Jeff's Guide to Unemployment #2.5: Parks with Beaches are the Perfect Combo!

Trying to take my own advice, Angie and I took a trip across the Golden Gate Bridge and headed over to hike along the coast.

We ended up finding an abandoned military building that was built into the side of hill. This was apparently the site of a large artillery gun used during WWII, along with a number of bunkers that were placed around it. Here's some pictures from the building used to house the artillery gun:



After that, we kept hiking up the hill to find the bunkers. WWII era bunkers and views of the ocean from a hill posed too big a temptation to have fun with our cameras for us to resist:

Jeff's Guide to Unemployment #2: Beaches are Free, TOO!!!!

Luckily another one of my favorite outdoorsy pastimes is free, as well, and I've tried to take full advantage with my time. When I'm not hiking, I've tried to make it out to the beach. It's a bit farther of a trek from my new home in West Hollywood, but it's usually worth the 30-45 minute commute to get a view of the ocean. Apart from trips to Venice Beach and Santa Monica Beach, I've also made it out to Half Moon Bay up in Northern California and also had a pretty amazing trip down the coast along Highway 1 with Angie a few weeks back. I tend to forget to bring cameras to the beach, but luckily Angie and I like to go to beaches together pretty often, and she always seems to remember to bring a camera along.

First off, here's Angie and I at Santa Monica Beach, one of our favorite spots:

Here's a picture at a beach on the northwest corner of San Francisco. If you look closely, you can see a bit of the Golden Gate Bridge. While dissapointingly lacking the nice sandy beaches of Southern California, it provided some pretty good views:

Here's the first beach Angie and I stopped at on our way down the Pacific coast. In the second picture, you can see a kind of see the hippie that had pulled his van off by the ocean so that he could dramatically spin around while holding his guitar off to the side and staring into the sky. I found him pretty amusing:


And here we are near Big Sur a bit further down the West Coast. We stopped at a few places with views over the cliffs that line that part of the coast when it was nearing sunset, in order to satisfy my unquenchable thirst for emo pictures:

Jeff's Guide to Unemployment #1: Parks are FREE!!!

Hey Everyone. Thought I'd get back to blogging after a long (and probably un-needed) break. I'm going to use this time to re-cap everyone with what I've been doing for the past 4 months or so. Given that during most of that time I've been successfully unemployed, I thought I'd frame this little recap in the form of "How to enjoy your time of unemployment!"

Lesson #1: Parks are FREEEEEE!

It helps living in a geographical area that has beautiful parks (sorry Texans), but I'm pretty sure you can park it up most anywhere. Here's some pictures of the various parks that I've been to over the past 4 months:

First off is Land's End Park in San Francisco:

This was one of the most beautiful parks I think I've been to. Not only do you get amazing views of the ocean and cliffs, but also manage to get a great view of the Golden Gate Bridge.

Second is Big Basin Redwoods State Park in between Saratoga and Santa Cruz. While not containing some of the giant Sequoias of Sequoia National Park, it still had some pretty sizable flora. This provided a nice hike one afternoon:


I've been hiking a ton in LA, but I haven't taken many pictures. I'll try to get some more. The best hike I've done is a 10 mile hike through the Hollywood Hills. Here's a picture of Downtown LA from the peak of the Runyon Canyon hike, which I can walk to from my apartment:


And lastly, Here's Angie and I at Golden Gate Park, in the middle of San Francisco:
From there we had a great view of San Francisco's annual free bluegrass festival, Hardly Strictly Bluegrass. I think this might be Steve Martin playing the banjo, but it's hard to tell from our view from the hill:
I went back to the festival the next day to get a bit more close and personal with bands like Dr Dog and Billy Bragg.

Hope you enjoyed my first look at how to enjoy the good life while unemployed! So far my only regret is that I turned down a free meal from a nice lady from a church that stopped by while I was playing my guitar in my car. I only turned her down once it was completely obvious that the reason she stopped to offer me food was because my unkempt, bearded and (probably) unwashed self led her to the assumption that I was homeless. I probably should have taken her up on it though...Nothing wrong with free food and meeting some new, nice people.

Marrakech

After a few days in Fes, we left for Marrakech. The train took about 7 hours, so we were able to get in a little before dinner. This is a picture of Bryan and I at the door to our hostel.

While the door looks quite fancy, it was actually rather hard to find. It was located within the Medina, so there's no "left turn here, right turn there." Instead, it was "go to this Cafe, then follow a road to the left, go through an arch past this shop, follow til you see a slight widening of the road and then find the alley connected to that part of the road." It took a bit of searching, but we found it. Inside, it turned out to be an old Riad, which were basically the old palaces, but converted into a hostel.

Below is a picture of one of the common areas in the hostel that you could use at night when everyone tends to hang out with one another.

We did a few touristy attractions (a large palace and some old tombs) but the most interesting thing to do in Marrakech seems to be simply wandering around the huge markets within the Medina and going to the main square in the middle of it all. At night, the square fills up with musicians and a huge portable restaurant set up that sold couscous and tagine dishes. Here's a shot of the square at night. It's a bit blurry, but seems to capture the hectic nature of it.


During the day, the square is full of henna artists, guys with monkeys and snake charmers. One snake charmer finally got our attention and convinced us to sit down with snakes on us while they played with the python sitting by the main snake charmer
Another highlight of our stay in Marrakech was the fruit. Apparently the government has demanded such high taxes for the exporting of fruit that the fruit companies have temporarily stopped exporting and have flooded the domestic market. Luckily for us, that means amazingly good fruit at incredibly cheap prices everywhere in the city
And finally, here I am walking through the gardens outside of the large Mosque in the center of town

Tarifa, Spain - Tangier and Fes, Morocco

I'm a bit behind, but I'm going to start blogging about my trips so far this summer. I started the whole trip back on May 31st by flying into Malaga, Spain with my friend Heather from University of Edinburgh. We got into Malaga around 5 and then took 3 buses to get to Tarifa, the southern most point in Spain and largely a surf town. Here's a picture of me in front of the entrance into Tarifa's old town.
We spent the night in a hostel, and then in the morning we took a 45 minute ferry that took us to Tangier Morocco. There we met Bryan, a fellow USC student who had also been in Edinburgh for the semester. We had enough time to stop by the beach for about 30 minutes before getting on the train to Fes.
Here's a picture of Fes from inside the Medina (the old town of Moroccan cities, which are surrounded by a city wall), as well as a picture of Bryan, Heather and I just outside of the Medina walls


While there, we met some young Moroccans studying languages in Fes who helped show us around. Most of their English was very good, one of them actually about to graduate with a masters in English and Spanish from the local university. Here's Achmed leading Bryan and I through the Medina
The also gave us our first experience of Moroccan mint tea, which I'd be having at least once per day (if not 3 times) for the rest of my stay. We got to watch one of their sisters make the tea, and found that the recipe seams to be 80% green tea, 20% mint leaves, and more sugar than I ever thought could be possible.

Ceilidh

I've been to a few Ceilidhs (pronounced Cay-Lee) while I've been here in Edinburgh. These are traditional Scottish dances that involve fast, bouncy Scottish folk music and a whole lot of spinning and bouncing around. The last one that I went to was a Ceilidh for May Day, on May 1st.

There ended up not being a good picture to see me dancing in all my glory, but you can see the back of me here. I'm the one on the right in the white shirt and I seem to be doing a move where you grab your partner by both hands and spin around. Also important to note: the crazy looking Scott on the left. No, he was not hired by the club to teach people to dance. He was real and just showed up for a good time.

Here's the band! They tend to be very friendly folk, joking around while they play. Each song has a specific dance that goes along with it, so they explain how to do each dance before playing so that everyone can join in.

And here we all are afterward, nice and sweaty. I believe I was actually pretty sore the next morning from the workout.

Trip to the Highlands

I just realized that I never put up a post from my trip to the Scottish Highlands, so here's some pictures from it. I went up with the same group I did the Berlin-Geneva-Milan trip, but this time we went with a group of about 14 other people in a small bus.

The whole trip was 3 days (Saturday morning to Monday night). We drove up to the highlands on the first day, stopping in a few places like the site of a battle feature William Wallace of Braveheart fame. We stayed at a house on a loch near the Isle of Skye where we could play games and eat food after our long days of siteseeing and hiking. It was February, so it was a 'wee' bit cold, though that didn't stop the Australian guy in our group from taking a late night dip in the loch (I rejected his proposal to join...though I did entertain the idea). Ok...on to pictures.

Here's a picture of me feeding one of the "hairy coos"... as they are called in Scotland

The ground of Isle of Skye was a bit wet. Sadly, my feet didn't fit the rain boots they provided, so my feet got quite soaked. Here's a picture of our first hike up to Saucy Mary's Castle, as I'm realizing I may be a bit damp for the rest of the day, as well as a picture of our group at Saucy Mary's Castle:


Next stop was a famous river of the Isle. Apparently, a woman who looked to be around 40 used to live near there. Every week, she made the trek into town to get supplies. After a few weeks, the townspeople hadn't seen her. Later, they found out she had died of old age, and was 90-something...not 40. Her secret to looking young? dunking her head in the freezing water of the river. I thought I'd give it a try


Then came the hike up to the Old Man of Storr. It's a big vertical column of rock up on a big mountain. Here's the hike up and the view from the top


Here's the four of us at Loch Ness!


And here we are back in Edinburgh! This is a picture in front of the bridge that I pass over on the way to St. Andrews