip going a bit north to Santa Monica and Malibu. We had a little walk in Santa Monica, another down the beach in Malibu and a very nice dinner with some grilled fish!

Monday we went to Hollywood to have a gaze at the famous people... Unfortunately there were none. The only thing we saw was some stars in the pavement - we ended up going to a record store and bought some CDs for the van. Our camera went dead the same day. That's why there haven't been any new pics the last couple of days. We have bought a new camera though that is waiting for us on our arrival back in Long Beach. Fortunately the Hollywood sign is just a sign and as the tourist website said: 'if you don't wanna go close to the sign, then there's tons of photos of it on the web!' But we had a very beautiful scenic drive up in the Beverly Hills driving on the famous Mulholland Drive - enormous mansions and breathtaking views.

Upcoming is a trip to San Diego, but not just any trip; it's a roadtrip within a roadtrip - a surftrip with sleeping bags in the chocolate van. Actually the trip is no longer upcoming but ongoing at this very moment. But we'll tell you more about that in the next post, 'cause we gotta go now - the waves are calling for us here in San Clemente.

Bye bye from the two Danes here in California.
Catch you on the flip side!