Venice Beach

Hi everybody,

yesterday I went to Venice (no, not the Venice in Italy but the Venice in Los Angeles..) and I saw the famous Venice Beach where our friend, "neighbour", bodybuilder and governor Arnold Schwarzennegger got famous...Some people also call it the "muscle beach" because apparently everybody works out at this beach,and there are many bars where you can (even without a gym) get in shape :-). Besides, this is the place where many famous bodybuilders work(ed) out and where they flexed their muscles :-)..crazy!

Believe me, I've been to many different gyms in my life but I never went to a gym which is outdoors AND at the same time close to the beach..It's unbelievably!!And if you then add the Californian sunshine to your picture in your head then you'll get nearly the same amazing impression I got when I went there !Just imagine you are walking on the street close to the beach and the only things you see are people doing sports (basketball, tennis, skateboard, running). That's what I call a healthy California!

But the best thing for me, as a basketball player and coach, is the fact that you can find the best streetball on the westcoast in Venice Beach. Wikipedia puts it this way:

"The basketball courts in Venice are renowned across the country for their high level of streetball; numerous NBA players developed their games or recruited on these courts.

In my opinion, that's the place to be if you love to play ball (and to improve one's game). It's just a piece of trivia but And1's first mixtape was partly recorded in Venice Beach, I think ;)

Furthermore, you are probably wondering by now why this city is called Venice when it has nothing in common with the Venice in Italy...wait a second! Is has something in common and guess what it is...;)! It is the canals which you can find in both cities..unfortunately, most of the canals got drained in the past but you can still see 6 canals nowadays in the "artifical" Venice. Sadly enough, I couldn't visit them on sunday because it was already too late butI'll definitely go to Venice again and then I want to take a few pictures of those canals..(remeber:the stress is on the second syllable, unlike the German word Kanal)

Speaking of the English (or American) language, who knows what
a) a booty call ...or...
b) toot it and boot it

means? It's just slang but I heard both words quite often here; especially the second one because the radio plays this song all the time...*stupid hip hop radio* :-). By the way, don't get the wrong impression of me since both words have a sexual background...It's just that hip hop and rap songs deal with this topic like all the time ;)

Another piece of trivia ,which I just learnt today in my Spanish class, is that in German, we say "ein blaues Auge" when someone gets beaten up by somebody else...in English it's a" black eye" and in Spanish its a "ojo morade" which means purple eye...It's interesting to see how cultures differ even in such tiny, unimportant things :-)

Anyway, I also wanted to add some earnest criticism about the US to his blog entry because so far I have only praised America and the things I've experienced. Don't get me wrong, I love being here and I think it's wonderful but there are a few things which bother me a lil bit. I don't want to talk about the fact that American cars are way too big and use too much gas but I wanted to mention a thing which probably not everybody knows back home . Firstly, if you go shopping in the US then you'll get nearly for every two (or three) items another plastic bag! You can do the math for yourself: Everytime I go shopping, I get easily nearly 5 to 6 bags which I all throw out after I placed my stuff in the fridge( because you get new ones every time you go shopping). It was exactly the same thing in Australia and I don't understand why they (also) do this here in the US because it only pollutes the environement and it's also expensive for the supermark to purchase so many bags. Secondly, I really like the American sports system with the high school and college sports teams because it's strongly competetive but think about this: The average American student enters college at the age of 17 or 18 and stays normally three years there to get the bachelor degree (at this time, he/she is 20 or 21). Let's assume that this person wants to get his master's degree which takes another three years to achieve this goal. By this time, most of the students are done with school and they are "only" 23 or 24 years old. You may think that this is really good because they are still young but the downside of this system is that these students don't have a chance/possibility to get into a sports club like we do! They can't just join a soccer team, a tennis team or something else like that because it does not really exist in the US. After college, you can only go to the gym by yourself or you can go for a run but you can't really participate in sports like basketball, soccer, volleyball and so on because everything focuses on doing sports in a school or a college.

It's not like in Germany where you can still do track and field at the age of 45 or 46 in a club, and I think that's sad because most of the students don't make it into a professional team in their sport.

Think about it and tell me your opinion.

Best,

Flo