Divides

The complementary breakfast at the Manhattan Beach hotel turned out to be the most lavish one yet. Oatmeal. Danishes. Eggs, sausages, pancakes and hashbrowns. A pick and mix yoghurt bar. Four kinds of cereal. Two kinds of bagels and three kinds of toast. SEVEN different flavours of make-your-own-waffles! The coffee was terrible, as all American hotel coffee is, but it was on the less offensive end of the spectrum.

I decided to make use of the kitchenette in my room and make dinner tonight. All of the local supermarkets are the expensive ones, so I persuaded my friend to drive me to the nearest Aldi to Manhattan Beach... which turned out to be 7 miles away in Inglewood. Inglewood isn’t quite South Central, Watts or Compton, but it’s adjacent; you could probably chuck a rock from it and hit those areas... not that I’d recommend that unless you want a cap popped in your ass. At least Aldis in the US are as comparatively inexpensive as their Australian cousins, and I could buy groceries without weeping. The presence of sweet old black church ladies, who made up 90% of the people in the store, helped to offset the dead-eyed gangsta youths loitering in the carpark.

In the afternoon I went cycling along the beachfront from Hermosa Beach right up to Playa Del Ray, about eight and a half miles each way. From a grand house on the boardwalk up for sale at $45,000,000AU to homeless people washing themselves at the dog watering taps next to the sewage treatment plant under the flightpath of the airport, all in just a few minutes’ cycling.

Dinner in the evening was a success, primarily because US Aldi sells the same great prosecco as Australia Aldi. Any meal with Aldi prosecco is a good meal.