We had a long and exhausting overnight fight. Simon and I took sleeping pills and Si was fortunate enough to have like 6 hours sleep straight…unfortunately I only got 3 hours
. After walking through customs and seeing their officers with guns I truely knew we had arrived in America! On our taxi to our hotel I realised how spread out LA is…highways, highways and more highways! (with lots of palm trees like the movies! After arriving at our hotel I had the best nap ever on the most comfortable sheets and pillows. We had dinner with some of Mark’s friends at the restaurant at our hotel. Pretty cool restaurant, it had glass all around and a view like the sky tower – ok maybe not so high. It was quite swanky and the whole tipping thing came into play. Tipping is crazy, you ALWAYS need to make sure you have $1 bills in your wallet. It’s a weird feeling leaving EXTRA money on the table and walking off.
Today we caught a taxi to Venice Beach…won’t be doing that again anytime soon! We hired out ‘chopper bicycles’ and rode down to Santa Monica Beach. Venice Beach had lots of interesting people to see…homeless, hippies, street entertainers and just plain weird people. For those who don’t know much about these beaches it’s the beaches that the Flight of the Concords rollerblade down in their music video. We got conned into buying some rap CD’s from the local African/American rappers. It was much easier to say NO to people in Thailand when they were half your size! When we got to Santa Monica Beach we saw the famous ‘muscle gym’. This is where big muscle heads are lifting heavy weights like ON the beach. We parked up our bicycles and walked down the famous pier. You know the one that has the big ferris wheel. We saw a guy in a wheeelchair, paralysed from the neck down who painted with his nose! We also walked along the beach and rocked on up to those lifeguard huts from Baywatch!!!
After a work out at the GYM (I’m so good) we went to a nice Italian restaurant on Sunset Boulevard. To date I have not seen any celebrities.