exciting news...check out roland's blog!

i have just learned of some VERY exciting news. the student that has been sent to LA from the university of st. gallen to study at pepperdine also has a blog. in short, roland and i have switched places in the world for the next 2.5-3 months. he is a full time student at the university of st. gallen, doing a semester abroad at pepperdine university in malibu, and i am a full time student at pepperdine university doing a semester abroad at the university of st. gallen. his name is roland and to read the things he describes to his friends in switzerland about LA and america is very interesting and entertaining. mind you, if you want to read his blog, you'll have to use google's language tools (http://www.google.com/language_tools) to translate the entire page into english because he's written it all in German. so, without further ado, please find the link on the right side of this page to navigate to roland's blog.

i don't know how interesting roland's blog would be to all my readers, but to be honest with you, i've gotten a huge kick out of it. he describes the SUVs in america, and compares them to the Opel cars you find here in switzerland/europe, and also talks about how you NEED a car in LA, and goes on to describe his new home there (as i did), with pics and all. it's really a nice contrast to compare our blogs and entertain yourself with all the differences and commonalities found in them. remember when you read roland's blog...St. Gallen is TINY. i mean really tiny, and i'm not kidding. to get a good idea of how small st. gallen is, you can walk from one side of it to the other in about 30-40 minutes. it's smaller than westwood. i'm actually having a hard time thinking of a place to compare its size to. everything in LA is so much bigger. i think westwood would be maybe the best size comparison. ya, just imagine westwood, but smaller (by the way, roland, you should go check out westwood if you haven't yet). so remember this when reading roland's blog. it is very small, cozy/intimate and everything is familiar here in st. gallen. it is the complete opposite of los angeles (which is one of the reasons i chose to come here; to try to get the most change i can for a short amount of time).

speaking of LA and how different it is from st. gallen, it reminds me of the very first conversation i had with my housemate here in st. gallen. his name is fred and he's from austria, studying here at the university. he's a cool guy and we became friends very quickly. he met me while he was kinda drunk, so it turned out to be an interesting first meeting. all of a sudden he wanted to ask me all these questions about how dangerous and violent LA is. i was telling him it's not that bad, however there are places you could go to if you want violence. but he was under the impression that all of LA was extremely dangerous (all he had to go by was all those LA movies he'd watched over the years). after a while i found out he was talking about east la, so i told him it's on the other side of LA, and if you go there looking for trouble you'll find it rather quickly. he got very excited at this statement. so he asked me if it was a place the guys could go to at night to hang out. i laughed before i answered him, but then told him it's not a hangout place for guys from the city to just go chill there for a night when they have nothing better to do, and it was very hard for him to believe that you could get very hurt in east la if you go there and start making a fuss, randomly cussing people out (that was the example of the behavior we used when we spoke). just goes to show you, we only know what we know, and we forget that people who have never been here only have few things to go by for a description. movies is a big one, that's all he knew about LA, was what you find in the movies, like "training day" with denzel washington (he asked if LA was really like that and i told him it was a pretty good rendition of what some parts of the city look like...like i'm on expert on East LA).

enough banter, it's late and i have to sleep. check out roland's blog, and don't forget to use google's language tools to translate the page. maybe i should just post his blog in the translated version already. ya, that sounds good.

goodnight...