Los Angeles, the second coming

For the President's Day long weekend, we headed down to LA, the city of Angels. This is our second time there. I first went to LA during the summer shutdown last year. The first time, it was exciting cause it was new, cool, and flashy. It felt like there were so many stuff to do and see. The second time around, I guess the euphoria kind of died off. Since I've already seen what it's like, being there didn't quite have the "wow" factor to it. Still, it was cool.

The weather was absolutely amazing. Hot, sunny, a solid 80 degrees. Before going to LA, we hung out at San Luis Obispo first. This town is home to the Cal Poly university, the Gumball Alley, and also UFC champion Chuck Liddell. The Gumball Alley is a shady alley in downtown, packed full of chewed gum stuck on the wall. People started tacking them on since the 60's. There's an equal amount of coloured recent gums to rock-hard black ones. Certainly worth a look I suppose.

While in LA, I tried to go to as many new places as possible. We visited Venice beach, Little Tokyo, Kodak Theatre (where they were setting up for the Oscars right through the night), Huntington Beach, the Crystal Cathedral, Universal City, California ScienCentre (I know, I know...I'll explain below), USC, and UCLA.

One of the biggest problem this time was the lack of planning. We ran out of ideas by the third day, and were struggling to come up with something to do. We thought about film studio tours and talk show tapings on the spot, but they were all booked out. Lack of planning bitting in the ass. As a result, we ended up at the science centre. It was free though, that's always appealing.

I would definitely want to go to LA again, there's still a lot more I want to check out. Some picture from this trip can be found here.

Wine tasting tour

A few of us went wine tasting this weekend up in Napa Valley. California is quite famous for its wide variety of wines produced, and Napa Valley is the biggest region of wineries in Northern California.

There are tons of wineries located in this county. Unfortunately we only had time to visit a very few of them. Almost all the wineries have wine tasting sessions, a tour through their vineyard and processing plant, and some sort of shop to get you to fork out a little more cash. We were mainly interested in the wine tastings. There are some (a selected few) that offer FREE tastings of all their wines, but most charge ~$5 - $15 for their selection.

The wineries we visited were V. Sattui, Beringer, and Robert Mondavi. Sattui offered free tasting which was awesome. Their wine wasn't bad at all, as a matter of fact, I bought a bottle of the Rosé, which tastes ... strawberry-ish. I paid $5 for Beringer's offering, but their service made the difference. I learned quite a few things about wine today, that I couldn't have just by watching Sideways or visiting the local store. White wine tastes great just by itself, but most of the red wine were too thick or heavy solo, they definitely need food to go with. So next time you need help with a sauvignon blanc, I just might be able to help ya out.

Afterwards, we drove back to the city (San Fran) to have dinner on the pier and went to see some Indie bands, that I don't remember, at Café du Nord. I posted some of my pictures online.