After a nice night on the outskirts of LA we headed to Hollywood to our Motel 6 accommodation. Upon arrival we founds that our van wouldn't fit in their car park as it was too tall, so we had to find parking on the road, not easy such an easy thing in LA. After checking in and having a well needed shower we went to LAX to pick up our guest. Ms Powell is joining us for the drive up to San Francisco where another one of her friends is staying whilst travelling. Unfortunately the volcano is still messing around with UK flights, so she was delayed and we had to keep driving round the terminals until her flight arrived.
When we all finally got back to the Motel it was heading towards dinner time so we strolled along Hollywood Blvd. With the aim of stopping somewhere along the way. It is a strange road. There are the stars along the pavement and famous theatres and a movie premier but all of this seems like it is going on in the middle of a grubby road with adult shops and homeless people. I was expecting Hollywood Blvd to be very high end and fancy but it really isn't. The best example of what it is like is the ending scenes of Inland Empire with the hookers on Hollywood Blvd, it is just like that.
In the evening we went for a drive along the famous Mulholland Drive. This is much more what I had pictures Hollywood to be like; huge mansions of the super rich with spectacular views over the city. It was great to see the actual road and views from the film of the same name. If you are reading this blog I plead with you to watch the film Mulholland Drive, it is my favourite film and will be referenced quite a bit whilst we are in LA. The Mulholland drive drive was just like the start of that film :D After the drive it was pretty late and time for bed.
In the morning we decided to go to Venice beach but first I wanted to have breakfast at the diner from Mulholland Drive (told you I would reference it a lot). I had looked it up on google and set a waypoint on Tomtom and away we went. When Tomtom said “you have reached your destination” there was no diner in sight, just a building site, so we assumed that it had been knocked down :( so we found a different diner for breakfast. This one wasn't quite the Mulholland drive diner, but it had really good pancakes and examples of radios through the ages, from the first tubes to modern radios.
Venice beach was very “cool”. It reminded us of Camden but by the beach. Lots of small shops selling random tat and stalls selling beach art. Here rolerblading and skateboarding are actual valid forms of transport and there is a fantastic bowl type skate park. They were advertising the release of the game Skate 3 so they had a DJ playing some music whilst the skaters did their thing. Really cool.
The beach itself is huge. A nice long stretch of sand with a couple of piers. It was a shame that the water was ridiculously cold. I liked the Florida bathwater temperature water, so English Channel temperature was not all that appealing, in the end only G0N went in. Funnily after going in he went for a run without telling Bryony or myself and disappeared for about half an hour. We had images of bodies floating by the rocks, but in the end he was alright.
In the evening I had my first experience of Japanese food in the form of prawn noodle soup and sushi. Very nice, but the prawn noodle soup and its one prawn seemed to leave a little much to the imagination. I have to say that wosabi is great stuff, really blows your nostrils away :).
Cube Out
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