James & Charlotte's Travel Blog: "Looks like another perfect day, I love LA" Randy Newman

Monday 10th April

Yes, we were on our way to the city of Angels. I'm sorry if the song was a wee bit hard. I didn't really know it before I heard it but it seemed appropriate. Anyway, our Greyhound was the express and in the end, we arrived half an hour earlier than our planned time of 5:30am. LA had never been a city I'd yearned to walk round at night, so before we left the greyhound station, we made sure to have our route to our hostel planned out. From the greyhound station, the bus stop was just across the road, past a homeless woman ranting about people being impolite. We caught the first bus of the day to downtown LA and then caught a subway train the rest of the way to Hollywood, where our hostel was bang opposite the exit to the station, which was handy. Obviously, due to the early hour, we weren't able to check in just yet, so we flopped on one of the sofas in the common room and waited patiently until breakfast was served. One of the benefits of hosteling on the mainland United States is the free breakfasts and we were lucky that we were allowed to help ourselves on a day when we hadn't actually stayed the night. It was a simple offering of bagels, spreads, cake and orange juice but you just can't complain about free food. Freshly caffeined and full up, we decided to head out to pass some time. We wandered down Hollywood boulevard, passing the stars on the pavement that make it famous, before hopping back on the metro to the next station down. We rode back to downtown la, to a place called Pershing Square. I'd heard of it before but had always read it as Perishing rather than Pershing. It took Charlotte to point it out to me for me to realise that I'd been reading and saying it wrongly. Downtown LA isn't renowned for being a hot bed of tourist attractions but we'd read that there was a market there, so reckoned it would be worth a trip to have a look. Unfortunately, as with most recent markets, it was a bit of a disappointment. Next to the market however was a place called Angels Flight, which I knew quite well having read a book by Michael Connoley about a Hollywood detective who solves a murder of a civil rights lawyer. The lawyer is murdered on one of the funicular trains that is called Angels Flight. The trains didn't seem to be running, so we walked to the top and found out that Angels Flight hadn't been running for 3 years due to not receiving a certificate from the local government. With that, we returned to Pershing Square and also, returned to Hollywood. When we'd walked through earlier, Hollywood had been almost completely shut up but upon our return it was bustling with tourists staring at all the walk of fame stars along the pavements. Coincidentally, we stumbled across a star dedicated to Randy Newman, which we felt was appropriate considering the song I used for the title of the blog. I'll level with you now, LA/Hollywood was simply an opportunity to rest for a day before setting off to our next destination and neither of us were really interested in seeing anything in particular. I'd visited before and Charlotte has very little interest in anything remotely celebrity related. We spent some time on Hollywood boulevard, looking around the exterior of the Chinese theatre, where the actors and actresses write their names and make their handprints in cement before it dries. For the next couple of hours, we tried in vain to check in to the hostel and ended up just joining the nutters on Sunset boulevard, grabbing some lunch from a shop and catching a quick glimpse of the Hollywood sign over in the distance. Eventually, we did check in, which didn't happen until around the late afternoon, so we'd had plenty to do with Hollywood by that time. To be frank, there was just nothing to enjoy about it. It's tacky, drab and downright dirty; a long way from the glitz and glamour stats shown on the tv. To be fair, that glitz and glamour is probably more present in Beverly Hills, so what really draws all the tourists to Hollywood is a bit of a mystery to us. One thing we had noticed around the hostel and on the streets was the large concentration of young, British tourists. We could only guess that this was down to the dirt cheap flights Norwegian air offer these days and god knows why they chose to visit a place like Los Angeles over all the wonderful places we have on offer back home in Europe. By the end of it, we just wanted the day to end, so we could catch up with our lost sleep and so we could get away from the grime of Hollywood. Even our dinner turned out to be a disaster, with the chilli beans in sauce turning out to be a far cry from the baked beans we were after. We were in bed by 8, just keeping our fingers crossed the other people in our first dorm in over a year, would keep the noise down. We already knew we had a snorer on our hands, so weren't looking forward to it.