A Mendes Minibreak

On 21st December, we fly back to the UK for Christmas.

Datewise though, our apartment is up on the 17th, when the new tenants take over. Our Atos gym membership runs out today, and our San Diego (crazy)bus passes are done by the weekend.

So for the last four days, we’ve decided to chuck everything up in the air again, and head up the coast to Costa Mesa, and the Art of Jiu Jitsu Academy.

For those who don’t know, this is the home of Rafael and Guiherme Mendes, berimbolo specialists and “new jiu jitsu” practitioners. Berimbolos and “new jiu jitsu” are exactly the kind of spankiness I’d love to be rocking on the mat, and whilst four days is barely long enough to watch in awe, let alone learn, we (me and Andy, not me and the Mendes) decided that coming back to the UK, only to look back and go “why didn’t we bother to take a trip up the road to the Mendes’ bros?” would be cause for regret.

They also work out of an all-white building, with paintings on the walls and a “white gi only” ruling, which is worth witnessing in person (even if my own practices are less artful).

As an added bonus, the Art of Jiu Jitsu Academy is also part of the Atos family, which bypasses that whole ungracious "pop in and train with you for two months, then head off to your competitor's school" faux pas.

In fact, plenty of the folk at Andre Galvao's academy have also experienced the Mendes first hand. Most of them have assured us that training there is "hard but great", though Manny's "it's like here, but there's two Andres watching over you so even less chance to slack off" has made our "twice a day, including the competition class" plans seem somewhat ominous.

So, the hire car is booked, we’ll be living in a Motel 6, and the only thing I need to do between now and then is brush up on the US highway code.

From walking/cycling around the Cali streets over the past couple of months, I assume this means you can run people over at will when turning right at the traffic lights, but I’d better check…

Fast Food Fatigue

On 18th October, fingers crossed, we will be moving into a studio apartment, situated roughly in between Pacific Beach and La Jolla. And instead of the endless beach bodies, the bars, clubs and shops, the thing I’m most looking forward to is…having a kitchen again.

Bar a guilty penchant for red wine, chocolate and a biscuit or six, back home our diet is reasonably sound.

This book is our bible, and largely champions the idea of cooking from scratch, using fresh ingredients and a vat full of spices.

Even on a lazy day, we can fall back on the staples of poached eggs, leafy veg and rye bread (that last one’s just for me, I might as well feed Andy glued-together sawdust).

The provision of such delights, however, does depend on a fully stocked cuisine, and an endless supply of cutting, dicing and mixing implements. Here at the California Suites, we are limited to just a chopping board and a microwave. No bowls, knives, flames, fans or towering chefs’ hats in these parts.

Which means we have to eat out, every single meal. Well, apart from breakfast, but that holds its own dietary ideosyncracies.

Here we are on our first day out of the hotel, getting ready to gorge ourselves on shrimp tacos.

Cue much post-meal waddling. But whilst being bloated and content goes well with a laid back stroll and a windy beach, there are hiccups when you introduce a training regime.

As most active sports-folk know, nutrition is vital to recovery. If you don’t eat right, you don’t recover, and if you don’t recover, you can’t train again.

It's Food 101 - a good balance of protein and carbohydrate, along with plenty of fibrous vegetables, washed down with several litres of H20.

It's worth mentioning at this point that Andy has the kind of metabolism where he needs to chow down every couple of hours in order to maintain muscle, whilst conversely, I have to eat very carefully to avoid getting, let’s say, over-curvaceous.

Our budget for food is stringent, coming in at $40 a day for the both of us.

After a couple of novel sushi, frozen yoghurt (the place in the photo confusingly doesn’t do berries or beans, but it does rock out peanut butter and cinnamon roll flavoured fro-yo) and Subway filled days, we see a pattern emerging:

Cheap food is abundant, but it generally sucks when it comes to nutrition (both in terms of fuel, and avoiding excess booty).

Healthy food generally comes at a premium price.

A week in and Andy’s looking leaner than a 'Men's Fitness' model, whilst my digestive system has ground to a complete halt.

I’m eying up the entire aisle (yup, you read that right) of digestive aids in Walmart with more desire than any of the food on offer.

Anyone see a link here?

So, as of next Thursday we will have an oven, kettle and the like, and we can get back to domesticated bliss. Oddly we’re both craving the aforementioned poached eggs, along with toast and honey and a side of asparagus.

In the meantime, we have stocked up our mini-fridge with granola, papaya, banana, porridge oats and microwavable brown rice to bypass the packet bagels at the breakfast buffet, and stave off starvation in Andy.

We’ve raided the contingency fund to buy some recovery based protein powder.

And we’ve found a couple of staple restaurants that we eat at on almost a daily (sometimes twice daily) basis:

Alladin’s do Arabic fare, and tasty Arabic fare at that. The only downside is that most of the menu is outside our budget, which means that I eat this chicken kebab with tabbouleh about eight times a week. I keep hinting heavily that they need some kind of loyalty card scheme (or perhaps just to sponsor our training) - no takers so far, though we did score some extra pitta this evening.

Pho "T" Cali is a recent discovery (last night in fact) and its relatively clean-tasting broth, laden with chicken, shrimp and the like, works well post-training, when you don’t mind a bit of sloshing on the cycle ride home.

Roll on Thursday. All microwave-friendly suggestions, or actual food parcels, gratefully received till then…

The Week We Got Dirty

There are many things to love about Jiu Jitsu. The smell of your kit after training is not one of them. While your own sweat might pass as mildly funky, the combined sweat of a class full of twenty, spread all over your clothes, hair and face is, without doubt, one of the most abhorrent kinds of stench. It brings to mind a cage full of mice in the back of a primary school classroom (this practice might have been banned since I went to school in the 70s) – a sort of tangy uriney smell that burns the nostrils and brings on involuntary wincing.

Along with the threat of ringworm, staph or other flesh-mangling diseases, ridding yourself and your stuff of this whiff is a priority once you step off the mat. So this particular notice, pinned up on the California Suites walls, was rather an issue.

Once I had got over the kind of spelling that makes me want to pour bleach in my eyes, a sinking dread set in. When you’re training once or twice a day, the washing stacks up pretty quickly. And, for those that don’t know first-hand, the longer you leave BJJ stink, the more it seemingly multiplies, and the harder it is to get out. Two or three days later, your room smells like the devil’s own armpit.

It was time to hit up the laundrette. Situated a couple of blocks away, Andy gallantly offered to take the lion’s share of the washing load (the dirty clothing).

I did my bit by bringing along the powder and some fabric conditioner.

Obviously all of the martial arts training is paying off. This is possibly the most testosterone-laden Man vs Washing Machine pose I’ve ever witnessed. It’s the modern version of the 1980s Topless Man with Baby poster. If Andy’s amenable, I might pimp him out to overworked housewives.

As with everything in the US, laundry comes in large, extra large, and just stupid sizes. I began to feel guilty we hadn’t messed up more clothes.

Loaded up, it was time to assume the position and wait.

Here are a couple of pros styling it out...

...and here's Andy giving it an admirable shot for a beginner.

Like the sunshine and the rain, the cloud and the silver lining, with washing comes drying, and a room full of damp gis.

I knew there was a reason I brought four purple belts...

Home Suite Home

First, the backstory. Though we have diligently budgeted circa £1300 a month for accommodation, at the pre-trip research stage we hit upon a couple of problems. Namely "managers" asking for around £6,000 to be wired to Western Union accounts in advance, for apartments that may or may not actually exist.

So we struck upon a backup plan. Carlos at Atos (the Brazilian Jiu Jitsu gym we will be training at) had suggested a budget hotel nearby, the ‘California Suites Hotel’. Browsing the prices online, it came up at just £472 for a two-week stay, giving us a base from which to start looking for our new abode.

From the pictures, it looked clean, fresh and relatively modern, plus it had a pool, a spa, high-speed internet, complimentary breakfast and on-site laundry facilities (pretty essential given the high-sweat, high-contact nature of BJJ). Heck, we pondered, if it was that darn good, we might even stay there for the duration, and save some spondoolicks. Being as I’m in a ‘spiritual growth’ kinda mood, I’ll say the reality has given us a chance to readdress our relationships with commercial branding, comfort, and other human beings. Also food (more about that later).

Fountain = classy establishment. Fact. This one has two layers, which makes it double classy. Just outside the shot is a sign advertising conference hosting facilities, which is great if you want your clients to associate you with faded sofas, chintz and an idiosyncratic bird lamp.

On the subject of charisma, this reception area is home to two ladies, neither of which I have photos of as I’m a bit scared of them. One has a boyfriend called London (I foolishly, and mistakenly, assumed this would put us in line for an upgrade) and the other’s concierge service extended as far as repeating “Bike hire? Bike hire? What do you mean?” back at me on the third day.

This is the internal courtyard. Another fountain, even more class.

Look, a pretty flower. Savour it, that’s as good as it gets.

Room 1802, home for the next fourteen nights.

The bedspread and soft furnishings – put it this way, that oversexed dude behind American Apparel would splurge within seconds.

Here is our top-of-the-range TV, along with an adjoining door to facilitate any inter-room drug dealing, wife-swapping or just general escaping from the feds. And let’s take a closer look at those signs on top of the telly…

50 times faster than the phone line indeed. California Suites appears to be the only place in the world that measures internet connectivity in relation to 1980s dial-up.

I don’t smoke anymore, but if I did, a fine that costs almost as much a week’s stay here might put me off.

The Suites has also plastered these signs on most walls to deter anyone who feels glib with their cash.

Despite the state-specific warnings, most walkways, stairs and balconies boast at least one smoker. This is our neighbour, a man who I suspect lives here and who spends pretty much all day every day inhaling nicotine like he’s hoping he’ll drop down dead and get away from the bedspreads.
The activities on the other side of 1802’s walls are no less ‘My Name Is Earl’. The inhabitant of 1804 kindly shared his all-night televisual experience with us for the first two evenings, and in my mind acquired the physical and psychopathic tendencies of Anton Chigurgh in ‘No Country For Old Men’. When he finally packed up the body parts/shotgun/sports bag full of bank notes and skipped town, he was replaced by some new lodgers, who, from the sounds emanating through the adjoining door, I would guess to be three Mexicans and a high-pitched transsexual prostitute.

Making the most of the current lack of shopping trolley in the pool (and for my part, ignoring the nagging suspicion of flesh-eating bacteria) we retired to our ‘spa’ area, and a whirlpool that runs hotter than the showers.