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After 10 hours driving we finally arrived in LA only to find that our hostel had no parking facilities, and so we set off in search of some! Eventually, with the help of a friendly car park attendant (a crazy crazy man!) we managed to find a 24 hour carpark where we could leave the car for the 4 days we would be in LA.
For our first day in LA we decided to spend it taking in all the obvious tourist sights the city had to offer! Our hostel had a fantastic location, just 30 metres from Hollywood Blvd and the same distance from Sunset Blvd, and so this made exploring easy! To begin with we walked up to Capitol Records and then walked down one side of Hollywood Blvd (along the Walk of Fame) to the Kodak Theatre (home of the Oscars) and the Hollywood and Highlands Shopping Centre. From here we could see the Hollywood Sign! Then we went next door to Graumann's Chinese Theatre where the handprints of numerous film star's are. The next stop was Sunset Blvd and eventually Sunset Strip. We then walked along Cresent Drive to CBS Studios and Warner Brothers Studios before finally finishing off at The Farmers Market for a corn dog!! To finish off the day we enjoyed tea at Taco Bell!
Day 2 in LA was....Universal Studios day, the home of entertainment!! To begin with we took the studio tour which went all around the backlots of the studios, and the outdoor sets such as the War of the Worlds plane crash set. We then spent a few hours in the lower lots enjoying the rides such as Backdraft, Jurassic Park (with a 89ft vertical water splash!) and the Mummy Returns (a backwards rollercoaster in the dark!). The rest of the day was spent in the main lot, where the highlights included the Waterworld show and the house of horrors (one of the highlights of the whole trip: Debs screaming for the entire duration of the ride as all the characters seemed to pick on her!!).
The next day we decided to take advantage of the hostel's free shuttle bus and spend the day at the beach! We got dropped off at Venice Beach (where Baywatch was filmed), and after we had seen everything there we walked along the coastal path to Santa Monica. Here we went for a wander along the famous pier but soon the smog/fog decended and so we went inland for shopping at the 3rd street promenade. It turns out that LA is HUGE and it took us 3 hours to get back to our hostel! In the evening we decided to go to Graumann's Chinese Theatre to watch 10,000BC. The cinema was really cool, but the film was very overrated (Apocolypto is better!)!!
On our last morning in LA we actually got a lie-in! After a pancake breakfast (we've had pancakes for breakfast every morning since we arrived in the states!) we went out on a hostel-organised walking tour of Bel Air and Beverly Hills with Jimmy our guide (this guy should be in standup!!). Bel Air was our first stop (this is even posher than Beverly Hills) and we saw such houses as Aaron Spellings 123-room mansion (the biggest in LA) and of course the Playboy Mansion (or the gate anyway!!). We even saw the actress from Ugly Betty driving around! Then it was onto Beverly Hills (normal-looking compared to Bel Air!) before finshing up at Rodeo Drive, possibly the poshest shopping street we have ever seen!!. In the evening we went for a drink with our room-mates and then headed to the huge Ameoba Records (it has over a million cd's!) for some late-night shopping.
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