Indecicive times

We had originally planned to stay no longer than two days with Dani but had always delayed our departure for one or two days because we liked her so much and had such a great time with her. On Tuesday we decided to leave her some space, we were blocking her entire room with our bed and stuff, but we were very certain to come back some day. Our plan was to take the train to San Diego, where we would spend the week before we returned to LA to go to Disneyland with Kenny. We had tried to contact several people down there but hadn't found a place to stay by that time so we texted Mike, a CouchSurfer from Hollywood with whom we had been in contact for a while, and asked if we could stay with him for that night. He was happy to have us next to another CouchSurfer and we headed off towards Hollywood after doing our laundry (my first time with a coin laundry machine). It takes quite a while to get into LA from here and it was already dark when we arrived but we met Mike and Julia, the girl who was staying with him, in a near supermarket where we shopped for dinner before we went to his place. Julia, a really nice and beautiful girl from St.Petersburg in Russia made us real Russian Blinis and one of Mike's friends came over to eat with us. We had a really cool evening and we heard a lot of stories about LA, movie making and far to expensive productions (both of them worked in the film biz, but the cool one, where they get to blow up stuff...).
Mike was also very interested in Australia because he was leaving in three days and we told him about places we've been to that we liked. It was so much fun and I enjoyed listening to those stories a lot.
The next day we actually wanted to take of to San Diego but we still hadn't heard back from anyone and when Mike asked us if we wanted to join Julia and him on a trip to Venice beach we decided to wait til the afternoon and went to the beach. It was a nice day, a slight breeze was blowing but the sun warmed us while we went for a walk on the Venice pier and the world famous promenade with all the hippie stores, the street vendors and the homeless people. I even found an old and shabby longboard deck which I bought for 15$ that made me very happy. We met another friend, who lived down there, for lunch and they showed us around the area a bit more and told us about theold and apparently really good public transport system that was then bought and destroyed by the car lobby because they wanted to make the people of LA dependent on cars. Through that they fucked up the whole city but probably earned a shit ton of money... 
Mike had found an outdoor store where he wanted to buy a bag for his trip and he used that opportunity to show us the 3rd street promenade, the big shopping street of Santa Monica. We found a bag and some shoes and headed home in the middle of the after work rush hour and I can tell you: You don't want to be driving, when all the other 6 million people that live here drive home! It was a good example for how the car industry had screwed up the city, when they had wrecked the public transport. It took us over 2 hours to get home (only about 11 miles) and by the time we arrived it was already time for us to leave for the last train to San Diego. We hadn't packed though and were both very tired from the long day at the beach and Mike offered us to stay for another night so we stayed, had another evening with him and Julia and made the decision not to drive down but to stay in the area, it was already Thursday and we were meeting Kenny on Sunday.
Mike is a professional photographer and he has a great camera with witch he took some cool pics.

A few weeks ago Rasmus had told me about Jason, this guy from CA who he had met while traveling in New Zealand and told me I should contact him when I was there. I had befriended him on Facebook before and called him that night to see if he had a place for us to stay for a day or two and he invited us to his place in Irvine for the next day. We left Hollywood early in the morning and took the train to Irvine where Jason picked us up. He surfed too and we got along well from the first minute. He had a lot of stories to tell about his travels and seemed to be a really relaxed and nice guy. He took us to a beach called Newport Beach to check the surf even though the forecast didn't look very good but it was actually OK. The swell was small but super clean and it broke in nice peaks all along the beach. We jumped into our wetsuits and jogged down to the beach for a session that turned out to be a lot of fun. It was really cool to have someone out there to talk to and we convinced Bekki to come as well which made me very happy. Jason had to go back to his lab in the afternoon but he dropped us off at his place before he left, where we met his room mate who was nice but didn't stay for long. We relaxed for the rest of the day, checked out the stores close by and made new plans because Jason was leaving the next day and couldn't host us for longer. Jason came back in the evening and made a Mexican dinner for us (his favorite food) and a couple from Norway he had just met came over for a drink. It was a really cool evening, I particularly liked to talk about strange American ways with the Norwegians, and I'm very glad to have contacted Jason because he is such a great guy. We slept on the floor in the living room that night but Jason gave us his sleeping bag which helped and I didn't have a problem falling asleep at all. I think I dreamed of surfing...