Venice Beach and other Santa Monica, CA Off The Beaten Path Tips

Just a little south of Santa Monica is another famous beach, this one a little seedier, more tourist oriented, and full of the kind of people California is stereotyped for. As soon as I stepped onto the boardwalk of Venice Beach, a crazy woman was staring at me. How dare I suggest she had missused my credit card. She was most offended. I looked left, I looked right, but there was only me there to talk to. Then I looked back, and realised she was talking to some guy directly behind me, but didn't think to worry about me being in the way.

As I walked along the boardwalk I overheard fantastic conversations like I would hear nowhere else in the world, at least not all together in one place. One tassle haired guy bemoaned to a sincere waif of a woman about the vegetarian conspiracy, that is the conspiracy to sneak meat products into vegetarian food. Then I eavesdropped accidently on another loudly broadcast conversation, where such-and-such's gay brother's bisexual friend was getting married to such-and-such's estranged former husband.

Venice Beach is chock full of shops selling all kinds of tourist tat in all kinds of imaginative ways. Some just sell it on the street, on carefully marked out, and studiously guarded spots. Street vendors selling Bushitler hats and t-shirts, henna tattoos and braidings, or two street musicians teaching each other riffs.

Very colourful and very weird, but despite that, I didn't really like it all that much.

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For me Malibu was always a kind of rum that my older brother drank when he was younger in order to appear more sophisticated. As a much younger brother, anything my brother thought was sophisticated really was, and so Malibu remained stuck in my mind as a "very cool thing". Older now, I wouldn't touch the pretentious coconut infused drink with a barge pole, but the name is still seared into my brain like that godforsaken song by Sheryl Crowe... until the sun comes up on the Santa Monica Boulevard.

Malibu Beach is a little further south along the coast from Venice. The beach was littered with volleyball nets, just as I had expected, but the place was completely abandoned.

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