Hanging Out With My New Aussie Mate Miss Indy Australia

Showing First-Time Visitor to America Kirsten Dee Around Manhattan Beach and Hermosa Beach, CA

By Kevin Wilkerson, PubClub.com Nightlife Blogger

First, I received a text. Then a knock on the door.

And suddenly, she was here, Miss Indy Australia, new “mate” Kirsten Dee, taking me up on my offer to crash at Casa de PubClub in Manhattan Beach while she was visiting in Los Angeles.

Kirsten and I met the previous weekend at the Toyota Grand Prix of Long Beach when another mate, Rosko Dickenson of Procon Leisure, had brought her to the Grand Prix as a reward for her winning the contest from among 2,000 other girls. And Kirsten, wide-eyed as they come in her first visit not just to America but pretty much out of Australia, was eager to spend as much time in the Los Angeles area as possible.

 

Frankly, I thought she would prefer the couple of days Rosko and fellow Aussie mate and now LA model Lisa Gleave showed her along the Sunset Strip, drawn in by the Hollywood glamor. But as it turns out, she’s a beach girl at heart.  Which is awesome in my book! (She lives in a coastal town about 20 minutes from Sydney.)

Kirsten’s piercing blue eyes were like a panorama camera, taking in everything with a 360 view, and she marveled at what seemed to me to be the most ordinary things. For instance, when I took her into the Sharkeez Hermosa Beach – a bar we call The Black Hole – she stared at the walls for a while. Or least I thought she was staring at the walls, until she mentioned the dozens of plasma TVs lined up next to one another in all directions (Sharkeez had some 50 TVs in its single room).

This, of course, is commonplace at sports bars throughout America. But apparently not in Australia.

She was also impressed with all the beachy decorations on parts of the walls not occupied by TVs. “Wow,” she said, “we don’t have anything like this where I live!”

She didn’t want to leave; I practically had to pull her out of the place with a crowbar. But I wanted to show her sunset on the deck and my friend Rosie, who had been part of our Grand Prix group, was joining us for drinks.

We traveled the way beach people travel here, by bicycle. The “street” we took is a two-lane concrete bike/running/rollerblade path that runs along the beach called the Strand. They have no such thing in Australia and Kirsten was as star-struck as if she had just seen George Clooney.

 

She was almost as excited when I served her a drink not in a glass but a plastic red cup. Apparently, people in Australia see American TV shows and the characters are drinking out of our familiar beverage containers – most commonly at keg parties in this country – and one of the things Assies want to do while in America is go to what they call a “red cup party.” So we had a red cup party!

Earlier, Kirsten was just as excited about going to Walmart and getting boxes of noodles for something like 29 cents. She’s even going to put the Walmart bag on a wall in her place in Australia.

As you can tell by now, Kirsten is a simple, just-happy-to-be-there gal.

Well, perhaps except when it comes to shopping. She preferred the shops in Manhattan Beach to the ones in Hermosa; the former is more beach-type attire mixed in with some somewhat run-down places, while the latter is more upscale. She spent a considerable amount of time in Diane’s Bikini Shop looking not for “cozzies” (bathing suits; she has plenty, as you might imagine) but purchased four pairs of boots at a place that apparently has been in Manhattan Beach for 20 years but I’ve never noticed. I even have to go back downtown to find out the name of it to add it to this post.  On my bike, of course.

The reason I did not know about it is because the proprietor has never served booze at the Holiday Open House. Since I brought him Kirsten’s business, I told him he owes me some wine during the July Manhattan Beach Centennial Open House on July 7.

Kirsten was only in the South Bay for two days, and there wasn’t enough time to do a bike ride to Redondo Beach’s harbor or even north to pop into LA’s Smallest Bar, the Harbor Room, in Playa del Rey.

But she appreciated what she did see: The Strand, the wide sand of the beaches, the sunsets, the shark outside the Roundhouse on the MB Pier, the shopping and Sharkeez (we had dinner at the Manhattan Beach location, and while there, I was thrilled to discover a Longboard Lager handle had been added to the draft beer selection; Rosie had just one of those tasty brews and now she’s hooked on it).

Our last stop was OB’s, where we had dinner before I took Kirsten to the airport. She must have said,  “but I don’t want to go!,” a dozen times. Make that two dozen.

She sure tried to find excuses to stay. She lost her purse (it was in her Walmart bag), her temporary American cell phone (four times!) her credit card in the boots shop (it was in her purse the whole time), her “sunnies” (sunglasses, which were of course in her purse) and even her passport at airport security.

When she finally made it to her gate, she sent a final text: “I don’t want to go!”

Rosko, you’re next to come and experience the PubClub treatment in Manhattan Beach!