Californiacation, pt 3

Los Angeles is big.

Like, bigger than anything I could have imagined. I’ve really never been to a big city before, and, well, yes, it’s big.

Everything is called “LA”, but really there are these smaller breakdowns to it – like Hollywood, and Glendale, downtown Los Angeles, Pasadena, Burbank, etc. My mind is just beginning to understand  it all.

Yesterday we took off early from our Huntington Beach motel and floored it all the way to LA.

Ok, not really. Turns out, there’s a lot of traffic here! So, we sort of half floored it and half break’d it all the way north. Nicole drove, so I had some opportunities to snap some photographs!

We headed over to Hollywood (all in a typical day) and located us a parking garage in which to abandon our car for a few hours. Luckily we happened upon the parking garage that is right smack dab in the middle of the walk of fame.

Then, basically, we walked about for three hours, up and down Hollywood Blvd.

Another thing I was surprised at – the Walk of Fame isn’t just some one-block stretch of stars. No, it goes on for like a mile and a half on both sides of the street. That is a lot of famous people!

And they just get walked on by millions of people each year. Yay!

I didn’t take a lot of pictures of the stars… really, I’m not that into celebrating celebrities. I found it most interesting to see which stars other people were looking at. Charlie Sheen was getting a lot of attention from youngsters, as well as big time bands like The Monkees. There were a lot of names I didn’t recognize, though – important people from the past that have faded from our current brainwaves. I did find me some Humphrey Bogart, though!

After walking the walk (haha), we headed into Madame Tussaud’s wax museum. Yes, a tourist spot, but, it must be done!

I’ve never been to such a place before, and it was remarkable to see how well people can shape wax into looking like a real living person – scary, yet amazing all the same.

Afterwards, we headed back to our car and attempted to figure out how to give the machine our money and then get out of there! Let me just say, I dislike driving in parking garages, and that was a rather large parking garage. Fun.

Then I had a go at LA traffic. You would think: If I can drive in one place, surely driving somewhere else will be easy! That’s what I thought. And then I tried driving in LA.

Yes, there are a lot of people, a lot of cars, and a lot of traffic. But the speed limit is low, and the roads are fairly simple. What got me was the size of the roads themselves.

They are tiny! Way narrower than the roads back home in Michigan. And with our huge Ford Taurus,(I say this as a very-small-car driver), I felt like I was taking up the entire roadway!

After a long, stressful 10 minute drive, we arrived at our motel. What a nice place! It was one of the cheapest in the area (we are poor college students!), but still a good value for the room. We have a T.V. and a mini-fridge which is really more like a baby regular fridge. (We haven’t used it. But, it’s still nice to have one!)

The best thing about our hotel, is that there is a stripmall with restaurants and whatnot just down the street! Last night we tried the local Mexican restaurant for dinner. Delicious and spicy!

Then we got lost. Sort of. We wanted to walk off our dinner, so we wandered around the neighboring neighborhood (ha), and we thought we were lost, but really, I totally knew where we were the entire time.

It was a beautiful walk, anyway. We saw actual homes of actual people that live here, discovered the local vegetation is much different than home’s (the grass is solid. solid.), and got a good workout, too.

Then it was time for desert, obviously!

Mmm. Frozen yogurt. Another new experience! And a very delicious one.

And with that, another Californian day came to a close. Another good day in the books.

More tomorrow!

(Oh, and if you’re reading this and you’re from the LA area, or you’ve been there — Where should I go? What should I see? Tell me everything!)