Hey y'all =P

The past few days have been a whirlwind of excitement, punctuated by some much needed rest breaks. On Friday we went on a tour bus around LA, which was a really great way to see the city considering we're somewhat pressed for time. We had an awesome tour guide too - an old, black man named "Pappy" (aka David, or "El Papo", whichever we preferred hehe). He was incredibly knowledgeable about the city and talked about a mile a minute whilst we were driving down Hollywood Boulevard! We stopped by the Hollywood Bowl, which is a huge arena built into the side of the Hollywood hills with incredible natural acoustics. We were lucky enough to be there when the LA Philharmonic Orchestra was rehearsing so we got to listen to them play for a few minutes.

Other things we saw were the Beverly Hills jail where Paris Hilton served her 21 days. To be honest, it looked like a nicer place to stay than our hostel! And Pappy told us how each "cell" had it's own telephone, there was place for limos to drive up out the front…basically, if you had to go to jail, this is the one you'd want to be in! We stopped for lunch at the famed LA Farmer's Markets, which is basically a huge collection of fruit and veg grocers, plus other little stores selling all sorts of food from around the world. We had my favourite market/carnival/festival food - hot corn on a cob! And then we got stuck into the $1 punnets of blackberries from the grocers. ONE DOLLAR!! =O Blackberries in Australia are in season for like 2 weeks of the year and even then a punnet always seems to cost about five bucks! So I scoffed that punnet of blackberries in about 5 minutes flat!

In the afternoon we moved onto a smaller bus and went on a tour through Beverly Hills to take a closer look at how the rich and famous live. It was a bit obscene really. The cost of property in that area was absolutely through the roof, and at one point, we stopped outside of the house belonging to one of the Guess designers and he had about 10 Ferraris parked in the driveway! Ten! Mum and I were thinking, surely if you had that many expensive cars you would put them somewhere safer and more protected that your driveway. But who knows what goes through the mind of a man who feels the need to own ten Ferraris…We also saw Judy Garland's old house where Liza Minelli was born, a house that George Clooney recently had built, and Christina Aguilera's place which formerly belonged to the Osbournes.

The evening, we took some time to stop and people watch at Hollywood and Highland, which is a big centre of shops and restaurants on the Hollywood Boulevard. There was some filming going on down in the bottom of the centre that we were able to watch from the upper levels. Seems this type of thing is pretty typical in LA and most people just strolled right on past. There was plenty of action going on down on the street with buskers and such…it's a really cool place to be (if you're in a safe area!) because there's such great atmosphere and such an interesting mix of people.

On Saturday we did nothing. Ok we walked to the shops for food and to find out about postage, and did some laundry. But apart from that, nothing. I learnt the hard way the importance of not doing TOO much when you're travelling and after a week of nonstop action we were so exhausted we decided to just chill out for the day. Turned out to be a very good thing because yesterday we spent the whole day at Universal Studios, which was really full on again! We took an amazing VIP tour around the backlots and studios and got the chance to see some pretty incredible stuff! We drove down Wisteria Lane from Desperate Houswives and across sets from War of the Worlds and The Grinch Who Stole Christmas. We saw the famous motel where Psycho was filmed and the part of the property that were burnt down in the fire. We even got to go inside one of the production sets where a TV drama called "Life" is currently filming (a cop show) and walk right through the set and look at everything up close. We even went into the properties department and it was amazing! Rows and rows of every sort of object you could possibly imagine, each one with a barcode and available to be hired out for 15% of the cost of the object. Here and there you could see tags where items were reserved for upcoming projects.

Later in the day we headed into the theme park area and rode some amazing rides. The Mummy ride is a rollercoaster that's pretty much completely in the dark and in parts of it you're going backwards! And the Jurassic Park ride had an 84 foot drop at the bottom of which you got just a tad wet…like, I've just had a shower kind of wet. Thank god for hideous yellow ponchos! Brendan Fraser was actually at the park that day promoting the release of the third Mummy film that was premiering that night in LA. Pretty cool really! On our way back to the hostel on a bus, we ran into quite a hilarious character, this large, black New Yorker who just talked and talked and talked to us from the moment he got on the bus haha He'd just been auditioning at a local comedy club and it was like free transportation entertainment.

Today we made the move down to Santa Monica, which is absolutely gorgeous. This is more like the nice LA beaches that I had envisaged! It's a really clean, safe area, and we've got pretty perfect weather really - sunny and warm with a cool sea breeze. Oo AND (I nearly forgot the most exciting news of all!) when we were at Universal Studios yesterday we managed to score free guaranteed seating on Jay Leno's Tonight Show!! It's filming tomorrow so we're heading over to NBC studios in the arvo for that eeeee how excitement! =D

I'm like, practically famous! Haha

LIVxo