Ray: LA - Venice Beach, the NBA, Hollywood

Trip Start Dec 27, 2007
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Trip End Dec 28, 2008


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Flag of United States  , California,
Tuesday, January 1, 2008

Hi y'all   This is just a quick summary. Arrived in LA to a hot day although one of the airport officials told us to wrap up warmly because it was "cold" outside. Probably 20 instead of 25. Picked up by Ian, our Hostel manager. Tall English guy nice and easy to talk to. Settled into our room and went out for a walk to see the sights. Off to Venice Beach. Almost got run over by cars driving on the bloody wrong side of the road. Grrr. Venice is a nice beached area flattened by bulldozers, cleaned up and raked every morning. Lots of beach front hotels etc obviously worth a mint. We took some pics, walked out to the pier, took more pics and headed back. I wanted to see muscle beach where apparently all the posers go to flex but it must have been a little cold for them.  

We had a wee rest, actually Sarah went to sleep for an hour and a half but I wanted to tough it out to get over that jet lag thing. I read some league mags I picked up in Auckland. Sorry Jeremy but don't fancy the dragons chances.   Anyway, we decided to catch an NBA game. LA Clippers v Pheonix Suns. We caught a bus in and the bus driver warmed to us and we had a good conversation on the way. The Stadium was impressive. 15 or so spotlights lit up the sky. We went in the wrong way and had to go out again because we didn't have tickets. It's a good thing one of the security guys was Samoan. He saw I was wearing a samoan t-shirt and told me in samoan we were in the wrong place and had to around to the front. We queued for ages and realised we were in the flaming wrong queue! Finally bought tickets and lined up to go through more security x-ray things.

We went upstairs, bought a couple of hotdogs 'cos apperently that's what you do and headed off to our seats. The inside was amazing. I'm sure it could easily hold 60,000 people, it was huge. We got in for the national anthem which was great and the "show" finally got underway. The game itself was ok. The Clippers were crap but the atmosphere was awesome.   We took off a little earlier because Sarah was tired and trundled off to our bus. Unfortunately we didn't really know where it was so we walked for ages. Probably a little silly in hindsight but we finally got home at midnight. Phew!   We've had a great start and we're both happy and really enjoying it. I haven't written about yesterday which was the bus tour around LA but as you can see I've written an awful lot for a "quick summary".
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