LA beach towns

Day 2 in LA was all about checking out the beach towns.
Venice - The canals are still fun to walk through, eventhough there are even more giant monstrosities along the banks. Abbott Kinney Blvd has a huge number of expensive maternity stores, wellness centers, and furniture stores, so it's lost more of it's funkyness. Stroh's Deli is still there, so we grabbed lunch. I had an exotic fried chicken and black forest ham sandwich. Yummy!
Santa Monica - We made a brief foray down Main Street. It has a few new buildings with a few new stores, but nothing worth mentioning. We stopped at the Library Ale House for an adult beverage, and it was good. We then hopped on The Big Blue Bus and got out of there.
Redondo Beach - We never spent much time down here before, but we cruised down the PCH to meet a bunch of pregnant people for dinner. It was fun, but all those pregnant peeps are scary.
Hermosa Beach - We ended the night with a walk around the pier. The pier itself has been renovated recently, so it's pleasant. The party joints around the pier were rockin' but we're too old for that stuff.

Return to LA

First fun trip back to SoCal since the move. It just took my experience at LAx to remind me why I was eager to escape. Flight time to LA: 55 minutes. Time from landing to car rental: 90 minutes. Such a freakin' waste.
So far the old hood is pretty much the same. Some things are cleaned up a bit. The parking lot at the Venice pier is getting a new restroom. Yippee!
Hinano's still makes one of the best burgers in the world, and it's still as divey as ever.
I drove by our old apartment and house and both are still standing.
We also checked out the new hip downtown Culver City. Ford's Filling Station proved to have excellent California cuisine, good service, and a more subtle LA crowd. There was even a small selection of craft beer on tap which included Firestone Double Barrel and a very Sierra-ish Ford's Pale Ale. After dinner we stopped by Vinum Populus to play with their cool wine dispensing apparatus. Plug your card in, push a button, out comes your wine, and then drink and repeat. Fun!
That was day 1, more to come later.

First test of email post

This is just a first test of a post sent through email. If it works,
it'll be cool.

Mont Blanc

These photos reminded me. If you are ever in a place where you see Mont Blanc on the dessert Menu. EAT IT! It's delicious.

Some pictures

At the request of a large percentage of this blog's members, I've posted a few pictures from the Rome experience. There will be more in the future, but here are a few for now. All current and future photos can be found at Stobbrau's gallery pages. Here's a small sample (for more go to this photo gallery):

La Perla

Don't expect to go in here without coming out $500 poorer. Even if you are "too old" to wear lingerie yourself you may end up buying something luxurious for your daughters.

Drinking Beer in Rome

Though Italy is not exactly a beer drinking destination, there were definitely some good, or at least interesting, beer options in Rome. Where might you find these beers, you ask?

Well, I was able to locate one good beer store. Named somthing like, "Oasi della Birra - Palombi", it's located in the Testaccio area of Rome. (Piazza Testaccio 38/41 - Roma - Tel: 06/5746122). It's hours are roughly: 8-13:30, 17-19:30 for the store, and 19:30-1:00 for the pub. That's right, in addition to being an "enoteca" (wine bar & shop) it also becomes a pub in the evening, featuring probably the widest available beer selection in the country (about 500, though they were out of many when I was there). The pub is downstairs and is rather cozy and crowded.

I had planned on visiting a few other potential beer establishments, but they either didn't exist, or the addresses I grabbed off of the web were wrong. I however, didn't really miss them as decent Belgian beer, especially Hoegaarden, was actually quite common in the little wine shops around the city.

One place that we stumbled upon that was a pleasant surprise was L'Antica Birreria Peroni on Via di San Marcello, 19 (00187 Roma - 06 6795310). The Peroni is really fresh, they serve it in glasses up to 1 Liter in size, and they have an assortment of styles. They also serve what looks like good sausage and other light food. If you've ever had Peroni, and wished it was something different, definitely check this place out.

I didn't try as many beers as I hoped to try, but when you have great wine options and other things to satiate the taste buds it is difficult to seek out beer. So here is a list of the beers that I sampled while in Rome (for a larger list of beers that I have sampled, check out this):

• Grafite - Birra Integrale Scura - porter-like possibly a stout, though much lighter. Good roasted flavor, almost coffee-like
• La Tabachera - ambrata doppio malto - Amarcord Birra Artigianale - decent amber ale
• La Tabachera - rosso doppio malto - Amarcord Birra Artigianale - red ale that needed more hops
  
• La Biere du Demon - 12% - Actually a French beer - very alcoholic almost wine like , no hops, very thin body
• Devil's Kiss - red ale, slight hops (more than most beers here)
• Floreffe - biere de Abbaye double - good solid Belgian double, rather malty
• G. Menabrea a Figli - This amber beer was very inconsistent in the bottle. The first I had was not that good, but the second was much better.
  

One last note, I found a brewpub, but it wasn't open during the day that I was there. It was a 20 minute subway ride from the Pyramide Station down to the coast. Named Birrificio B.O.A. (Birrificio Ostiense Artigianale) it is at Pzza. Dei Ravennati, 1, 00121 OSTIA LIDO (Roma), Tel: 06.5640138. It looks like a very US-styled brewpub with several beers and lots of food. It's right next to the beach and attached to an hotel and about a 5 minute walk from the central subway station in Ostia Lido. If I'm ever back in Rome, I'll check it out when it's open.