I believe its German for "Whales Vagina"

San Diego is awesome. It is an incredibly beautiful place. Maybe I just got a really good impression because I was only in the sort of touristy places but I don't think so. The beach was great, very chill, lots of cool bars, stores, etc. The downtown area was super nice, and exceptionally clean compared to most of the major cities I've been to on the east coast. There were public parks everywhere, which was cool. Even the homeless guys were money (more on that later). The scenery was incredible, be it the bay, the beach, sunset cliffs, the cove in La Jolla. What I thought was cool was the landscaping (for lack of a better word) around the entire city. Growing up in Virginia Beach you could always tell when you were getting close to the beach because the plants and trees would change, palm trees would start showing up and that sort of thing. Well San Diego is like that everywhere and that was comforting to me for some reason. Basically what I'm saying is i spent a lot of time thinking of reasons why I don't live there, and I couldn't come up with any. So who wants to move to California with me?

On to the trip itself. It started off on a strange note. It turns out that my roommates girlfriends roommate was on my flight as well (that seems a little complicated, why didn't I just say a friends of mine, because we are friends, but then you would probably be thinking well if you're friends why didn't you know that you would be on the same flight, and the answer is I don't know, anyway). She was going to Fort Worth for a wedding and I had a layover in Dallas. I thought that was pretty random, but that wasn't the randomest part. She was traveling with a friends whom I have never met before. Except that when we were introduced I immediately remembered that she was a bartender at a bar I went to in Ocean City, MD the summer after graduating college. What's funny is that I have a notoriously bad memory so I found it interesting that I remembered the face of a girl who worked at a bar I attended one time, for maybe 2 hours, four years ago. I guess she made an impression, she was cute but not stunning enough that I would remember her four years later. Maybe it means we're soul mates or something. I doubt it though because we probably talked for an hour so while waiting for the plane and I wasn't particulary enthralled, in fact I was slightly bored.

So I arrived Friday around nine. Hotmetal and Pat picked me up and we went straight to the bar. No real stories of note here, nothing to out of the ordinary happened.

Saturday morning we went to Pacific Beach. My first foray into the Pacific Ocean. I wasn't terribly impressed. As I mentioned above I grew up in Virginia Beach, so having spent the first 20 or so years of my life never living more than 15 minutes from the beach I know the old Atlantic pretty well and was expecting big things from the Pacific. The water was clear, but not as clear as I thought it would be, that didn't really bother me that much. What was annoying is that it is full of seaweed and kelp. I hate that stuff, it is so disgusting, also when you hanging out with two jackasses they should not have access to things like this becuase it means you're going to spend a significant amount time getting pelted with seaweed. What i though was the most strange is that the waves were breaking about a 150 yards from the shore and they were super small. Thats really far compared to what I'm used to, we were like 100 feet out and the waves had already washed away before reaching us.

You can drink and grill on the beach, that is a new concept to me. It was actually very awesome to have a bbq on the beach, drinking I wasn't that into, it's to hot. The idea of roasting on the beach and then dehydrating yourself even more by having a few beers is gross. (Side note: the makers of Coors Light are absolute genius, with the can liners and the cooler pack, there were a lot of people drinking there and I honestly think every single person was drinking Coors Light) So we get to the beach and set up our little area, Hotmetal is about to crack open a beer when we notice the people in front of us, who are about our age are getting a citation from a cop for drinking. I was watching this happen and getting so bitter because it is just like Hotmetal to think you're allowed to drink on the beach when you're actually not and get us a ticket. So the cop finishes up with them and walks over to us, so i pretended to be asleep while Hotmetal dealt with him. Turns out the problem was they were drinking before twelve which is a no-no. He just want us to mention to us that the grill needs to be 12" off the ground before we light it. He said "sometimes the ground gets really hot and when you light grill the sand can get superheated then it'll stay that way for a while and people can burn there feet." This cracked us up for some reason. I think it's because the cop was wearing shorts. It's really hard for me to respect the authority of someone wearing shorts.

The homeless guys in SD are pretty cool. Unlike the crackheads in Baltimore that are hassling you all the time, they don't really bother you. In fact it's hard to tell who a homeless guy is, they just look like some beach bum surfer whos been on the beach for to long. Here's the impressive part though, instead of making people feel uncomfortable by asking them for money they use some ingenuity. They thought, hey there's thousands of people on the beach drinking from cans and plastic bottles. So they go around and collect everyones cans and bottles and recycle them for money. I loved this, it's a win-win, you don't have to worry about throwing away your trash and the homeless guys get dinner. We were so impressed in fact that we made a couple guys some sausages.

There were three extrememly hot girls laying out in front of us. We talked to them and found out that they were down for the weekend from Las Vegas. I immediately assumed they were strippers, then they said they worked at Wynn. I sort of felt like dick for thinking that, but then I got over it.

This post is getting exceptionally long so I'll save the rest for later. It gets better, you'll want to hear about the antics at the Ska concert and the zoo, its some funny stuff.