JB's Blog

After two full days we thought we’d have a nice light day of walking around and checking out some stuff at L.A. After waking up at 10am (someone had a great idea of drinking beers in bed the night before till the wee hours of the morning) we caught a cab to City Walk.
City Walk is beside Universal Studio’s and is basically a strip of shopping centres. It’s pretty big and has lots of movie related wares to buy.

It’s not all that big (about 40-60 shops), though it has lots of character and a nice feel to it. There was even a huge Billabong store with overpriced Billabong wares and a artificial beach with waves. An awesome shop had heaps of transformers gear with shirts and even a steering wheel cover. Wilko picked himself up an awesome ‘Grimlock kick butt!’ shirt. Bastard beat me to it.

Imagine that, Wilko and I danced at city walk – I was walking past and some guy was yelling for competitors so I volunteered of course not knowing what the hell was going. I don’t think the host understood my accent as he kept calling me ‘Jose’ from some unpronounceable location. I’m sure the video footage from Greg’s HandyCam will be entertaining as they got me to dance to some prissy girly music. I tried to find the beat, but failed dismally. Luckily Wilko and I were able to cheat by having another three Australians in the crowd screaming for us when the host asked which were the best.

We used the $25USD to good use by heading to ‘The PIG’ restaurant and buying every type of soda they had and a bowl of fries. The guy didn’t understand we wanted every different soda; we found some awesome flavours of different stuff. The different root beer we had tasted more like sarsaparilla which was a nice taste.

In City Walk we found one of those booths where you take photos and send to friends, so we thought it would be a good idea to cram 5 into that little booth. It took a little effort, but we were able to cram everyone fairly well into the photo. Of course there is another matter of looking at the camera when the picture was taken…

Pardon the look on my face, I swear I wasn’t on shrooms. Though I did see some awesome Nintendo NES Mushrooms for sale in various stores at City-walk. Just as well I held my hand away from my wallet otherwise I may not have bought half the gaming clothing!
After City Walk we took the underground train to Hollywood Blv. The underground train stations had awesome surroundings – ranging from California history to movie stories. The trains themselves were very clean and quick. Being underground had some pressure changes which hurt my ears a little, I guess all the air coming in and out as well as being half a mile underground does these things.

Walking up and down Hollywood Blv was pretty awesome. There was the chinese theatre which had heaps of movie stars hand and foot prints and heaps of movie magic. For a mile or so there were gold plaques embedded in the sidewalk pavement with names of entertainment stars throughout the ages. I couldn’t find the ‘Governators’ (what the Californians call Arnie) plaque, but I’m sure he’s somewhere special.
There was this cool Adult Museum which had a history of Adult toys throughout the ages. We didn’t get time to check it out, and the $11USD were probably best spent on our dinner anyway – but I hope that I’ll be able to check it out one day. It looked entertaining and quite tasteful!

There surprisingly not many ‘mega stores’, most stores were for boutique things or tourist stuff on the strip. I guess not many Californians shop on the strip – but there were heaps of shops anyway.
As Greg put it well, the stuff you go searching for in Australia is freely available and just there in America. And this is just downtown L.A., who knows what will happen when we get to N.Y./N.Y.!

We got lost on the Train. Apparently West Hollywood (our hotel location) is completely different to Hollywood West. Ones a gay capital of L.A., the other is a Ghetto, and both are completely opposite locations to each other (we later found out that West Hollywood could have got us killed, so I guess it’s good we didn’t go there). Thanks to a nice American who told us on the train to ‘Turn around man, you are going the wrong way!’ we made it back to our hotel after a 2 hour walk. It might seem long in writing but we checked out all kinds of stuff on the way back – lots of clubs and cafes of all types of walks of life.

Another awesome day, tomorrow is Disneyland which I’m really excited about… I just wish we would have a few more hours of sleep instead of 5.