Arrived in LA after a 13 hour train ride. Felt quite motion sick for the rest of the night, felt like the whole room wass moving around me. The train ride was LONG but it was nice, we took the scenic train that goes along the coast and it's really comfortable with heaps of leg room and leg rests. There's also an observatory carriage with huge windows on the sides and roof and a man talking about what we are going past etc.
Three people from our Yosemetie tour, one Aussie and two Germans also caught the train with us and one of them is staying at our hostel which is a bit dodgy and so far hasn't grown on me like the green tortoise. They have mixed dorms which I really don't like.. The weather is quite warm here.
On Tuesday we walked down Hollywood Boulevard down the walk of fame, past the Kodak Theatre where the Oscars are held etc. We caught the metro downtown and had a look around there, at some markets, the jewellery and fashion district and old downtown. Caught a bus to Venice Beach not realising it would take us an hour to get there only to find it was quite cold! We walked down the beachfront and ended up playing a game of paddle tennis to warm up. It was a bit disappointing that there were not a whole lot of freaks out rollerblading but we did see a few. We also saw a beggar wearing funny glasses and hat singing "Jingle bells, jingle bells, help to get me drunk" and waving a cup around. Another one holding up a sign saying "I will work for marijuana."
I have totally lost track of time, just had to ask someone what day it is and it feels like I've been gone several weeks already! This computer is really hard to use, the lighting is awful and you have to push the keys really hard!
Los Angeles is one massive city, infact apparantly it's actually 88 cities all close together! It is also on a fault line and they experince a bad earthquake every 15 years or so. That could explain the lack of subway lines.. it takes a long time to get around anyway, if you don't have a car. LA is also the city of cars, 11 million! So on Wednesday we decided to jump on a city tour. We started at 9am and drove down to the coast, drove past some oil rigs which along with gold and the movie business made lots of people rich in the 1920's. We also drove past Marina del Rey, the biggest man made and most expensive marina in the world. We then went to Venice again although it was slightly better weather and we saw the canals that we had missed the day before.
We then drove past Santa Monica, the beach that Baywatch was filmed. Our tour guide was a funny Italian man whose claim to fame is a role in 'Collateral' where he is shot by Tom Cruise. Anyway he provided a soundtrack to the tour including the Baywatch theme along with Hotel Cailfornia, Pretty Woman and others.
After the coast we drove to downtown LA where the population is mostly Latinos. LA was colonised by the Spanish and the area used to be past of Mexico. We stopped and walked around some markets which had food plus much much more, a lot of the shop keepers there don't even speak any English at all. Despite being in downtown LA the day before we saw a competely different side of it so that was good.
We then headed back to Hollywood for a lunch break and saw the setting up for a movie premier for 'Ironman' tonight. The street was blocked off and a huge red carpet laid along it, lights set up, paparazzi preparing and the whole lot. after lunch we drove to a lookout for views of the Hollywood sign and then up Mulholland Drive. A surprisingly bad road considering the amount of money people pay to live there. Despite being only 15 mins from LA it's like another world, it's quiet and it's above the smog line so the air is clean and fresh. We saw lots of the stars' houses including Jack Nicholson, Meg Ryan, Leo Di Caprio only to name a few... They are some crazy crazy houses, a lot of them built on a the side of steep slopes so they are literally suspended off the side of the hill.
We then drove through Belair and saw much the same style of houses and then Beverly Hills. Very very rich areas, over 95% of the population there are multi-millionaires.. We stopped at Rodea Drive just to do some window shopping.. Everything in LA has a story, that's where so and so as filmed... that's the shop that Julia Roberts wasn't allowed to shop in in Pretty Woman etc. etc. We also came back down Sunset Blvd where a lot of the nightclus are. Called the Sunset strip because this is where all the gangsters opened strip clubs and bars.
The tour ended at 6pm so it was a long day despite all the stops being way too short. It was a good way to see lots though and find out a lot about the city and places we may want to go back to. The hostel put on a free BBQ which was great followed by kareoke, which was hilarious.. until we wanted to go to sleep, then it was just plain annoying!!
We have been trying to cook for ourselves and make our own lunches to save money, which we have gone through incredibly fast since arriving in America!!! Eeek.. The supermarkets have a good range but the prices also vary quite a bit, went to nearers supermarket to us which was the nicest supermarket I've ever seen but was super expensive, probably because they had three people serving at every check out, one to unload he basket/ttrolley, one to scan items and one to pack the items into bags... crazy and sooo unnecessary! We then found another supermarket that was entirely self serve and this one was super cheap! Alcohol is cheap to, a six pack of beer is about $9 and we saw some people with a gallon (that's 4 litres) of smirnoff that they bought for $20!!!!
Thursday we went to Disneyland which was awesome, beautiful warm sunny day yet not toooo many people, longest time we had to wait for a ride was 20mins which isn't bad when you look at the space they have available for lining up!! Yikes! All the rides are pretty tame but fun at the same time! It's amazing the attention to detail that goes in to those rides and everything else in the park. Friday we went to Universal Studios which was cool, very very different to Disneyland, they can't even be compared! There are only a couple of rides at Universal Studios, oh and the hous of horrors... which was awful! I hated it, I just wanted to get out but you had to walk the whole way through, there were people dressed up who jumped out at you or even just reached out and touched you, it was dark and there were narrow corridors, one with mummies all along the side, all fake until the last two who grabbed us as we went past. There was another room with corpses hanging from the ceiling in plastic and you had to push them out of the way to get past and it smelt really badly.
We moved rooms in our hostel Thursday and were much happier. The problem with the old room was that it was manily occupied by people who live and work at the hostel so people were cnstantly coming in and out, it was filthy dirsty and the kitchen was used to prepare the free BBQ's the hostel puts on. We are in a much nicer cleaner room now with only 6 people in it. Friday night a bus left at 7:30 for another hostel that is owned by the same people. They put on a free dinner, just burgers and then we wentto the sunset strip.Went to a bar called Saddle Ranch chich had a mechanical bull.. then went to the House of Blue which was really cool, really cool design and a whole bunch of little cosy rooms with couches tht you can sit in.
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