Our wonderful friends, the Terrill's, had already scoped out LA on their way home from the UK, so they had some instructions for us when we got there. It made it much easier knowing what we had to do when we got to the airport, which was to get the LA Flyer bus to Union Sation then get the Metro Red Line to Hollywood/Vine. Then it was a short walk to our hotel. We obviously stuck out like sore thumbs with our 3 suitcases and backpack, and a guy on the Metro started talking to us, asking us where we were from and telling us that we were gonna love LA. He gave us the LA Weekly, a free newspaper that has everything that's on that week. Then when we got to Hollywood/Vine Station, another guy walks up to us and asks where we needed to go, and points us in the right direction.
It turns out that the Capitol Records building is right there when we come out of the station. My camera was almost out of battery so I was trying to minimise the number of photos I took. I don't know why I missed that iconic building though. Also right in front of us was the Pantages theatre, which is where thy show the Broadway shows. When we reached our hotel, we got a very warm welcome from the guy at the desk, and our room seemed pretty good. It was over 30 degrees that day (unseasonably warm apparently, and this was to continue for the 3 days we were there), so we had showers, changed into shorts and t-shirts, and went out to find some dinner.
The hotelier told us one place we could try was Katsuya, frequented by the likes of Clint Eastwood, but when we found out prices started from $100 we decided to give that a miss. We walked down Hollywood Boulevard looking at all the Stars (apparently they cost the celebrity $30 000 and the celebrity has to apply to "The Board" to have one put in...). It was very tacky with lots of souvenir shops, not really what we expected. We got to the Kodak Theatre and had a look at the mall inside. There was a huge line for something that we realised was a J Lo signing, but we decided not to hang around. Next door is Grauman's Chinese Theatre, the place that they have all the celebrity handprints outside. It was closed off for something, but I took a photo from across the street.
Eventually after being pretty unimpressed with our eating options, we ended up at Popeye's Chicken, which I was curious to try. It proclaimed it had beat KFC in a nationwide taste test. It wasn't too bad, but we were so hungry by that stage anything would've been good. We took it back to the hotel as we were getting pretty tired by then.The plan for the next day was Universal Studios. First Rob wanted to check with the hotel if we could change rooms as he hadn't got much sleep the night before with all the road noise. They assured us that wouldn't be a problem, so we packed our bags and left them with reception for them to sort out (sure enough we got a much better room on the second floor and towards the back of the building, which was great). So eventually we were on our way, onto the Metro again a few stops north. We got a front-of-line pass for Universal studios which would get us guaranteed seats in the shows and much shorter lines for the rides. The first show that we went to was animal actors, which was really cute. I felt a bit sorry for the apes though.
I went on the Simpsons ride after that to assess whether it would be safe for Rob to go on, as he's not allowed to accelerate his heart quickly or be around magnets. It was really well done, you actually don't go anywhere but you feel like you are due to the way they do it. I figured it would be OK so Rob went on it later.
The next show we went to was the Special Effects show. They showed some techniques like stop motion animation, green screen, and motion capture.
We also went to Waterworld, the show, which had some pretty good stunts and special effects.
For the Studio Tour we took a risk as people with heart conditions were on the "banned" sign. We thought, how bad can it be, really? And we're glad we went because it was pretty tame... We looked at facades used in movies,
The Clock Tower from Back to the Future (minus the clock),
Then we went into the King Kong 3D Experience, outside of which was this squashed Tour Trolley.... Scary... It was well done but I don't think it elevated our heart rates significantly.
This street was used in many, many Spaghetti Westerns.
We saw Wisteria Lane from Desperate Housewives.
And the wreckage from the War of the Worlds (with Tom Cruise)
We also saw Jaws, Norman Bates and the Bates Motel, and lots of famous movie cars.I went on the Jurassic Park Ride and The Mummy Ride by myself, as we didn't think Rob should risk it. They were both awesome - The Mummy Ride was terrifying! Think Roller Coaster in the dark... We missed out on a few things like The Terminator show and the Shrek 4D show, the park closes at 5pm so it is hard to get everything done. Afterwards we went out to the big mall outside the park - Citywalk, and watched some buskers doing some hip-hop and entertaining the crowd. One of the guys did a flip over four people lined up for the finale. We found a shop called It's Sugar, with a wall of different coloured M&Ms that you can dispense individually, and bought some candy made famous by Seinfeld and popular American Culture, like Jujy Fruits, Tootsie Roll, and Butterfinger. Other stuff we had to try while we were there was Junior Mints, Red Vine, and Twinkies. NZ sweets are definitely better, 100%. Even English sweets are better. The American ones are either too sweet or too artificial-tasting, I thought anyway.
We made our way back into town, and decided to go to Chinatown as Rob wanted Chinese. Somehow I don't think we made it into Chinatown proper, as despite the streets having Chinatown flags, and the Chinatown placename, there was only one Chinese restaurant, one Thai restaurant, and one Vietnamese restaurant in the couple of streets we looked at. We were too hungry to wait any longer so we went to the Chinese restaurant we saw which looked quite full. Rob ordered chicken and cashew nuts and I ordered beef stew chow mein. The lady was very insistent about other dishes we could order so we got fried rice as well. When the food came out our mouths dropped because each dish looked like it would feed 6 people. We ate our fill (really good food as well) and barely made a dent. The fried rice had all sorts in it, including prawns. We asked to take the rest home. All up we spent about $25 American and got free tea, 2 soft drinks, all that food, free tapioca puddings, free fortune cookies. It lasted us for dinner the next day, and we had to throw the rest out before we left, so it was a pretty good bargain. I couldn't believe the family next to us though, a mum and dad and two very small children, ordered about 5 dishes, including lobster and a whole chicken... The kids only ate a little bit of fried rice each! Very American...
The next day we planned to do a tour and go out to Venice Beach. We walked along Hollywood Boulevard and had a couple of people offer us deals on tours. We got to Starline Tours which is the one that does the Hop-on Hop-off Bus and the guy there offered us a tour of celebrity homes for $20 each (normally about $55) and the hop-on hop-off bus for $30 each. Seeing as I was expecting to pay $50 anyway it seemed like a good deal and would get us to Venice Beach as well. We had an hour to kill so I had a taco for lunch in celebration of Cinco de Mayo (a big deal here due to the big Mexican population), then we looked at the handprints outside the Chinese Theatre. It was interesting seeing what years the celebrities had got big enough to get handprints.
Then we met our tour guide, a very interesting lady. She was very enthusiastic about her work, to say the least, and excitedly told us about the celebrities she's managed to see. Our first stop was up the Hollywood Hills. We got to see the skyline of LA through a nice haze of smog.
We got a view of the Hollywood sign.
We drove around the Hollywood Hills and got glimpses at houses of celebrities, or fences of houses anyway. Then we drove around Beverly Hills, a crazy manufactured city. The streets all have back alleys to put the rubbish out so garbage trucks don't have to drive through the streets. All of the streets have a different tree theme, and have silver fire hydrants. There are no shops or service stations so the (mainly Mexican - sorry but it's true) workers eat lunch from Taco trucks that come by specifically for that purpose. Some of the old star's houses, like Marilyn Monroe, Cary Grant and Doris Day, are in Beverly Hills. Its very different from the new stars' houses, whereas these days everyone has huge fences and mega-security, in the old days there was no fences (and no paparazzi).
Our tour guide got extremely excited when we were on our way back to Hollywood, when she saw Janice Dickinson in a black BMW. SHe immediately did a U-turn and floored it to try and catch up with her, but Janice craftily turned into a private road that the tour van could not follow. No one in the tour van seemed too cut up about it, except our tour guide. We drove down Sunset Boulevard and got to see some famous bars and hotels, like the Viper Room and Whiskey A Gogo, the Standard and Chateau Marmont.
We finally got dropped back at the Chinese Theatre and got on the Hop-on Hop-off bus. I took a photo of the handprints and the tourists milling around while we were waiting.
The bus went round Beverly Hills so we got another look.
If you look closely you can see the silver fire hydrant.
We went past the building used in the Die Hard movies and Rob made me get a photo...
We got to Santa Monica and decided to hire bikes to get to Venice Beach which was about 45 minutes walk up the beach, but only about 10 minutes cycling. We got ourselves some gorgeous Blue Smoothies for $7.50 per hour and cycled to the Pier at Venice Beach.
Unfortunately you can't make out the little blue beach huts used in Baywatch very well in this photo.We walked our bikes back down the Venice Beach Boardwalk. Unfortunately there wasn't many people working out at Muscle Beach.
People were touting their wares, including medical marijuana - get assessed by the doctor now!
We needed to make sure we got the bus before they stopped for the night so we went and got it, luckily as it turned out there was massive traffic jams in downtown LA and it took ages to get back. We had our left-over Chinese, and another early night. So, no Palladium for us this time round!The next day we checked out and decided to head straight to the airport to avoid being late. Time for the Air New Zealand Experience again, and back to London :-)
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