Hey Boys and Girls back home!

I gotta tell you, I got such a hangover, all I need right now is a warm, cuddly bed, some coke and a hockey game. I'm watching the Sharks vs. the Ducks right now, NHL is just awesome, these guys are soo good, fast and technically perfect, awesome sport. But not to bother you any longer with some lame story nobody's interested in I start my weekly update.

My week was pretty good, but time flies by so fast, it's crazy. I go to work at 9am every day and get out of the office at 6pm, sadly it's pitch black, so no surfing during the week. Work is still fun, we're working at some interesting projects and I'm almost done with the website I do for an architect. Ned, one of my new coworkers is just awesome, we have tons of fun everyday and hopefully he will show me the Hollywood hood, he used to live at, one day. Beside work, Aline is still here, also worked during the week for a watch salesman at beverly hills. So we both were pretty exhausted in the evenings and chilled most of the time. On sunday we've seen the new Roland Emmerich movie called 2012. Pretty awesome to see your neighbourhood flooded and sinks into the ocean. A really entertaining movie, if you looking for something intellectual, it's of course nothing for you then!

Yesterday night was pretty much fun. We went to The Echo, an alternative club in east LA to pardy hardy. Gautham and P, some buddies from LA, joined us and so we met in front of the club. I already had a couple of beers and Aline was so nice to drive that night. The club was pretty cool. Bunch of bands were playing and the girls were pretty handsome! We had a really good time, drinking, talking, goofing around and was getting drunk as hell. Gautham and P didn't stop giving me their drinks so I had a bad bad mixture of pretty much everything. But again, I need one of you buddies from hometown here! We need to hunt the girls down, it would be sooo much easier with one of you! So get your stuff packed and come over!!! We left at about 2 or 3am, I don't really remember;-) The only thing I remember is falling onto my bed, putting my doze-off-music in and falling asleep in seconds.

The bad thing was, I've already planned to get to Manhatten Beach at 7am the next morning for surfing. So just after an awesome "rush" (feeeel the rush ooooohhhoo....(goes out to Matti-Katzebohle)) and few hours of sleep I stood up, didn't even dress, just put my wetsuit on and headed with a very dizzy head down to the beach. And guess what?! I had my first american car accident!!! Awesome ah?! But it wasn't my fault, the guy in front of me wanted to pass the intersection and I followed straight behind him. For some reason he stopped and backed off, maybe to let some pedestrians get over the street. But he did't see me and my nice car, so just at the moment I hit my horn he crashed into me! Damn!!! So we went to the next alley and looked at the damage. My blinker and front bumper are busted, but it's not that bad. So we exchanged insurance information, he apologized and we all went down to the beach to catch some waves, cause he and his friends also were a bunch of surfers.

I expected only a couple of surfers, cause it was 8am on saturday morning. But yeah, actually it was as crowded as I've never seen it before. Lets say at the whole Manhatten Beach there were about 150 surfers in the water, just sick! Don't californian surfers pardy hardy?! Or are they just "hard-dogs" :-)??? So I went into the water and my head and body asked me: "Dude are you serious?!?!?" and I wasn't that sure if I was. I still felt so dizzy, my stomach was a mess and the waves did their part. Even I felt really really bad I had one of the best few catches though. After getting home again, I showered as hot as possible and went to bed to take a nap.



At noon we went to East-Downtown to walk around, but it wasn't a pretty nice place there, so we decided to head more west to go to the California Vegan restaurant to grab some awesome food. So we did, enjoyed and went to the famous LA Guitar Center. It's such a huge store with guitar, PAs and DRUMSSS!!! They had a bunch of electronic drums there and it felt soo good to play my instrument again! Awesome! After my jam session we drove back home and here we are. I'm tired and exhausted as hell and looking forward to tomorrows surfing with the Santa Monica Surfers.

Take care, and see you in San Francisco at Thanksgivin!!!!
Bye bye bye! Thunder

DON AT THE FAMOUS HANDPRINTS OF SICK SICK IRON MAIDEN!!!!

A wonderfull evening boys and girls, mum and dads, dudes and chickichikichickens!!! How the hack is it going?! Do you remember me?! Its me, Mr. Don Ailinger!!!

I know it has been a while, and I really want to apologize that you fewer and fewer entries, but as I start getting rid of my tourist life here and really getting used to my daily life, not every single minute of my life is that "awesome-mind-blowing-worth-to-blog-about" any more. So weekely updates seem to be the new trend here :-)

Lets start with the last weekend. As my buddy Greg left this sinking shipwreck :-) I needed to take some rest and get my batteries reloded again, cause we've been a lot on the road the days before. So my weekend was a mixture of sleeping, some digital work and of course surfing. Manhatten is my new beach to be. Its beautiful there and the waves are really good and sometimes turn out to be tooo big. Like last sunday. Boy, I gotta tell you. These waves were the way to big for me. I guess like 10 foot or something and the tide was so agressive that I decided to quit being the playball of the waves after an hour and went back to the beach completely exhausted. Dude, never underestimate the power of waves, I got tons of respect of em....


What about the week?! Yes! Actually, work is really really fun! I enjoy to work with my new colleagues and at some great projects. It feels good to be a member of a team, taking responsibility and figure out solutions for difficult tasks. Awesome. Right now we're doing some websites for a movie company called Participant Media. To name some: Website for Al Gores An inconvient Truth and for Oceans, a Disney movie about the life underwater. Yeah, and thats possibly another reason why I like this work here that much. Very very good clients and interesting projects. Just Awesome. So the work week starts to pass by a lot faster than in the beginning.


Friday night - Time for a show!!! It was friday morning, about 11 am and I was wondering what I'm gonna do at night. So I went to my concert schedule and found out that the amazing Every Avenue stopped at the Avalon in Hollywood that night. Great! Bought my ticket, waited for quitting time and went to Hollywood. The show wasn't that crowded as expected but the show was good. The first 2 bands did a solid set and the crowd started to get in the mood some good music. Every Avenue was awesome. Thumbs up for the singer, a: his a really handsome guy and b: he can sing like crazy! He killed it completely, the songs are great anyways, but he did such an awesome job! Thumbs thumbs thumbs!!! After the White Tie Affair - who were a bit too gay for me - I headed home and fell asleep like a baby!:-)

Saturday was a good surfin day, better then I've expected. Sunny weather, almost the 25 degs and no cloud as far as you can see. I decided to check Manhatten Beach again, drove there, attached the leash and went into the water. We were about 25 surfers and the guy next to me looked somehow familiar to me...but I thought, yeah, dude, how should you know him...but after 2 hours still thinking that I know him from somewhere I took the opportunity and asked him where he's from! After a couple of word exchages the biggest coincidence in my entire life was out!!!!! I knew him, he is from Germany, he is from Ravensburg, he's from the Westside and he lives in the fucking same 30-Zone than I do!!!!! Dude!!!! What the hack is going on?!?! How small is this world?! Not even a village any more!!! It's a 30-Zone!!! :-) And the funny thing is, we don't knew each other, I just knew his face from somewhere....and yeah, my brain seems to work better than ever. We decided to hang out the whole saturday. We went to Hermosa Beach to grab some food, headed to Santa Monica, checked out the pier and the surfshops! After this great hours I picked up my dearest Aline, who is on a America-Trip right now. It is awesome to have her here again after a long time not seeing each other.

We drove home, I showed her around, introduced her to the fam and afterwards we went to West Hollywood to meet Felix, the guy I met at surfing and his friends again. After a bit of a journey through LA, we finally found a club to hang out. We had some 7-$-Beers and good conversations but not that Party-Feeling. Dude, I miss it. I wanna party again!!!! :-)


Sunday started lazy:-) Sleeped kind of long, had breakfast with Aline in the sun and packed my stuff for Malibu Beach. We were supposed to meet Felix and the guys at 2 at the beach. I expected an awesome sunny surf day with good waves...."expected". We came to MB - no waves at all - low tide, so all the rocks showed out of the water - longboarders who caught even the smalles waves. Aline went for a beach run and I lied in the sun, waiting for the waves to get bigger... After a while Felix showed up, it turned out that he has been surfing there earlier today, feel to the reef and cut an arteria of his arm...so he had to get it fixed at the urgent care...for only 600 bucks!!! As I point out later, this day possibly sucked for everyone... I went in to catch at least some waves....I didn't catch more than two, also fell to the reef and these goddam rocks breaked a hole into my board....DAMN!!!! I was pissed, cause it means another 30 bucks or whatever to fix the board and it theses waves weren't worth one cent....dude!!!! BUT who cares :-) We went home, Aline cooked some great food and afterwards we went to 2012. I pretty nice movie. Hollywood on its best, millions of special effects and a familiar story. I like it.


That should be it for now. I'm sooo tired, its 2 am and I need to find some sleep. I hope this entry makes sense at all, cause I didn't double check wether the content nor the spelling. Screw it, whatever, you definitely will get my points. So enjoy it, have a nice Monday and write me postcards dudes!!!

See you soon, take care buddies!

A wonderful good evening family, friends and my other dearest followers. I want to start this entry with some motion pictures from the Santa Barbara trip last weekend. And I have to tell you, as I edited the few clips Greg had captured with his iPhone, and added some of my favourite songs, I recognized what a wonderful life I live here. Check this out:




I think the perfect caption would be something like „Beauty of life at the fullest“. I can‘t believe that I have such a perfect life right now... I‘m really thankfull!

So lets get back to the stories of our lives. I think the last blog entrie by Greg (which was funny as hell) was on Tue or Wed, so I start with wednesday night. We went over to Carlos and had some really good Pizza and a nice talk with him. Afterwards we went back home again to watch the Baseball Finals between the Phillies and the Yankees. And guess who won?! Of course, if I got a Yank named Greg here the Yankees won. Awesome.

Thursday started early, both of us tired as hell but we wanted to start our day early cause it was supposed to be a lot to do. My boss Jochen was so nice to get me time off on thursday and friday, so I was able to enjoy life with my special Greg here. We packed our surfboards and stuff in my pretty little car and headed north, up the Pacific Coast Highway towards Malibu. It was awesome there, beautiful nice weather, no one in the water, a lonely lifeguard tower and some good waves. So we went into the water, which isn‘t that warm anymore, but hey, we got balls:-) Surfing starts to get better and better, I made it a few times up on my board and caught my longest ride ever. Greg is also doing better, even with the shortest shortboard of all time:-D


Time to leave the ocean, dry our surferboybodies ;-) and head to Beverly Hills. It was great, we went up and down the streets to see some nice houses where probably a lot of stars live...And also a lot of great cars on the streets...so we saw this sportscar and both of us: „wow dude, look at this car..“ and instantly after that greg and me were yelling „ DUUUUUDDDEEE IIITTTSSS LLIIIONNNNEEELL RRIIIICHHHIIIEEEEE“. Hahaha! And yes it was, Lionell Richie, so I hit the breaks and u-turned my car on the 6 lanes Beverly Hills Main Street, haha all the guys out there probably thought we‘d be insane...and they are right:-) So we pushed the Corolla to its limits and raced as fast as we could go! And there it was, our chance, the lights turned red and we stopped directly beside Lionel. We both waved, thumbed up and he was perfect! Smiling into the camera, waving back and also put his thumbs up! That was awesome!!!


The plan was to get to Travis Barkers Famous Store, but sadly we lost the adress, we had no idea where to go. So we decided to drive down to Manhatten beach to surf to the sunset. Again one of the experiences I will never forget. A great beach, a pier and the sunset and me, surfing directly beside the pier seeing the sun go down...look at the picture and you will know what I‘m talking about!!!


Time again to get out of the water. We went home to shower hot hot hot and left for Griffith Park. Before, we stopped at the shopping mall near my house and did some shopping for ourselves and gregs family. The drive to Griffith Park should turn out to not be that easy. My navigation system turned completely crazy, the guy told me to drive up roads which don‘t even exist hehe! But yeah, it was no big deal, cause we drove some little streets up the hills with a view completely unbelievable and insane houses - just wow!!!! Awesome! Finally we made it up the hill to Griffith Park, which is an observatory on top of the hills of LA, with a great view at the Hollywood Sign and over whole Los Angeles. Just take a look at the pics below and you will see how mindblowing this view is!!! Sadly we lost a lot of time driving there and so we only had a couple of minutes left to enjoy the view, but believe me it last! Time to head home to go sleeping cause friday was also supposed to be a long day!!!


7am: Ringeldidingeldiding! The alarm went down, both again tired as hell but ready to hit the road down to San Diego Baby!!! For breakfast we went to IHop, the international house of pancakes. I had some Banana-Strawberry-Pans....dude!!! Delicious as f***! :-)


After that great morning meal which almost let our stomaches burst we went to Newport Beach. For me as a big OC California Fan a must see hahahaha! Sadly the place isn‘t exactly the beach and pier they‘re shooting the series but dude! Who cares?!?! It was great there, a lot of surfers in the water, some really really nice beach house you definitely could spend your last days...We drove through the streets of NPBeach, looked at the houses, cars and boats and thought, wow, how nice can a place probably be?!?! Newport Beach is definitely one of my favourite towns here in beautiful California. (The one with the blue marquee is my one :-)


Next stop San Diego, but wait, a sign showing to Laguna Beach...alrighty! Lets go there we said! And again, the drive down there, just amazing. The landscape here is sooo beautiful. All the palm trees, the green fields, the ocean and the beautiful houses....paradise! I think in Laguna Beach we probably were the oldest and cheapest car, haha, no wonder, but yeah, a lot of Porsches, Ferraries and Escalades. Seems to be the home of the rich and the famous;-)


Wow, this is probably the longest blog entry ever, not yet finished and worth to spend a couple of more words. Next stop San Diego! As we drove down there, the colors turned from a beautiful green to brown...seems like the mexican border isn‘t that far away any more...:-) We stopped at a surf outlet and I bought some nice stuff for surfing and a new backpack - shopping here is soo sweet:-) After a quick stop at downtown San Diego we went to the famous Pacific Beach to surf some waves. And they were awesome, probably head high ones, with a good break. Paddling out was again the hardest part of the session. Its soo exhausting to get throught the breaking waves, always pushing you back to the beach or ripping you of your surfboard. But yeah, I got to say, surfing gets better and better. I caught some really high ones and rode 3 or 4 completely till the beach stopped me! It‘s such a great feeling to see the wave coming, paddel in, stand up on your tiny board and ride for 10 secs only with the power of the wave. Greg also caught some and had a lot of fun.


For the evening I had some tickets for a show at the house of blues. All time Low, a great pop punk band stopped there with the Glamour Kills tour. The venue was just awesome, a huge building with a restaurant, a bar and a nice concert room. All styled like you imagine an old blues club, great! As we already had recognized the whole day, San Diego girls are very very pretty, and that shouldn‘t change at night:-) May the age went down to mid teenagers but yeah, still a lot of hotties around:-) So as you can imagine me and Special Greg had a lot of fun and the bands were great! The main act, All time low was funny as hell. The singer seemed to be drunk or on dope or something. Kidding all the time but still singing sooo good! Check out the video below:




So guys, that should be it for today. I had a couple of awesome days with my dearest Greg! It was sooo great to have him here. I will miss him, but I‘m sure he will also miss Cali!!! Dude come back whenever you want to!!!

There is one thing left I want to say, I skyped with a good friend earlier this night and for us as real men it was kind of emotional and I recognized one thing again. You don‘t need tons of „friends“, the only thing you need are a handfull of real close buddies you love - and I definitely got em! You guys know who I‘m talking about. Thank you all so much for being there, I miss you and we will have a great time again soon! Keep things going crazy at home for me! Miss you guys, you‘re awesome!!!