Tijuana, Los Angeles, burning pancakes...

The way I see it, blogging while traveling is as challenging as being disciplined while following some demanding diet, or going to the gym. You tell yourself “this Monday I am going on a diet”, and so you do, but after a few days the initial excitement has evaporated, or things have happened and following your diet is the last thing you have in mind. You start going to the gym, the first couple of weeks you are all excited, but after that you start getting lazy, minimizing your weekly visits to the gym, before quitting altogether (or is it just I?). You add new entries to your blog the first couple of days of your trip, and then… six days pass without writing a single line, and then the biggest challenge is to sum up in ONE entry everything that happened those six “silent” (writing-wise) days… I won’t even try. All I’ll say is that Tijuana (Sunday, day trip from San Diego), left me scratching my head, Venice Beach (Los Angeles) is for me a place you can’t get bored of, Santa Monica (Los Angeles, again) woke up in my mind countless memories of movies I have watched, with scenes shot at its Pier (you know, with the wheel and all), and Hollywood Boulevard (yesterday) surprised me pleasantly with how seriously informal it feels. For some reason I was under the impression that it would be full of expensive clothes stores and restaurants, next to the Kodak Theatre, but reality proved way different… Every second shop sells kinky lingerie and outfits ;-), tattoo and piercing studios are found in every third corner, low-key pizza joints attract your nose every few dozens of meters, and… all in all, the whole neighborhood feels… cool. From Santa Monica I will never forget the almost two hours I spent the day before yesterday at “Hear Music”, a Starbucks associated CD place, where I felt like… Alice in Wonderland. You sit, you have a screen in front of you, and you get to choose among thousands of songs, before burning your own CD. The first seven songs cost 8.99 dollars, and then every song costs 99 cents. With 21.50 (damn taxes…) I got myself a CD with 18 songs, almost 80 minutes of music, including names like Nickelback, Anastacia, Alicia Keys, Christina Aguilera, Rihanna, etc. As for Venice Beach, it’s where I spent Christmas, riding a bicycle I rent for a couple of hours and then playing basketball with a French guy I met in my hostel and two black guys we found at the basketball courts, next to our hostel. Four days at coastal LA the sun shined, and sure, it wasn’t boiling hot, but it was warm enough to feel… spring-ish. Last, but not least, Tijuana itself makes, if you ask me, a great day trip from San Diego, but what hit me the most was my re-entering the US, in the afternoon. The line was long, but in less than five minutes I was already showing my passport to some official, answering to his “did you buy anything at Tijuana” question. I said “no”, and passed. I was back in the US. That was all. No one searched me, neither me nor the vast majority of people going back to San Diego. I don’t know… I thought things would be too strict, but people just showed an ID to the officers, they would nod, and in no time we all were back to the US side of the border(!). Fine by me…
It’s 8am in LA, I am in the middle of having breakfast, having just prepared my first ever pancake!! Oooooh my mother would be soooooo proud of her only child (no need for her to know that I actually, eham, burnt my pancake. It still tasted sooooo nice, because I, I had prepared it! Ok, enough with my bragging over burning my first ever pancake creation…).
Last, I must mention something more from yesterday. The world IS small, after all… Here I am, in Hollywood, so far away from home, Greece, and yet, the guy who slept in my bed the night before, is called Yanis and is not only Greek, but yep, from Thessaloniki. He came back in the afternoon to change before leaving the hostel for good, and we spent five minutes repeating to each other “how small the world is…”
I’m more or less in the middle of my trip, and all in all I can say that I am having a… good time. I’m not having the time of my life, I can’t compare this trip to my last two big ones to India and Brazil, but still, I’m having a good time. Nothing’s wrong with the places I have visited, hell no, it’s just that I myself am not in the… appropriate mood to enjoy this trip to the maximum.
Ok, time to burn…eeeeehm, I mean… PREPARE another pancake…