Venice Beach, Beverly Hills, Hollywood

Thursday begun with a nice warming sunshine like the first day in LA too. It’s something unusual for a Finn to put on just a t-shirt in January but we’re not complaining. Today we first went to Redondo Beach, which is about 15 miles from Long Beach hotel. The weather was almost 20 degrees at 11am already and we did a small walk at the beach area there. Our main target for the morning and midday was Venice Beach where to we had still a another 15 miles drive. At the legendary beach we walked up and down the beach boulevard and stopped for lunch at a nice beach restaurant.  

 Next mission was to find our way to Beverly Hills to take a look at how the really rich people live. And well, they’ve got pretty nice houses and cars there :) We didn’t exactly know where we were driving and soon we noticed that we were at the Hollywood Hills so we continued our journey through the hills and finally arrived to the Hollywood Boulevard. We pulled over and started walking up and down the Walk of Fame. Then it was time to drive closer to the Hollywood sign and we found us driving quite small hill roads again. Drinking coffee at Starbucks’ we got the idea of going to a Kings’ game against the Calgary Flames. We drove to Staples Center to check out the ticket situation but unfortunately there weren’t any cheap tickets available anymore. We decided to skip the game and started looking for a place to eat. We found an awesome Korean ‘all you can eat’ barbeque place! The food tasted very good, the staff was super friendly and the price was also really nice.. To be able to see as much as possible in California and Nevada, we’re leaving LA for San Diego today for the weekend.

Ducks vs. Coyotes & Downtown LA

Today we spent our first complete day in Los Angeles and it didn’t go without any problems. Right after we started from our parking lot the maintenance required light went on, so we called Alamo to ask for advice. The conclusion was that we should drive to their location at the Long Beach airport so that we can get a new car. So far so good but we had to make a 40 miles detour from our planned route and it cost us almost 2 hours. But the nice part was that we got a Jeep Grand Cherokee in change which is actually really cool and it’s pretty much bigger than the Camry.. And the best part of the whole chapter is that at the LAX rental station the officer wanted us to upgrade to a SUV but it’d have cost almost $300 and now we got it for no extra price! :)

After the little coincidence we headed towards downtown LA. The distances here are quite big and from our Long Beach hotel it’s a over 40 mile drive to downtown. We just drove there for a while and found a really awesome location at a small hill where the view at the LA skyline was spectacular. After a Taco Bell lunch we continued to Anaheim. After the one-hour drive we went to a big shopping mall to spend some time before the game. At a sunglass store we met a really friendly salesman who wanted to discus with us a lot. We talked about hockey and Finland since he was a big Kings fan by himself. He also gave us some hints for Las Vegas.. In the evening it was hockey time! The game was truly a really good hockey game and the Ducks won 6-2. The only bad thing was that the Honda Center wasn’t even close to being sold out, instead it was quite empty and the atmosphere wasn’t very intensive. But we went to watch good hockey and we got it :)

I'll upload some photos in the near future when we hopefully have a faster internet connection. It's kind of impossible to upload them here due to the very poor connection..

Time to continue to LA

Today it was time to leave NYC and move on to LA. One week is certainly not enough for seeing everything you'd wanna see in New York although we did see a lot of the attractions and don't feel like we would have missed something really important. One thing we all agreed was that next time we'll come during summer. The city was beautiful during winter time too, but for example the Central Park during summer is something I wanna see in the future! So this wasn't the last time in NYC for sure.. Right after today’s breakfast we ordered a cab to pick up us at the hotel to drive us to JFK for the flight to LA International Airport. We thought we’d get a free lunch or at least a snack on the plane but nothing! All you could eat was some light snacks which cost a lot, too much in our minds :) So we were starving when we got to LA and right after getting our rental car we headed to eat at Jack in the Box’s. Getting no food at the plane was not the only negative aspect about American Airlines. At first we were forced to pay $25 each for the bags since they apparently weren't included in the tickets. I'd be happy to say I don't have to fly on AA again but we're flying to Shanghai with AA. So let's give the another shot to give a better impression..

At Alamo’s the clerk strongly was in the opinion that we wouldn’t manage to load our bags into the Chevy Impala or a similar vehicle and wanted us to upgrade to a SUV. Otherwise we’d taken that but the price was way too high for us and he wasn’t in a negotiation mood and we were pretty sure that we’ll get the luggage into the trunk.. And we were right :) It was quite a puzzle and the Impala wasn’t big enough but the trunk of a Toyota Camry was just the right size! The car has not only a big trunk but it’s big in every way and we’re very pleased with it.

We had some concerns about the traffic here but the way from LAX to Days Inn at Long Beach went well, despite the problems in finding the hotel but finally we managed in that too.. In the evening we went for a drive around the suburbs here to take a first look at LA. Have to say that I just don’t get it how it’s possible to have that many fast food restaurants like it is here. There’s on every corner at least a couple of them.. But now it’s time to get some sleep and tomorrow it’s NHL time as we’re going to watch Ducks vs. Coyotes at the Honda Center in Anaheim!  

NFL Weekend and Brooklyn tours

On Saturday we started our day in Lower Manhattan at the Wall Street where we visited the Museum of American Finance. It was very interesting and illustrated properly the early years if the world’s number one stock exchange, NYSE, as well as the development phases and crashes. After the tour there we navigated towards WTC memorial place. On our way we stopped by at Tiffany’s to take a look at jewelry that expensive we’ve never seen before. The most expensive necklace we saw was worth of over 50k.

Although we’ve already been nearly a week in NYC, we haven’t walked through Chinatown yet so now it was certainly time to fix that! We found a pretty big and popular Chinese restaurant where you could take whatever you liked from the lines. The only problem thereby was there weren’t any signs about what they offered so we weren’t quite sure about the items we were eating :) But for the most part everything tasted good.. After lunch we headed to SoHo through Little Italy. In Soho we found a sports bar to watch the day’s NHL game.

For the evening we planned to drive to Brooklyn cause we haven’t had the opportunity to go there before. After a short walk there we found a small restaurant where we ate some really delicious burgers. With full stomachs we continued to a bar to watch the NFL game Patriots vs. Broncos.

On Sunday we had a pretty low-speed start for the day and it was almost 12 o’clock before we walked out from through our hotel’s doors. First we drove again to Brooklyn to eat and we found a great Italian place. The weather was sunny and we wanted to take some nice photos of Brooklyn Bridge and Manhattan. We also planned to walk over the bridge back to Manhattan but we chose to take subway since it was very cold due to the heavy wind.. At Lower Manhattan we went into the skyscraper museum where was a small exhibition of the world’s biggest skyscrapers.

In the early evening we visited world biggest photo & audio store B&H which certainly was enormous. After lunch we decided to end our evening at the cinema and watched the new Mission Impossible 4 before heading back to the hotel.