Hello again.
Since last email we've been pretty busy. I got a blister the size of a 10c coin on my heel from playing basketball in converse allstars. It was worth wearing them thhough (aside from the fact that I only had one pair of non-work shoes) because the guy I was guarding was talking about my "chucks".
The day after my last email we went to disney land. We decided to take a bus because it was only $5 instead of $30 for the direct shuttle. Unfortunately the bus took 4 hours to get there, so we didn't get to disneyland until about 2pm. Disneyland has like 2 sections, california park, and disneyland itself. We started out in california park or whatever it's called, and that was pretty sweet. It was totally deserted and had a few cool rides. We went on the roller coaster, and saw this muppet 3d movie. The last ride we went on was this hollywood hotel ride thing. It's just about the only ride I've ever been on that I wantexd to get off because I didn't feel safe. You seat in this seat strapped in by only a seatbelt, with your bags and stuff loose on the floor, and the theme of the ride is that you're exploring a ghostly hotel... You're completely indoors, and they show you some spooky scenes and then you drop really fast for ages, then you stop and go up really fast, up and down, up and down for a while until you go right to the top. A window then opens in front of you showing you how high you are and then you drop to the bottom.
After california park we went on into disneyland. There must have been at least 50,000 people in there. You could hardly move. It was totally rediculous. On the more popular rides you can get a fast pass, where you can insert your disneyland ticket and get a pass that takes you to the front of the queue for certain rides between a certain time. We went straight to indiana jones (one of the most popular rides) at about 4pm and got a fast pass. They sell them in chronological order, and ours was for 10pm-11pm so one of the last passes to be sold. Anyways fast passes suck, because the whole day when we were in lines all the people who had fast passes skipped in front of us making the line go about twice as slowly. We were in the line for space mountain (indoor rollercoaster) for nearly 2 hours. It was totally horribles. I guess that'll learn us for going on a saturday in summer.
Anyways after a long day in lines we went and got denny's and started making our way home. We got stuck in downtown LA because the buses had stopped. We haqd to catch a taxi back to venice. It was expensive but necessary :
The next day was our last in venice. I wanted to check out an american church, so I walked around looking for one and came across a methodist church with a morning service, so I walked in. The first thing that struck me as strange was that they had a massive american flag with rainbow stripes instead of red and blue. They also had all the chairs facing each other with a woollen carpet thing in the middle and an altar with a rock and some other trinkets and a candle on it.
That's when the singing started.
It was totally whack. Like hippies chanting something. Everyon there was wearing rainbow coloured clothing and they were singing weird 60's songs. They had a reading from albert einstein and one from matthew, and then a sermon on how much army recruitment sux. They then had a "response time" where everyone got to complain about recruitment, one lady was talking about how she believes AIDS was manufactured on the government and tested on homosexuals. There was a particualrly cliche hippie lady who was swearing and talking about how f$#%d up the government was for injecting her former viet vet boyfriend with chemicals and experimenting on him. They then sung a song to "God" "godess" and some great redeemer I didn't catch the name of. By this point I was past feeling amused, and was getting upset, but apparently the service was at it's end, so we all stood up and held hands in a circle and everyone just randomly said "i want to uplift
I talked to the pastor after the service, she said she'd only been at the church for 3 weeks, and that this church is completely different to a normal methodist church. I think she is still a bit spun out by it as well... I dunno. The whole thing doesn't make sense to me.
I left the church about lunch time and went for a walk because I was still a little disturbed. I checked out a snowbaord shop, and they had some good deals on snowboards but I have no space to take one back. I walked for about 30 blocks and then caught a bus back to venice to meet dave to check out of our hotel. There was a college basketball game going on on the courts at venice beach that I caught a bit of on the way.
Dave and I said goodbye to our room and caught a taxi to the airport. We only just made it onto our plane and got to san diego. Our hotel room here is OK. It's pretty nice but it's far away from everything. I'll get to explore the city a bit more today, but so far I like it a lot more than LA. LA was... bigger and more weird. This feels a bit more comfortable and somewhere that you could hang out without feeling like you were going to get asked for money "for some weed", or whatever.
The conference starts tomorrow, we're setting up the stand today. It should be heaps different to the past few days in LA.
