In Da 'Burgh

Exactly 24 hours transpire between your plane taking off in Auckland and your final one landing in Pittsburgh. At minimum. I mention this because travel to and from New Zealand takes a blasted long amount of time regardless of where you are in the world, so I might as well save you a day of your life to discover this fact. Further, it is forever easy to lose track of how long you're travelling, as it involves two night flights over the date line, meaning at one point you go backwards in time in a physics-defying way and skip ahead a few hours the second leg.

But hey, once you sort that all out you might as well hit the beach in Los Angeles!
More specifically, I headed to Venice Beach since I had a 2pm-11pm layover in LAX and I'd never been to the beach before. Plus the idea of seeing both sides of the Pacific in one day (not to mention two sunsets!) sounded greatly appealing to me.
While I wasn't planning on it, Venice Beach is probably the best place to reacclimate yourself to American culture after being abroad. It's primarily a boardwalk filled with crappy gitch and food classified as "only in America and all bad for you," and has a decent assortment of hippies. In these enlightened times, however, they just hold signs saying "will work for marijuana" and "every time you don't spare change, Chuck Norris dropkicks a kitten" instead of lying about their intentions with your money.

Alas, had I taken a picture of the hippies they would have berated me for spare change for the honor, and thus I refrained from doing so. However, the most amusing part of my day was when some tourist lady decided for whatever reason to debate with one of the potheads that he shouldn't live his life the way he does, which is clearly a lost cause in any event. The best part was another tourist standing nearby during the whole thing, sheepishly shuffling his feet trying to show that he didn't know this woman despite very clearly being her husband.

Anyway, reaclimitization over I returned to the airport and flew the last leg home, arriving here around 630am Tuesday (I left at 945am Monday in New Zealand), so I then proceeded to sleep most of the first day. It's kind of weird to be back though... everything seems normal because it's the way my autopilot remembers it, but everything is oddly green compared to when I last saw it! Here's a view of the backyard right now-
The other odd thing is how it is rather hot in a startling way (in New Zealand it gets hot too, but it doesn't invade every pore of your body and steal your soul like it can here), and the sun goes down really, really late!

Anyway, I should head towards bed as tomorrow my mom and I are driving 12 hours to New Hampshire. Cheers!