Ever since the crackdown on the usage traditional plastic bags, substitute bags have been popping up everywhere. Some of the local farmer’s markets have begun using BioBags, which biodegrade within a short period of time. Throw it into your compost bin (which I myself have yet to get) and you’re golden. I have also noticed that Savers, America’s Thrift Department Store, has also started to carry biodegradable bags.
It’s nice to know that when you forget your reusable shopping bag at home, there are other eco-friendly solutions.
My friend Pavel made this video, which I think captures all the emotions of a fun 4th of July weekend. Even if there are some cupcake-ish moments in the latter half. =)
Who celebrates on the Fourth of July nowadays anyway? The entire country. Oopps. Well, we celebrated on the third day of July, and it was just as chill. There was plenty of drinks, fried rice, dogs, burgers and jenga to go around. A BBQ also isn’t complete without kite flying, frisbee, zoo, Scrabble, a bacon grease fire, and a personifying dog either.
Yesterday a small group of us rode out to Gilroy and back for some Sonic drank. It was a nice long ride, probably a little harder than the San Francisco to San Jose ride. The whole ride round trip is about 60-70 miles, but the headwind is brutal, although we didn’t encounter too much of it yesterday. The temperature was actually ok, it wasn’t too blazing hot, but it also wasn’t comfortable either.
Lately the people at Hellyer have been really cool about us riding on the track with riser bars and other silly fixed gear modifications. As long as you sign the waiver and have a helmet you are good to go. Absolutely free! It’s great because it introduces a lot of people to the track who normally don’t get a chance to ride it.
Riding to the track was a bit of a treacherous journey with part of the trail being blocked off. No worries though, where there is a will, there is a partially broken fence to peel back and climb through.
Went to go see Tortured Soul last night in the city. Reggie and Trisha are really into them, and for good reason. They put on a stellar show, even after performing the night before and being sick. We hit up Fly beforehand, and the bartender hooked us up with some free drank.
If you have never heard of Tortured Soul, you gotta get dat. Gotta get dat.
Chrome held and alleycat and goldsprints race in San Francisco at their 4th st. location.
Normally goldsprints are pretty fun and exciting. You hop on the stationary bike and ride for either 500m or 1000m. Not 2000m. On Friday night I experienced probably one of the most brutal and rigorous exercises ever.
The standard 500m distance can be completed in around 20 seconds. Just multiply that by more than 4x for the 2000m. The amount of stress that your body endures during that 1 plus minute and afterwards is nothing short of torture. Matt yakked a few times after his race. I collapsed onto the cement sidewalk after getting murdered by 15 seconds by Jose.
I was also able to snap a picture of the elusive couple that is Citybeats and Manjo.
As we were living it up in Vegas, I tried to keep mental notes of all the hobo lifestyle tricks that we pulled during our stay. Below is a short list of things you can do to stretch your dollar.
-We paid for a regular room at Excalibur, and then upgraded to a widescreen room. Matt found this trick online, and Reggie confirmed it as he did this when he was in Sin City. What’s the trick?
The trick is to slip a $20 bill in between your driver’s license and credit card, while handing it over the front desk person. Say something along the lines of, “I have a room under Billy Bob, do you have any complimentary room upgrades available?”
When we went to go register, the hotel manager was watching us, so I couldn’t slip in the $20. However, as soon as he left, we asked the lady for the upgrade and she said she already upgraded us! Free suc doo.
-Hotels are always giving away free swag out in the streets or in the lobbies. We scored free buffett tickets by spinning a wheel of fortune giveaway.
-You can drink on the strip in Las Vegas, so remember to drink while walking to the club/bars. You can save money on hailing a cab, and get suc while walking.
-Drinks in the casinos are free too, just make sure you tip your waiter/waitress.
-Know people who know people. There are plenty of people in Vegas who have hookups to all sorts of things, so just go out and find ‘em.
Since moving into my new apartment, I have been toiling with a few different color schemes for my walls. I decided to go with a more subtle neutral color on one wall, while going with a bold red on the opposite wall. Hopefully it comes together nicely.
It all started with a free concert featuring Third Eye Blind on Thursday. Then on Friday it was off to Vegas. There was some serious suc action over there. I can’t even begin to recall all the grandness of it all.
Some highlights: girls, riding from 6am to 8am in 80 degree weather, girls, clubs, suc…. I think we can call it a complete SUCcess. Here are just a few pics to cap it off. It was so much fun that I didn’t even have time to snap pictures. What happens in Vegas…
You will also be pleased to know that we accomplished our trip to Vegas on the cheaps. More on that after I recover.
Darin was host to his birthday bbq at his huge new-ish house in San Jose. Brendan came through and also brought about half of Costco with him. Not bad for a Wednesday evening.
There were many funny moments and incidents, including Kevin holding on for dear life over the koi fish pond and Neiman going parallel with the floor after flying off the Indo board.
One of the many mind blowing moments last night included a conversation between Jared, JP and myself. We were talking about blogs, when Jared mentioned one of his blogosphere heroes. I was like what the, Matt Rennick is also one of the blogs I follow religiously! Both of us started to laugh hysterically and yell incoherently for no shorter than 10 minutes. Then we proceeded to talk about Matt’s personal life in a little too much detail than we would probably care to admit.
Also: Sorry about the lack of updates, but the undisclosed location where I have been getting my internet from is currently undergoing renovation. Hopefully they will get my connection up and running soon. Haha.
The words of Dan Diggity. His family just opened up the Corner Shop Stop on 7th St., so they hosted a grand opening bash. Music Machine was there to spin it up along with some other folks. Free eggrolls baby! The Like Me’s (sp) also played, which was pretty fun to watch since they were your “typical generic Southeast Asian girlband.”
The Subzero festival was held in the SoFA district on Friday. It’s a one evening event that highlights all things art and shenanigans. Although I was at Works for most of the night, SJFixed had a booth set up with various goods for sale. I think it gave us some positive exposure, especially with the upcoming alleycat.
The alleycat on Sunday was grueling. Depending on which route you took, it was at least a 40 mile race through stop signs, red lights and insane amounts of traffic. Almost everyone I spoke with had leg cramps by the end of the race.
There were 5 checkpoints scattered throughout the southbay, all of which were malls. San Jose State was the starting point and Williams park was the finish. The first checkpoint was Oakridge mall, then Great Mall in Milpitas, back to Eastridge mall in San Jose, and finally Santana Row in Santa Clara before coming back to the park. Reggie and I managed to finish in the 20s even though we had a couple run ins with motorists and police.
All in all it was a good day, there were 175 registered racers, with over 100 actually finishing. Mark and the whole entire team did a good job of organizing and spreading the word. Series two is in the books!
Given the current economy and my lack of employment, it is finally time for me to move. Into a bigger apartment! Suc!!
My neighbor Tyreek is moving out, so he hooked me up with his old 1-bedroom apartment. Normally I hate moving, but he just lives 10 feet away from me so it shouldn’t be too bad. Plus I don’t have a lot of stuff to haul over; minimalism for the win!
The rent isn’t too much more, I figure if I cut back on a few indulgences, it would come out being the same amount of money as my old place.
Sucwidit. I slept for a good 12 hours on the night that I got back, and caught up with friends and even got a good ride in since coming home. I received a nice little surprise when I reached my apartment too. The construction has pretty much wrapped up outside my building, and a nice little wooden lounge area was added.
I wanted to write a little about my experience traveling, as it was my first time really “backpacking it” in a different country.
The trip overall was a success, as there was something to do almost every single day of the trip. I learned a lot, tried new things, met people from around the world; but I also blew my budget and missed out on a few things as well.
I went into New Zealand with a really basic plan, with a few must sees and must dos. Although I think being spontaneous is great, having a rough plan is key. There were a few activities or places that I couldn’t cross off my list; which was attributed to either poor planning or bad weather. But even then, I should have had a contingency plan for those rainy/windy/snowy days. A few of the spots that I wanted to hit up, Abel Tasman, Franz Josef Glaciers, and Milford Sound along with skydiving were completely missed.
Staying at hostels is not only the most economical choice for lodging, but for a variety of other reasons as well. Many hostels offer discounts for members, as well as discounts for tours, activities and restaurants if booked through them. I stayed at quite a few different hostels during my visit, and paid around $20 each night on average. That’s $20 US dollars!
Another great reason for staying at a hostel are for the people. I met so many different from so many different countries it was astounding. It was awesome listening to all the adventures that people have had over the years. One girl that I met from England had been to a slew of South Asian countries including Vietnam! For two weeks! I’m 100% pure suc and I haven’t even been to the motherland yet.
When I was planning the trip back home, I tried to come up with a budget for the entire duration of my stay. I ended up surpassing that amount before my first week was over. As I started to go over my budget, I decided not to worry too much about the dollar amount, because these are really once in a lifetime opportunities. I mean you can’t really put a price tag on experiences or memories, right?
Upon arriving in New Zealand, I really had no idea what was going on. I didn’t know any of the places of interest, although my friend new a lot more, since he had been there for two weeks already. Since New Zealand is a very touristy place, there are information centers all over. But even those can be overwhelming. Talking to locals about cool places to go to is a good start, but sometimes they don’t even really know.
Here is where your fellow travelers come into play. Ask them! When I was at the hostel, all of the people I met told me some of the great places that they had either been to or were planning to go to. Also, when you are doing the activity, or on a tour or whatever, ask the people with you for more great tips.
I never really was a Facebook or Myspace type of person, as these new fangled social networks always seemed suc with my mind. However, I started to regret not having one, because then I could have added all the people that I met to my friend list to stay in touch. Oh, well.
Turns out that I overpacked. I think next time I will cram everything into my huge backpack, and try it on. Then I’ll take it off and remove 1/3 to 1/2 of the clothes from my bag. I ended up using less than half of my clothes. Usually you can find a washer/dryer somewhere and just rewear everything.
I’m not too sure where I will be headed to next. But I have to wait until my bank account recovers first.
Oh, and bring sandals.
Edit: I’ll probably add to this later when my I get my thoughts together.
Well, it’s been a fantastic journey for me out here. I’m sitting in a coffee shop enjoying my last bit of Kiwi coffee (alright it’s a caramel macchiato). I spent the last couple of nights in the Christchurch/Canterbury area.
My skydiving booking was canceled yet again on Sunday, due to turbulent winds. So I decided to take the bus up to Hanmer Springs, which is about a 2 hour drive away from Christchurch. The area has beautiful scenery, but more importantly it has quad-biking, or ATVing as they call it in the states. I had heard that Hanmer Springs has one of the best quad-biking in the south island.
It was a lot colder in Hanmer Springs, and the weather was nice and wet as well. Perfect! As you can see from one of the pictures, it was so wet that you can’t even see me from the huge splash.
And the reviews were right, it was an awesome time. Some kid wrote in the guestbook that it was the single most greatest day of his life! Haha! The rugged terrain mixed with the mud and water, going up hills and then bombing them, and literally going through cows. Sick!
When I get back home I plan on posting up more pictures/videos, and a recap/reflection of my trip. Until then, cheers!
I haven’t had a decent internet session in a while, mostly because we’ve either been in the boonies or just trekking about NZ. Last week we rented, or “hired” a car as the Kiwis say here, and drove out to Springfield. I was itching to get some climbing in, especially since I wasn’t getting any form of exercise other than walking. Jabari had stayed at this one backpacker B & B earlier, so we opted to stay there again. It was a pretty nice and spacious house, each of us got our own bedroom.
We ended up climbing and hiking around in this area called Castle Hill for two days.
My feet were killing me for some reason so I couldn’t do a lot of bouldering, but it’s not like I’m a pro anyway. The little day excursions were pretty sick, but at night, it was effin boring. Since we were literally in the middle of nowhere, there wasn’t much to do in the evening. I remember one night stoking the fire and then watching Bill and Ted’s Bogus Journey all but for 15 minutes before crashing. Jammy time for the win.
My internet charges are racking up here, so I will update more tomorrow before I leave for home. Yeyeyeyeyeeyey!
A thousand curses on this dreadful day! The weather has not been cooperating at all for the past few days. It really limits what you can do, but that doesn’t mean that I haven’t been able to get a few activities in though. One of the things I was really looking forward to in Queenstown was the whitewater rafting.
The blasted photos from my heli-rafting trip are all messed up on their site, so I just grabbed some stock photos instead. It was pretty fun, we took a heli in to the starting point and then rafted down some grade 3-5 rapids.
The good thing about water and bungee activities are that they usually go on no matter what the weather. That meant that the world’s second highest bungee was open. I was pretty amped to conquer this bad boy, despite the freezing cold wind and snow up in my face. The free fall is supposed to last 8.5 seconds, but it seemed a lot quicker than that.
After I jumped I was craving some Fergburger, which has got to be one of the tastiest burgers I have ever had my mouth wrapped around. Straight up scrumdilicious!
I am in a bit of a foul mood though, because our skydiving reservations have been pushed back a few times already. We might be taking off tonight, so it is doubtful that we will get our jump in Queenstown. Cheers mates.
