Arriving In California/Introduction to Beer Pong! ✈️

Tuesday 25th August, 2009 always sticks in my memory as the beginning of my 3-month North American trip.

Arrived in the United States at Los Angeles airport after ten hour amazing Virgin Atlantic flight from London Heathrow!!!! So exciting to travel so far. We passed over the Nevada desert and the rugged terrain below looked incredible, so interesting, like nothing I’ve seen before. The plane banked left at one point and my window was filled with the most incredible desert view, amazing.

Michelle picked us up at the airport, very surreal to see her again after exactly a year. She drove us down our first American highway to Irvine to begin our adventures. We briefly visited Michelle’s parents’ (really nice) house, then she dropped us off at a SWIMMING POOL which serves surrounding accommodation, as she had to go immediately back to LAX to pick up her parents coming in from a trip!

*Ben by the pool, after our long journey*

Palm trees by the pool, warm sun, temperature was about 25 degrees. We couldn’t believe the surrealness of it – our day began at Zack’s house in London walking to South Ealing tube station at 8am, and by 4pm we were sat by a POOL in the CALIFORNIAN sun!!¹ We had an extremely refreshing 20 lengths in the pool with loads of underwater swimming. Little did we know our day was to get much longer!

After the pool we tried walking the three minute walk back to Michelle’s around 8pm but got lost! We almost made it when Michelle, on extremely good initiative, found us whilst driving about the neighbourhood in her car looking for us!

Our Couchsurfing host Trevor wasn’t on the ball with responding to my message asking where in Newport Beach he lived – he hadn’t realised the date had got to the 25^th already. So we used our back-up plan, we phoned one of Ben’s ex-summer school students from last year and we met her at a UC Irvine student’s house party in the evening, near Michelle’s house².

This was brilliant!! We were introduced to a party game called BEER PONG! It consists of a table approx. table tennis size, with a triangle of 10 cups at each end. Each have a fifth of a can of beer in, and each player (or team of two) alternately attempts to throw a ping pong ball into the opponent’s cups. There are various rules which make it more interesting – like if both players get the same cup the opponents have to drink all the cups touching that cup as well as the cup the ball went in.

Frustratingly, I couldn’t get a ball into a cup on my first few throws, whilst Ben was already getting into it. So as a last resort, on my next go I turned around and threw the ball over my head. Well… everybody was watching, and it went IN!! First time!! The place erupted, everyone went crazy. I was so happy and after that everything went great!

¹ With an 11-hour flight somewhere in the middle of that 😆.
² …The Trevor story would continue the next day, however!