Who’s with me in traveling the world for a year?!

So this last week at the Santa Monica hostel has been a blast. The hostel is really nice and there’s a lot of cool things to do and just a lot of cool people you meet from around the world. It’s inspired me to want to see the world even more than I already did. I kinda want to take a break from school, even though I barely started. I feel like I have to do this while I’m still young though. I don’t want to be old and seeing the world in hostels.
Most of the people here are young, there’s a few older people and they’re cool, but they’re definitely the outcast. I came to the conclusion today that I should just see the world. I’ll graduate a year older but that’s fine. And I can possibly even go back to some places I will have visited like France and Australia when I study abroad. The only real problem C-blocking me is $$ and I don’t want to do it alone and I doubt I’ll find anyone to go with me.
First thing I have to figure out is how am I gonna afford everything. I’m thinking I’ll move back home, as much as I don’t want to move back to the Bay Area. Get a job working full time and live with my parents and save save save, for how long I’m still figuring out.
Let’s say all the hostels average at 30 a night. It can be as cheap as $10 a night in some places, but as far as more popular cities, it’s gonna be maybe around 25 depending on what kind of room you get. So it’s gonna be roughly $700 a month. Then you have to include food, lets say I do things cheap and give myself $15 a day for food, it comes to $420 a month. Next, you have to add in travel expenses like plane tickets and bus travel. I figure I’ll fly where I have to, like Australia and Europe and then just take bus/trains. Usually the max stay at a hostel is 2 weeks. I figure I’ll live somewhere new every one or two weeks. I’m gonna have to figure transportation out later when I decide for sure what I’m doing. From there, I’m gonna give myself a $100 a week for fun things, like pub crawls, tours, and other activities the hostels hopefully have.
So far the total is $1520 a month. Working minimum wage full time would almost give me the money I need, I basically would need to work 1 month for every month I want off.  Well that’s a reality check. Change of plans, I think I’ll just visit Europe and Australia.
Now I need to think of the route.
1st. Dublin, Ireland for one week

2nd. London for one week.

3rd. Madrid, Spain for one week.

4th Paris, France for one week.
5th Amsterdam for one week

6th Berlin, Germany for one week

7th Sweden for one week

8th Italy for one week

9th Australia for two weeks.
Melbourne

Sydney


So its 10 weeks total. 4 weeks in a month, so basically 3 months. I need to save for 3 months. I think toughing it out for 3 months would be worth it. I probably wouldn’t be able to leave until next January anyway due to my whole probation thing. I guess in the meantime I can also do another semester of school. That gives me 6 months to save. I have to change my ways. I have a serious spending problem and have to break that addiction. Maybe this will be the motivation  to start learning how to save. Plus 6 months should be enough time to lose a few L B S’s. When I get back I can continue my education.

Today I didn’t even have to use my A.K.

I gotta say it was a good day. If I had to describe my day by music video, it would be Fight Fair’s Pop Rocks

I woke up this morning feeling good. This last week has been probably one of the best weeks I’ve had in Santa Monica/LA. I think it may be because of the Hostel. It’s been an adventure. So I wake up today and head to Jamba Juice to start my day with a Strawberry Whirl with a soy protein boost and a 3G charger and it was delish obviously. Oh and they were playing Vanilla Ice’s Ice Ice Baby lol.

On the way there I saw a random guy break into dance on the street lol. I was like what?! but ok, I’m feelin it. Then the bus was right on time lol and again, there was a girl on the bus who randomly broke into dance, and she was gettin low, I’m guessing she was listening to Ludacris’ How Low Can You Go. Also, there was two incredibly hot girls from Australia, one was blonde. How do I know they were from Australia? I overheard their accents aand this old lady started randomly questioning them lol, it was great. I went to storage to grab my gym clothes and rode my bike to the gym. It was probably the first time I’ve gone into the gym in maybe a little under a year. I got my work out on, felt great, came back to the hostel, showered, went to walk around Santa Monica and decided to get corn dogs at the original Hot Dog on a Stick.

I’m not even kidding, on the way there, another girl randomly breaks into dance. It’s like the Pied Piper was following me today. While I was in line, there was this black guy on his skateboard whistling for people to like get out of way because he was coming down the hill and for the most part people moved but there was this kid who didn’t get that whistling meant get out of the way, so the skater guy accidently kinda hits him and it knocks him off balance and he goes straight into the beach sand lol. On the way back I looked for a bar that would be showing the UFC fight tonight. I saw a lot of street performances. Two drummers! and good ones. So there went my dreams of being a drumming street performer in Santa Monica lol. One place was charging a cover and everyone else wasn’t showing the fight.

Luckily I ran into Cabo Cantina. No Cover. and Rampage lost, that was the only downer the day really. I should mention that there was beautiful girls everywhere all day today. Also while walking on 3rd st. I heard the Outhere Brother’s Boom Boom Boom Let me here you say Wayoh! The night ended with people coming from the bars and I met this girl who was at the hostel, she was definitely intoxicated lol, her name was Alexa Castillo.

She had some deep things to say lol. She was very intriguing. She saw my shirt

and it inspired her to come up with a bikini and thats when we found out she was a fashion designer.  She’s a fan of using you as a brand, not what you wear and using clothes to express yourself without labels, or something like that. What a day.

I did it, Santa Monica 2010

I realized its been two months since I last wrote about wanting to move to Santa Monica and... Jan 4 I officially moved to Santa Monica (well kinda, technically its West LA)! So step 1 of my plans for the future has worked out. I've been in Santa Monica two months now and so far I'm loving it. It's definitely has had its ups and downs though, like going to jail and getting tons of parking tickets, but then I get to do a lot of cool things only LA can offer, there's tons of things to do, and meeting people like this dude who is going to be on an episode of tough love from new york to meeting a guy whos worked on videos with britney spears, flyleaf to meeting another dude who's worked in the music business industry whose worked with rappers.

Technically I moved to West LA which is pretty much right in the middle of Santa Monica and Beverly Hills. Santa Monica blvd runs from the beach in Santa Monica all the way through West LA, Beverly Hills, West Hollywood, Hollywood. Sunset Blvd is a parallel street down in Hollywood. All of that is literary down the street from me. I swear I see at least one Bently or a Porsche or a Ferrari or even a Rolls Royce once a day.



A big difference down here is everybody LOOVES Coffee Bean and you see them everywhere here. Same way you'd see Starbucks on every corner in San Francisco.

There's only one country station in LA, well depending in what part of LA you're in. I couldn't find any country clubs like the Saddle Rack down here. It's possible it exist, I'm gonna have to start asking around but I get a feeling there isn't a lot of people that listen to country in LA.

Another thing I've noticed is nobody is from LA lol. I would say a little over half, maybe 2/3's of the people I meet down here moved here from somewhere else. I'd break it down as 1/3 from another country, 1/3 from somewhere else in the US and 1/3 actually from LA.

What I'm really liking is that there's tons of local restaurants. There's almost no point in going to a chain restaurant. I know i'm going to try to avoid them and try all the local places.

The weather is definitely beautiful here. I'm enjoying it way more than the Bay Area. I personally love the sun and other than those two rain storms, its been nothing but sunny.

Why I'm Moving to Santa Monica...

I posted a thing on Facebook saying i'm moving to Santa Monica and got a few people asking why and I realized that I haven't really updated my blog on the whole situation. So in a way this an update to "Nashville and Chasing Dreams"

Quick recap, I'm not gonna be happy with life in the long run unless I'm doing what I love and am passionate about, which is music. In order to do that I've gotta go to college and Belmont University is the best fit for me. I can't get into Belmont University (in Nashville) on my high school grades alone. So I've decided to pretty much go with Option B in my last blog about the situation, which is go to community college in Santa Monica for a year and then transfer to Belmont. Problem with that was it would take me a year and half of community college to get the credits I needed, so I decided to start early, which is why I went to San Jose City College for the Fall semester.

Why go to community college in Santa Monica instead of The Bay Area??

Why the f not. No offense to the bay area, its my home, but i'm kinda bored of it. I'll come back eventually and settle there. For now though, I want to see the world and I'm pretty sure i'll only have when i'm young to do it. I don't have a career or wife and kids holding me down yet. So now's my chance. I've always thought about living in LA, so i'm gonna take this opportunity and take it. Its only a year. Then I move to Nashville for the next three. Then back home to hopefully San Jose or Fremont. During those three years at Belmont though, i'm really hoping I can do the study abroad thing and spend a semester in Australia and another semester in Italy.