US here we come

We finally made it – a safe 13 hour trip from Sydney to LA. The shuttle bus, which we’d booked on-line, was at the LAX curbside, under an orange sign saying “shared vans”, as promised by the company.

When the plane was a couple of hours off the California coast, the sun started to rise. We were above the clouds and they looked stunning, especially when the sun’s rays created a hue over them with all the colours of the rainbow. I quickly plugged in my MP3 player to Miles Davis’ album, “Kinda Blue”. It’s the most perfect piece of music I’ve ever heard and, with a vikew like the one I was observing, I just had to have it as my leit motif. It was a magic moment.

Hollywood is hot – over 40 degrees today. The evening has been very warm – I’m writing this post at midnight on Monday – and so we all went for a walk down to the Boulevarde, Hollywood Boulevarde, that is. It’s just amazing. People everywhere, mostly tourists, but lots of locals cashing in on the attraction of Hollywood: impersonators of Marilyn Monroe, Charlie Chaplin, even a dwarf in a horror mask. Quite surreal. Also lots of street musicians: a Latino band, a black guy beating out rhythms on a range of buckets turned upside down, white folk musician with acoustic guitar.
Grauman’s Chinese Theatre is a remarkable piece of architecture and much bigger than it seems in the tourist brochure images. Joan and Joey and Hannah and I checked out the hand-prints in the cement pavers in front of the theatre. We found the Marx brothers! On the sidewalk outside, we checked out the stars dedicated to leading lights and I was thrilled to find the star in memory of Charles Bronson. It was all so exciting and I reckon one would have to be a total stick in the mud not to be moved by it.

We returned to the hotel and Joey and I couldn’t resist a late night swim under the stars in the hotel’s outdoor swimming pool. The water was warm and the night still. The Magic Castle Hotel, so far, has been better than we expected. It has a Spanish architectural feel, plus a couple of large palm trees in the courtyard.

The Spanish influence is very apparent and, like Australia, Hollywood is multicultural, but with Hispanic and black Americans being prominent minorities.

Some other differences: doors on white-goods over here open backwards compared to Australia’s. Light switches switch up to go on – ours have to be switched downwards. They still use one cent coins over here. Also, the power-points don’t have on-off switches – they’re on all the time.

More later,
Barry

Tags: California, Grauman's Chinese Theatre, Hollywood, Los Angeles, Travel, USA

This entry was posted on Tuesday, April 29th, 2008 at 10:56 am and is filed under Travel. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.