Its been a while! Perhaps too long to really be able to give a good and fulfilling report on what exactly I have been upto. Life is good, its simple and perhaps not entirely exciting as such, but at least its not difficult. If you didn’t already know, I’m currently in Seoul, South Korea, more specifically I live in Itaewon (Check here for more info), which is the America town of Korea (South Korea that is, the North doesn’t have an America town). I am here teaching private tuition lessons in the evenings to international school kids and during the British holidays I teach korean children who study at boarding schools in the UK who have come back for their vacation, so that is only seasonal work and I am teaching History and Geography. So in actual fact, I don’t teach any English whatsoever.

Yes! so I have gotten around! I was in Bangkok, Thailand for a good week of fun and frolic with an uncle of mine and my brother David (who was there doing some photo shoot stuff that you can check out here). Thailand is a beautiful country, there were quite a few ideas flying around about the quality of life their and the dangers, but I saw a lot of the city and life looks good. Its mostly clean and there is a lot of good fresh clean food around, toilets were good (which is always a big plus in my book). The people are very friendly and polite, it helps that they love korean people as well. I had some of the best meals I’ve ever had while I was in Thailand, I rarely have such over powering flavoured dishes, but my uncle knew where best to take me and we dined like kings! (Here is some food porn for you)

Once again my blog has fallen into the graces of being a mere list of what I ate. But Thai style food is a winner, amazing ingredients and top notch flavours. Peppercorn baked crab was my favourite, I have never had any dish that was so crammed with fresh peppercorns that created such a spicy flavour. Unfortunately my picture didn’t come out very well, so I have included a picture of the feast we ate at the Dusitani courtesy of David Sheldrick’s very cool friends in Thailand.

Let me get back on track and give my salivating tastebuds a rest. Thailand is overwhelmingly filled with things to see, temples, shrines, palaces and history. And what a history! I forget, being English, just how much happened on this side of the world that we never hear about. Entire cultures swept under the rug in our education system, its sad, but in a way, unavoidable, we have such a vast history of our own to learn. Now I won’t go into much detail, but you really should get yourself out to Thailand sometime. Here are some pictures of some of the great things I managed to get around to on my trip, I hope the will visually stimulate you to plan a trip. Its very cheap once you get there. And I will be going again soon!

This is a few months off, so I apologise, I will be posting my next blog, about another trip to America that I took, in a few days. In the mean time I would just like to mention what I am currently working on. It is a iPhone application that we plan to launch in a month or two. It uses geo-tagged photo’s from Flickr to show your the most popular and local photo’s combined with your current location and it shows you how to get there from wherever you are. It is called Take Me There — (you may see it in other forms online such as TakeMeThere or Takemethereapp but its the same thing), we believe its a new an interesting idea and has a lot of potential but its also just fun to be doing a task such as this, call it a hobby. I am doing it with my friend Lawrence Gosset (@gosseti) and we are doing it under his company Gosseti. Its a good idea and we are trying to help people explore their local surroundings by showing them how beautiful places can be and how you can get to those places by using our iPhone application to “Take Me There”.

We are also hoping to be able to cut out the need to send people your current location as an address, with our app you should be able to send a picture of where you are and people will be able to pull it up and come and meet you, it means they will also know what the places looks like when they get there. Typing in address lines is old! Well you can find more information out on our Take Me There about page if you so wish.

Anyways, thanks for your time, I will be trying to update more often.

P.S. Oh also we would really appreciate it if you could like our page on facebook and/or follow us on twitter

Another year, another adventure! Its 2011 and as 2010 was the year of the USA, this year is the year of Asia! For starters you probably know by now that I’m currently in South Korea teaching and over indulging in the delights of packed out clubs and bars, great company and great food. However Asia is not all about Korea, and seeing as my tourist visa is running out here, I need to leave the country for a while in order to get a new visa when I re-enter the country. South Korea is essentially an island thanks an inability to cross the boarder through North Korea, therefore I need to fly out somewhere. There were multiple choices, Shanghai or Beijing (both require special visa’s), Japan (close and cheaper ticket but expensive when I get there), Hong Kong (good place, lots of friends there, but been there and done that), so I have settled on the popular tourist destination that is Thailand! Its very visitor friendly and my brother just happens to be going there the same week as me for a photoshoot with Burberry and Zara, which I will most definitely be riding on the back of! We also have family friends there, which will be great!
I have been here in Korea for coming on 3 months now and I thought I would give you a brief update on life in here in Seoul. I live in a 2 bedroom basement apartment with my brother David, it is situated in Itaewon (essentially the westerners town in Seoul) which is great for us because most people speak English and definitely all the people in the shops/bars/restaurants do. There is ample availability of western goods here as well so we never go without, there is the added bonus that I can easily get my hands on a number of American products that we don’t see often in British supermarkets, such as Peter Pans Honey Roasted Peanut Butter which is incredibl(ly bad for you)e! We live at the top of Itaewon near Seoul tower (Namsan tower), its not an easy walk but there are 2 busses which come almost straight to our door and we live near the Grand Hyatt Seoul which makes it easy for cab drivers to find.

The weather is currently -9°C here in Korea, in Bangkok its over 30°C! That will be a great contrast and I cant wait to get out of the cold, here it snows on and off and I constantly have my eye’s on the ground to ensure I don’t fall over, so it will be nice to have that off my mind. While in Thailand I have been lucky enough to land free accommodation at my dads friends place, so far I’ve got by on a free flight and now free accommodation. This is a relatively impromptu trip so there is little in terms of a plan and I know little about Thailand, hopefully what I discover will be of some interest to you, I will be trying to post everyday about what I am doing if its interesting in any way. I am leaving on the 22nd and returning roughly a week later on the 28th.

Watch this space.

And incase you were wondering, this is what it actually looks like inside my mothers bar. I also added it on foursquare! its called Ease. It actually stretches around the room, next time I will make a video tour of the operation.

I woke up after having some crazy dreams, having spent the night on a huge air bed, I felt like I was flying! In my dream I was flying everywhere and saving people, essentially I was Superman. Anyways, enough of my dreams.

Today was our last day in LA and essentially the last day of the road trip. It dawned on us that we would have to start facing the reality of life once we got back to England. We wouldn’t let it bring us down though!

We started the day by going tailgating with Chris Bae, the USC Trojans were playing Washington state at home. It was once again a last reminder of how great the sporting system is in America, once again a huge turn out of people with BBQ’s and tents and general drinking set ups.  We made our way towards the USC Trojans store on campus and it was packed to the rafters with people getting merchandise. The amount of branding that they have for these college teams is ridiculous, an entire floor of the university library dedicated to branded clothing. I helped myself to two tee’s and Paolo got himself one. Exiting the store we made our way towards one of Chris Bae’s societies that had set up a tailgate. There we refreshed ourselves with some soft drinks and filled ourselves with burgers and hotdogs that were cooking away on their BBQ, we needed it, and we definitely weren’t going to be on the beers like the rest of the people there, especially not after last night.

Around 3 we headed back to Chris’s and packed up to leave, this was a big pack as it was where we had to decide what we were going to keep and what we should leave behind, this was the final pack before we bored for the flight back to Boston and then onto London. We said goodbye to Chris Bae, it was emotional, I hate goodbyes! But we will see each other again so its okay. Now our flight wasn’t until 5 am, so we had to keep ourselves amused for another 12 hours or so. We decided that we should do our last minute shopping, for gifts, souveneirs and general American bits and bobs. We made our way over to The Grove, a shopping mall area near the farmers market we were at before. We spent a good 3 hours shopping, and we bough tickets for ‘The Social Network’ film which had just been released, there were huge queues for this film, luckily we had booked ours for a showing past midnight. After a while shopping can get boring, and it can make you hungry! Luckily however my friends Clara and Erie were making their way over for a final meal, Clara I have brought up before and Erie is her friend who came to visit her in London and we hung out then. We were going for a last meal at the Cheesecake factory! I must say I like this chain, we should have it in England, it beats T.G.I. Fridays by a country mile.  Clara is practically family now, infact I have seen her more times in the past 2 years than my real family! So I hated to say goodbye to her, but as I said before, I will be seeing her again.

Now once we said goodbye to Erie and Clara, we still had a good 2 hours till our films started, so what did we do to fill that time? We went back to the car and watched a couple of episodes of Jersey Shore ofcourse!

Now I wont bore you with a review of the film, I will just put in my 2cent and say I thought it was brilliant, exciting and motivating, and I definitely recommend you go out and watch it. Jesse Eisenberg is brilliant in it and so is Justin Timberlake. Oh also we can boast that we were the first of all our mates to watch it! (we are so cool) .

After the film we headed over to the airport to drop of our trusty car… This was the best car ever! Dora (the explorer) has been our trusty 3^rd member of our wolf pack and we really didn’t like to see it go, and the thought of it having to be driven by some other customers fills me with sadness. Here is a montage of my favourite pictures of Dora.

Aside from the loss f Dora, the rest of the airport experience went smoothly, there is 3 security checks, which is totally unnecessary, and everybody working at the airport clearly hates their jobs and hates everybody who flies with them, especially people who didn’t speak English, I really felt bad for a group of Germans who they treated like lower class people, just because they spoke with a German accent (even though they were speaking with perfect English), its practically the only place that we have witnessed the really rude side of the American people, everybody else in America were really polite.

The biggest thing I’m leaving behind are my friends, but I will be back, and Facebook will always be on.

So to the plan.
The Idea at the moment is to go to Seoul, then after a weekend there I am planning on going down to Geoje-Do which is where my parents live. My mum has started a terrible and failing restaurant with NO menu, so for the first few days/week I am going to be designing a menu for her, teaching her how to cook and generally watching how she runs her company. She has zero experience of working in a restaurant, let alone managing one, I only have limited experience and I fear what I’m going to be walking into. I will feel like Gordan Ramsey in his Kitchen Nightmares show which will be nice, I guess I will feel important.
After that I plan to head back to Seoul and teach some private lessons to a couple of kids whom I have lined up, it should be easy and it is good pay. It is all afternoon work as well which leaves me free in the day and at night, which is great because Korea really doesn’t sleep much.
As for how long I am going, I am unsure. Perhaps 2 months, perhaps 10. It all depends on whether I can find a job back in England, I am going to be applying while I am in Korea, and if I cant find anything, then I will continue to stay and teach and earn some money then in the summer I will travel around and see Asia. I am not limiting my job search to England, I ideally would like to settle somewhere in the USA, that would be perfect, but who knows!

So that is my general round up and synopsis of my plans, hope it fills you in, and watch this space for more blog posts of tales in Asia and whatever fun and frolics comes my way!

P.S. I’m writing to you from the SkyTeam First class lounge in Heathrow, sipping on some Champagne, a toast to friends in high places :D

The Farmers Market on Third and Fairfax was the location we chose and we were well in the mood for some fish taco’s! The market is alright, a bit small and slightly limited, although I guess coming from Europe our version of farmers markets are much more impressive. Everything is fried! They will take something that is great fresh and stick it in the deep fat fryer, this disappointed me, I wanted some nice fresh fish taco’s besides LA is essentially a seaside city! Where is the fresh fish at?! Nevermind, a slight disappointment, but we found a brilliant hot sauce shop called Light My Fire (check them out http://www.hotsaucetogo.com/) .

Post farmers market we decided that what we needed was some beaches! So we made our way over to the iconic and famously obscure Venice Beach! Brilliantly white beaches, bright glaring sunshine, parking right by the water and all the maniacs and lunatics that you could ever want! I say lunatics and maniacs, but don’t get me wrong, there were also crack heads, stoners, tran-sexuals, homeless and police, a variable who’s who of social outcasts all gathered together as a family on a beach. That being said, it felt very safe and welcoming, everything there was unique, a realy hipsters paradise, locals mixed in with the strange all walking amongst the tourists. This is famously the location of the basketball scenes in American History X and White Men Cant Jump, also the place where Anthony Kiedis, front man of the Red Hot Chilli Peppers, grew up. Now I have been here before but that was during the winter back in 2008 so there were not as many people out, this time was much better. A real atmosphere is what I sensed and community. Unfortunatly because we had donned our beach shorts we didn’t have a camera with us so there are no pictures for you amusement, but just know that we both enjoyed it. We got our Tan on and had lunch before heading off back into town to meet Chris Bae.

To recap, this is the morning after drinking and partying in the Koreatown in LA, Chris Bae crashed in our room and I lost my socks. Chris got up around 8 and said his goodbyes and told us that we could stay at his that night and we should eventually make our way over to the University of Southern California (USC) campus. He departed and we got up and made our way out for some breakfast!

The Farmers Market on Third and Fairfax was the location we chose and we were well in the mood for some fish taco’s! The market is alright, a bit small and slightly limited, although I guess coming from Europe our version of farmers markets are much more impressive. Everything is fried! They will take something that is great fresh and stick it in the deep fat fryer, this disappointed me, I wanted some nice fresh fish taco’s besides LA is essentially a seaside city! Where is the fresh fish at?! Nevermind, a slight disappointment, but we found a brilliant hot sauce shop called Light My Fire (check them out http://www.hotsaucetogo.com/) .

Post farmers market we decided that what we needed was some beaches! So we made our way over to the iconic and famously obscure Venice Beach! Brilliantly white beaches, bright glaring sunshine, parking right by the water and all the maniacs and lunatics that you could ever want! I say lunatics and maniacs, but don’t get me wrong, there were also crack heads, stoners, tran-sexuals, homeless and police, a variable who’s who of social outcasts all gathered together as a family on a beach. That being said, it felt very safe and welcoming, everything there was unique, a realy hipsters paradise, locals mixed in with the strange all walking amongst the tourists. This is famously the location of the basketball scenes in American History X and White Men Cant Jump, also the place where Anthony Kiedis, front man of the Red Hot Chilli Peppers, grew up. Now I have been here before but that was during the winter back in 2008 so there were not as many people out, this time was much better. A real atmosphere is what I sensed and community. Unfortunatly because we had donned our beach shorts we didn’t have a camera with us so there are no pictures for you amusement, but just know that we both enjoyed it. We got our Tan on and had lunch before heading off back into town to meet Chris Bae.

By now it was 3pm and we had made our way back across town and into the USC campus to meet Chris. Chris Bae if you have forgotten was my room mate last year when I studied abroad and oh how great it was to be back by his side. He is the President of a society on campus and he gave us the full tour with boundless amounts of information (which he tested us on at the end and apparently only Paolo was listening). Here are a few pictures to give you an idea.

After the tour from my friend Frommer Chris, we had to go back to his office while he finished up some work he was in the middle of. This gave Paolo and I the chance to chill out and get our Facebook on.  We headed back to Chris’s and met his roommate and watched an hour long special of Family Guy. Then the topic of dinner came up, in the end it was decided that we should make our way over to a sushi happy hour that was going on at some random Japanese restaurant in Downtown with a very forgettable name. It was great though and it was $2 a dish, with the whole conveyor belt novelty thingy.

Now Chris is not of age yet but that’s okay because he was going to use my ID, after all we all look alike. Paolo, Chris and I headed over to Santa Monica where we met up with Mike Tran and Abe! This was going to turn into one of the best nights out we’ve had in the USA, so we started in Santa Monica and worked our way from where we had parked and bar crawled it all the way to the beach, stopping at every bar along the way buying rounds, then once arriving at the beach we worked our way back through another road. Fun and frolics and general stupidity was abound! Afterwards we decided as a collective that we should get some food, but not just any food, dirty Mexican street food somewhere back in Downtown, so we made our way over and I for some reason got out of the car before we got there so was slightly lost. Luckily I ran into my friend Baaby Susan who pointed me in the right direction saying she had just seen all the guys in a Mexican place around the corner so I made my way round. They were already sitting there munching away on some taco’s, they had already ordered for me and I sat down for some munch as well. They were crap! But apparently that is the point. It was a lot of fun this place, crappy food, crappy service, but buzzing with people who had just finished a night out. Abe bet Mike $20 drink a container of their super hot hot sauce, which he did! It was bad and you could see Mike’s pain, but that didn’t stop him from downing another one for an extra $5 that Abe offered up again. Mike walked away up $25 but it was definitely worth it to the rest of us to see him do it, I didn’t want to be Mike in the morning.

We headed back to Chris’s and crashed out on his airbed. What a brilliant night!

First thing in the morning, we checked out. We left our car in the motel car park as we had the closest possible location anyways. It was around 10 am and we wondered back towards Hollywood Blvd and the Man’s Chinese theatre in order to get ourselves onto a stars homes tour! This was essentially the most tacky Hollywood tourist thing we could think to do, so we did it!

Now I wont bore you with all the stars homes that we saw because essentially it was all of them, but an observation I must make is that the valuations on the homes seemed remarkably low for what they were. You stick the same $2million home in London and you’d easily get £10million! I understand that location is everything but that’s exactly why I was surprised, this was Beverly Hills! One of the most famous locations in the world! Never mind, just gives me more hope of living there someday, after all, they are only $2 million!

I do ofcourse have to mention, we saw the Fresh Prince of Bel Air house!

The tour took us down to Rodeo Drive, the Bond street of Los Angeles, although its crap compared to Bond street. I bought myself a Nike windbreaker that was on sale from $130 down to $40, and I love windbreakers so I was on that deal like ketchup on fries. The tour lasted, in total, about 4 hours, so it was almost lunch time when we decided that we would make our way towards our next hotel of choice. Tonight we were staying at the Rotex in Koreatown, it was opposite Manna, the restaurant I was going to be having my little reunion that night with my friends from LA.

After arriving at our destination we checked in and had a top floor room with a view of the Hollywood sign, very nice, we headed out and wondered around the Korea town for a bit. It was huge! We walked for a good 2 hours exploring before coming back, having a nap and watching an episode of Jersey Shore.

We crossed the road the an all you can eat Korean BBQ place called Manna, here we were going to wait for my friends to turn up and eat, drink and be merry! It was packed! This was obviously a very popular place, they had loads of huge parties of people all cheering and having fun, reminded me a lot of Korea, we sat down with Clara, Kieu, Kevin, Chris Bae, Abe and Mike. I felt bad for Paolo because we were all reminisicing about times we had when we were all studying abroad, these guys all live in LA but they barely ever meet up so they were catching up with each other as much as they were catching up with me, but all was good, such a great group of people that anybody can get on with. The BBQ was all you can eat, so we were there for a good 2 hours of eating. It was a lot of fun and I felt really at home with everybody and it made me realise how much I had missed it.

After dinner we proceeded into the heart of LA Korea town and went for some good old fashion Korean drinking, Soju time. I don’t recall the name of the place, in the LA Korea town there are hundreds of Korean bars, its unreal, in the one in New Malden there is perhaps 1 Korean bar. I gave Chris Bae my ID and but they didn’t even check so it was no issue (sucks being under 21 in the USA). We played a whole array of drinking games, that’s the best thing about drinking in Korean bars is that you order drinks by the bottle and so its easier to play drinking games with shots. Here Baaby Susan had joined us with three of her friends whom only added to the great night we were so far having!

But once again I was disappointed by the fact that the bar shut at 1am, I think I take 24 hour drinking for granted back home, but no worries! Everybody came back to our hotel room and the party continued! The toilet got flooded and someone had picked up about 6 cans of 4loco so you know we were going to have a good time! The night ended with some people crashing and some going home, all in all a bloody brilliant night in LA!

There are not many pictures of the night, which is either good or bad, but I do have a couple so I hope they will suffice.

We had tried to go to a place called Hash House a’go go while in Las Vegas but it was closed on the Sunday we went. Luckily there is another branch in San Diego so we went there! It was good, great breakfast food, they serve their food in a skillet and it is literally a pile of food, I got the garlic roast chicken and Paolo had the beef. Essentially the ‘hash’ is a bed of their own mix of roast potatoes with various herbs, it is served the American way with fruit on the same plate as the savoury meal, with a side of scrambled eggs 2 sticks of asparagus, a ‘biscuit’ (which is actually a scone) and a whole sprig of thyme! It was good and oh was it filling! It has been a while since we have had fresh high quality produce, I mean we have had great food, but it hasn’t always been the freshest or the highest of quality, the mastery in the American cuisine is how they process it. Anyways, my point is this was good quality food, it has been such a long time so it was easier to notice that is that the quality here was higher, perhaps it was because we were in California and they are more food conscious, who knows.

We headed back to Farah’s place, packed up and headed off. We had a brilliant time in San Diego, really fell in love with the place, it helped that we had brilliant company, we weren’t even intending to stay with Farah, but she invited us and we accepted, and it was brilliant fun, sometimes the best times are unplanned!

We hit traffic around 30 minutes into the drive towards LA, we however managed to by pass the entire jam (which lasted almost the entire way into LA) because we drove in the car pool lane, which had nobody in it. You have to have 2 people in the car in order to drive in the carpool lane and nobody did! I was checking out the cars stuck in the jam and every car had 1 person in it! Insane that they would sit through all of that when all they would need to do is carpool! The traffic was literally at a standstill, but we just zipped straight past with nobody in our lane.

Arriving in LA we hit the real rush hour traffic, its not so bad, its simply because there is a huge bloody highway plonked right in the middle. We drove down Wiltshire blvd all the way down to Sunset and drove north towards Hollywood blvd. It was around 6pm by now and we settled in a motel 1 block behind Hollywood Blvd and Man’s Chinese Theatre, brilliant location! Or so we thought. It being Hollywood, we expected that there would be bars and clubs somewhere around such a famous area, what with it being the location of the walk of fame and all the stars on the floor, but no! There were no bars. So we just had dinner, which was surprisingly good. We had a bacon covered burger, I had spinach mashed potatoes as a side, it went straight in the top 10 burgers I’ve had, although not near the top 5, that is a hard list to get into after the trip I’ve had.

We headed back after being disappointed by LA, but don’t worry, we watched two episodes of Jersey shore which made up for all the evil in the world!

I write to you from my humble abode, sitting in my mess of a room in London. The weather sucks, and I am behind on my American road trip posts. Already it seems so far away… because it is, but still, I miss it and now I have to recollect the joys of just a week ago.

As with many days on this trip we had an early start. We were doing the whole out tourist experience today, like we did with Coca Cola world and the Jack Daniels factory, today we were taking in another institution of the American tourist industry. SeaWorld!

SeaWorld is easy to find in San Diego, its sign posted on all the highways and it even has its own road. We drove in, parking was $15, slightly extortionate considering there was only SeaWorld here and nobody was going to park there for any other reason, Disneyland doesn’t charge for parking, Thorpe Park doesn’t charge for parking, SeaWorld on the other hand thinks they are more important. The price of entry was an astounding $70 each! Incredible! We doubted whether we should enter, but after a bit of deliberation we paid the fare and entered, determined to get full value for money for our tickets!

The first thing we noticed was that there really wasn’t anybody around, we wondered for a bit but really there were few people. We eventually heard screams and roar of applause and headed in the direction of the excited cheers. It was the dolphins show area, and the show was running, we couldn’t get in because it was half way through, however we were able to stand behind and see the dolphins that had just finished performing. They did a couple of back flips and tricks with the trainers for us. It was amazing to see them being so obedient!

The shows are on twice a day, the are numerous shows, there is the dolphin show, Shamu’s killer whale show, the otter and sea lion show and the pet show.

We made our way over to the area where the next show after the dolphin show, that we had missed, was going to be. The Shamu’s killer whale show! It’s what SeaWorld is famous for, and it is supposed to be the most impressive show at the park. We seated ourselves in the splash zone, about 10 seats in, the splash zone did go up to the first 20 rows of seats and we decided to sit in the middle of it.

For such large beasts killer whales move extremely fast, you can see them under water through the piece of glass at the top of the tank as they zip by. Its incredible to think that they can be trained as well as they are. Killer whales are definitely a animal which is impressive, however I would have preferred to have seen them in their natural habitat, I will say however that SeaWorld provided a better photo opp. And yes, we got wet…

The show ended and we slowly made our way out of the stadium with the rest of the masses and made our way over to the aquarium, where there were any number of strange quirky creatures from the deep, there were some really cool fish that changed colour depending on how dark it was (you could press a button to change the light intensity in the tank). Apart from that, a fish is a fish, so we headed over to the Rapids, in which we had to awkwardly sit with a family of Mexicans, their son was petrified and I got on the wrong end of a waterfall.

The turtle area was a sad sight, unless they were rescued turtles (which it didn’t specify) these giants of the oceans were all cramped into a small tank, they were piling on top of each other, even as we were there we could see some of them biting each other, turtles are my favourite creature from the sea’s along with penguins, they just seem fun loving. The penguin enclosure is a different story, they have their own little world going on, and they appeared to love it!

Next we did went to go watch the seals and sea lions being fed, before moving onto the sea lion show, it was a comedy whereby the sea lions enacted out popular American TV shows, like CSI and Pop Idol etc. it was good and definitely entertaining, they looked like they were having fun, my favourite ‘actor’ was the otter though, it kept messing up! Also it has to be mentioned, but sea lions have incredible balance on their nose.

I decided that it would perhaps be a good idea to feed the flamingo’s, what I wasn’t expecting was to be attacked by one of them, I was trying to feed one when another one came over and started trying to eat my hand! It didn’t hurt as they don’t have teeth, but they do pinch! This flamingo then proceeded to attack all the rest of the flamingo’s and a duck! No manners.

The Dolphin show was on the cards and so off we went to go see what we had heard the crowds enjoying earlier. The show was extremely cheesy, with back stories and character lines that spun off into a tangent that really was a non requisite for the show, all I wanted to see was tricks from the dolphins! This show involved doves and a crane (the bird), it was great! We sat in the splash zone again, but didn’t get too wet, the dolphins had decided to focus their attention on another seating section, they spent a good minute continuously splashing one section of the crowd, and they got destroyed.

We then went to go see the polar bears chilling and took in the only real action ride in the park, where we got another good wash down and I did my tribute to Ace Venture (we were in an animal park after all).

Overall we felt like we had got our money’s worth, a great day out!

We returned to meet up with Farah and her roommates, we were going to go to a San Diego food Mecca, Phil’s BBQ! It is the must go place to eat in San Diego, everybody we met who had been to SD recommended we eat there, and definitely for good reason! We had at a time that we had to queue for about 30 minutes, Farah told us this is the shortest time she ever had to wait at Phil’s BBQ. Paolo and I ordered two plates, the taster plate, which had a small selection of ribs with two sides, and their famous pulled pork sandwich. Both were succulent and juicy, even the sides were a class of their own, it brings great sadness that you simply cant get food like this in England! It was great, simply put, it was great, every mouthful was as great and if not better than the last, the ribs just fell off the bone! It was not too salty, not too sweet many times I have come close to saying it, and I will perhaps verge on saying it now, but this is up there with the perfect BBQ, although just trumped perhaps by Salt Lick BBQ in Austin, Texas, but only by a pinch. Here is a picture of the food; there were 7 of us in total, which should explain the sheer amount of food.

There was a place in San Diego that we had to go, Mt Soledad in La Jolla, it is the same place that Ron Burgundy brings Veronica Corningstone in the film Anchorman and explains the origins of the name of the city. A breath taking view, there were only 5 of us by now, and we just sat up on the peak and stared out on the city enjoying the view, the police eventually came along and moved along everybody who was parked up on the peak, we had parked somewhere else and walked up though so we were able to stay, this meant that we had the place to ourselves, we had brought along a bottle of Jameson’s and had a few drinks up there while we simply enjoyed the view. The memory will last a long time and I plan to return.

Karaoke time! We then moved the night on by going to karaoke! Paolo had never been to a Korean style karaoke place, normally you have to wait an hour to sing the song you chose, Korean style is you get a room, fill it with your friends, and for an hour you get to sing all the songs you want! Except we were there for way over an hour, and we sang to our hearts content! We had shots of Jack in between songs and beers to wash them down, we had ups and downs, from Take That to Radiohead, Justing Timberlake to Justin Bieber, and we covered all the bases.

Some people just cant handle all the fun though and find it extremely tiring!

We got everybody home, it was late, around 2am, we continued to chat and sit around drinking until about 3am when someone suggested we got to Wal-Mart! Paolo being the only sensible person decided it would be better to sleep than to head to Wal-Mart, the rest of us clearly thought otherwise and we went! There was nobody there, it was open but we were the only customers that were stupid enough to go, when we got there we it clicked, why were we there? We wondered around the isles for a bit, but really there was no reason for us being there, I was trying to teach everybody how to Dougie in flip flops and I made a right royal fool of myself by slipping up, luckily the ground was there to break my fall. We headed back home for a bit of sleep, but once again we ended up on a tangent and the next thing I knew I was telling the girls ghost stories, and right at the end of one of them, a water pipe burst outside sending gushing water into the air, it was terribly loud and was a big shock! It was so loud that we had to go round closing all the doors and windows. The night still wasn’t over because Farah stuck on ‘The Princess and The Frog’ Disney movie, and I fell asleep watching that.

This day essentially was a travel day to San Diego from LA, we checked out of our hotel and hit the road, straight onto the 15 and headed south west. We did hit some quite severe traffic on the way and once again got into a predicament as there were a lack of petrol stations. We did finally come across one and low and behold who was there filling up his car? Lou Ferrigno! From ‘I Love You Man’ , we didnt manage to get a photo or say hi as he was just getting into his car to leave, I have to mention that we say him earlier in the Mandalay Bay casino two nights before.

The rest of the journey was pretty uneventful, we stopped at a Chipotle for a bite to eat then finished the 5 hour drive to San Diego.

We were staying at my friend’s place in UCSD, we got there around 5pm and sat around and chatted with my friend (Farah) and her room mates, but we had to leave again as we had tickets to a San Diego Padres baseball game that night which started at 6.

Now this was a must-do for us in America, go to a baseball game! It was alot of fun, even though it was just a weekday match it was still buzzing, the stadium was barely full, but it was big and i thought that everything about it was alot of fun. I decked myself out in all the gear, the Tshirt and the cap, and we sat there with our soda’s and hot dogs while shouting out for the Padres to go win! I think I have finally got to grips with what is going on in the game. Its really quite slow, we sat there for around 2-3 hours watching and it went surprisingly quick to be honest, which I wasnt expecting, i was really worried that it would be a drag, but it definately wasnt, the Padres went 1 down around the 7th innings and never recovered, but the final innings had an incredible atmosphere and everybody was on their feet screaming and cheering. Im definately a big Padres fan now!

After our disppointing defeat at home to the Cubs, we headed back to Farah’s place and we had a good fun night of drinks and chat! A great first few hours in San Diego.