Well yesterday was a world of excitement and I have many a story to tell…we had a little bit of a sleep in (til 730 or so!!) and then got up and had free breakfast…FREE BREAKFAST! Hostels are awesome =D haha and it’s so good being in a place where we can make our own food – muchos savings on the money front. Although, we’ve never once bought two meals at a time whilst we’ve been in America – everywhere we go, we split one meal to be on the safe side and end up having plenty (if not still too much) for both us! Hurrah for lack of portion control! =P

So yesterday we took an extremely long route of public transport from Santa Monica into the Hollywood area. That’s one tricky thing about LA; everything is so spread out! It took us about 50 minutes to get in there by bus and over an hour coming home, and that’s not even in bad traffic! Fortunately I was busy churning out super awesome play-lists on my ipod so the time flew by pretty quickly. We stopped for lunch in Hollywood and Highland, and did a little more people watching before taking a wander to buy some postcards. Whilst we were in one of the gift shops there was a huge tremor and all of the ground seemed to move under out feet. Mum asked if I a thought it was an earthquake, and I was like no surely not, probably just dodgy foundations of something…haha don’t know what I was thinking really, except that nobody was acting in the least bit panicked and I always figured that people would in an earthquake! Which it turns out it was! 5 point something in the Richter Scale, so not exactly teeny tiny, but not big enough to do any real damage thank goodness!

After that little scare we moved on and caught the train to Universal City and went to the Hard Rock Café. We spent some time there having icecream (Haagen Daz – really REALLY yummy) and looking at all the memorabilia. Pretty amazing stuff really…pants worn by Jimmy Hendrix in a 1960s performance at the Hollywood Bowl, Jimmy Page’s (of Led Zeppelin) double necked guitar, plus guitars belonging to heaps of other rock and roll Gods.

Next stop was NBC studios for the taping of Jay Leno’s Tonight Show. We had tickets that guaranteed us entry and seating but it was crazy to see how many people were lined up outside just for the chance to fill in the spare seats. It was pretty exciting because we didn’t even know who was going to be on the show! When you go in you go through metal detectors and all that sort of thing and if you leave the studio to go to the toilet you need a password to get back in…very top secret stuff.

About 15 minutes before the show begins taping Jay comes out and has a chat to everyone and kinda gets the crowd all riled up. They continue to do this throughout the show, and whenever there’s a commercial break, a live band plays and the lead singer gets up and gets the crowd involved, I guess so that the energy in the audience and the room never drops and they never lose that excited atmosphere. I was absolutely stoked to discover that Seth Rogan (of Knocked Up, Badass, 40 Year Old Virgin – and apparently a cameo on Dawson’s Creek!) would be on the show promoting his new movie Pineapple Express. He was absolutely hilarious, and it was particularly funny because his parents were in the audience and some of the topics of discussion were obviously the kind he was pretty uncomfortable talking about in front of them. Next up was Joan Allen, promoting her new movie Death Race. She’s been nominated for an Oscar several times and is in Upside of Anger…also plays the mother in the Notebook. All in all it was pretty amazing to see what goes on backstage at these kinda shows.

After the show was over we began the long commute back to Santa Monica for another chillaxed evening =) Next up…Vegas!

LIVxo