On Wednesday we caught a free shuttle from our hostel to Santa Monica Beach with Shae, who is from Melbourne and also staying in our hostel. Oh it's so nice there! It reminded me of being at home (must be the beach, the sun, and the fresh air!) and it was much nicer than central LA. The streets were clean, there were only a small amount of homeless people, and we weren't being bugged ever few metres to do a tour. We walked down to the water, across about 3 times as much sand as we have at home, and then walked along the beach to Santa Monica Pier. We then walked back up to the main streets in Santa Monica (3rd Street Promenade) and had some lunch. Shae then left us to check out Malibu and we had a look at the shops on the Promenade and at Santa Monica Place (mall). The shops are so exciting here (I'm thinking I am only liking them cos we don't have them at home) and we have to stop ourselves buying stuff as we don't really have that much space at the moment to buy clothes (we are thinking we will do most of our shopping in New York towards the end of our trip).
After hanging around the shops we decided to walk to Venice Beach which we were told was only a short walk (20 mins). This turned out to be a lie. It definitely did not feel like a short walk and there is absolutely no shade the whole way there (just the bloody palm trees that look pretty but are completely useless!). We were so exhausted by the time we got to Venice and we were totally disappointed by it. It was just a dirty boardwalk of tacky souvenir shops and we kept getting hassled by the sellers, the homeless and randoms. We high tailed it up to a main street, again nothing special, and it was now, thankfully, that Nik, the guy who sold us phones the previous day, called us to see if we wanted to go get some food. He came and picked us up and we went and had a late lunch/early dinner at Saki House which had yummy Japanese food. He then drove us through LA showing us the UCLA area (which was another nicer area), the mansions in Beverly Hills and other LA spots. By now I have also realised I am severely sun burnt from walking to Venice (for any of you who remember how badly burnt I got at Leavers, it was almost that bad!).
Wednesday night we went on a limo ride(stretch Hummer)/pub crawl organised by the hostel which was good and bad. The music in the limo was terrible (read R&B) but there was plenty of free alcohol for us to drink. The first bar we stopped at, Saddle Ranch, was my kind of place with a kind of outback ranch feel to it with a mechanical bull and awesome music (read rock). The second place we were taken was a night club which I hated. While we were in the line to get in, two guys in front of us started talking shit (trying to convince us they were famous). We stayed with them inside long enough to get free drinks. The club itself was called Ecco and it was skanky and had shocking music (cue me being miserable).
We left about midnight and walked back to our hostel a few blocks away with the intention of going to bed but when we got back to the hostel, Shae was back from Malibu and sitting in the courtyard drinking with a bunch of people so we joined them and then the three of us, plus Alex from Toronto, decided to go and try to find some food. You would think it would be pretty easy to find food (especially when you are drunk and hungry) at 1am on Hollywood Blvd. It is not easy! But we did have an awesome time wandering along the Walk of Fame taking silly photos of us and talking to other random tourists and locals. We did eventually find food at Popeye's Chicken and Biscuits (omg disgusting! and the biscuits are scones!) and had a random conversation with a homeless guy about how amazing his teeth were (don't worry Mum, we were in a 'restaurant' and we were with the guys so we were pretty safe).
Such a crazy random good and bad day!
