Korean Bell of Friendship

It was the rare Sunday afternoon where I was not on some sort of deadline, so Carlos and I decided to explore the South Bay. We headed south on Western, stopped at the point where it ends to check out the view from one of the local beaches, and then traversed some coastal road whose name I can't recall until we saw a massive bell topping a hill.

The Korean Bell of Friendship was a gift from the Republic of Korea in honor of our bicentennial, which makes it five months older than yours truly. You can read more about the bell here.

From the pagoda, which you can enter to a degree, you can see beyond Catalina, with oil tankers dotting the horizon like Battleship pieces. It was extremely windy on the hilltop, so windy that I got a case of airplane ear, and the slope was quite slippery from three days of rain. Nonetheless, it was beautiful and I suggest taking a look if you're ever in the area.

The Adventures of Karl and Liesel

Things were looking pretty grim on Friday, too much work and not enough time. By Sunday, though, I got enough of it done to feel like something had been accomplished and so I headed down to the South Bay to hang out with Carlos.

We headed to Alpine Village for Oktoberfest, where we left our proper names behind and rechristened ourselves Karl and Liesel. This being a Sunday, the crowd was more family-oriented than what we had heard about the annual month-long celebration. However, by family-oriented, I mean that kids were running around with balloon swords as their parents chugged bier from mega-sized steins. We were disappointed to learn that biersteifel's were $50+ and sold out. 

An oom-pah band played throughout the day, encouraging the crowd of roughly 2000 people to scream "Zicke zacke zicke, hoi hoi hoi" and count "eins, zwei, drei" before chug a lugging their way through another 32 ouncer.  We tried the house brew, made by Angel City Brewery, and it was mild in flavor with no aftertaste.  Great stuff.

After we drank, we toured the Alpine Village shops, which have amazing lederhosen, if you have $300 to spare.  I picked up an Edith Piaf CD for my mom (yeah, I know she's French, but she was really popular in Germany) as she can't find the one she had and we saw La Vie en Rose last night.

Then I suggested that we head over to the closet-sized Aardvark outpost on Artesia Blvd., where we just so happened to find our costumes. I'm not going to give away Carlos, I mean Karl's ensemble, as it's too funny to unveil before Halloween. Since nobody except my otaku friends will have any idea what I am, here's a link for you. Here's her bio.

For the past two years, I have had to finish stories on Halloween and so I didn't even bother with costumes. That was really freakin' depressing as Halloween is the best day of the year. So nothing, I mean nothing, is keeping me from going out in my bad ass Halloween cosplay this year.

Gone Writing

I have to finish a story for Razorcake tonight. Will return to posting tomorrow. In the meantime, check out the photos (by me) of the Beach Boys Monument next to the 105 freeway that stands upon the former hours of the Wilsons.