What time is it there?!

We arrived in Los Angeles feeling a little tired. When we leave LA on Friday it will be seven weeks since we left home and there has hardly been a day when we haven’t been getting up reasonably early to go and do something or embark on yet another long drive!

We decided to stick to the coast road on our journey from Santa Barbara so that we could stop at the beaches as we passed through Malibu and then Santa Monica. This didn’t really work as we encountered quite heavy fog and could barely see the beach! Allegedly it is excellent surfing territory although we couldn’t see anything to confirm or deny this. You could have told us that the sea was made of liquid gold and we would have been none the wiser.

So instead we headed off to find our hotel and enjoyed the legendary LA traffic. The traffic on the freeways is pretty bad, but to be honest if you’ve experienced the UK motorway network around the M3/M25/M4 area then you’ll be well prepared. We have actually found that in general Americans seem to be quite reasonable and courteous drivers, and quite good at observing roadsigns etc. However, stick them on a freeway and all sense goes out of the window. Moving lanes is obviously OK, but do they have to make sudden sharp movements at 80mph or more? It also seems that at least 50% of them completely disregard the speedlimits on the freeways as well.

Anyhow, back to LA, depending on your point of view you could either spend a month here and not get bored, or you could find that even one day is too long. So after a month of visiting some of the finest works of nature it is something of an anti-climax to see what you can do with a few million tons of concrete, glass and steel. We decided to limit ourselves to one real touristy visit (see Universal Studios) in addition to seeing a bit of the city.

Hollywood Boulevard (for those of you who don’t already know this) is all a bit of a disappointment. Yes you can see footprints in the concrete, and stars in the sidewalk, but other than that the street looks remarkably similar to the place we stayed in downtown Vancouver (ie. everything from tattoo parlours to far seedier places).

We decided not to purchase one of the ‘Maps of the Stars Homes’, but instead just headed off into the Hollywood Hills, Beverly Hills and Bel Air to see what we could find. We didn’t encounter anyone we recognised, but we did get to see some houses that we definitely cannot afford. You seem to be able to tell just how rich the owners are by measuring a) the thickness of the steel gates, and b) the number of signs advising you of the security company providing "24hr Armed Response".

By contrast, the area where we are staying is definitely inhabited by real people. A couple of reviews of our hotel made it sound like it was in the middle of a warzone, but I think these were probably written by people who normally live behind gates (or perhaps get scared when they see anyone with a slight tan...).
We had to walk a couple of blocks to reach a laundrette, so we got to see how things really work around here. There are two or three mobile fruit & veg vans based on our street, but we think it’s just some kind of tax scam as they don’t seem to go anywhere they just stay parked there and people come to them to shop! (good way to keep down rental costs on your ‘shop’ though). Then there are the two guys selling food outside the laundrette. One of them is selling barbecued corn cobs, which he cooks on a portable BBQ propped on top of a shopping trolley, the other is selling some sort of crisps and snacks in plain plastic bags. They seem to be very popular, although we suspect they may not be declaring all their earnings to the taxman! The other side of us is ‘Little Korea’ where we have our second experience of burning CD’s at an internet cafe where the computers run an Asian version of Windows with very little English.