Los Angeles

First thing in the morning, we checked out. We left our car in the motel car park as we had the closest possible location anyways. It was around 10 am and we wondered back towards Hollywood Blvd and the Man’s Chinese theatre in order to get ourselves onto a stars homes tour! This was essentially the most tacky Hollywood tourist thing we could think to do, so we did it!

Now I wont bore you with all the stars homes that we saw because essentially it was all of them, but an observation I must make is that the valuations on the homes seemed remarkably low for what they were. You stick the same $2million home in London and you’d easily get £10million! I understand that location is everything but that’s exactly why I was surprised, this was Beverly Hills! One of the most famous locations in the world! Never mind, just gives me more hope of living there someday, after all, they are only $2 million!

I do ofcourse have to mention, we saw the Fresh Prince of Bel Air house!

The tour took us down to Rodeo Drive, the Bond street of Los Angeles, although its crap compared to Bond street. I bought myself a Nike windbreaker that was on sale from $130 down to $40, and I love windbreakers so I was on that deal like ketchup on fries. The tour lasted, in total, about 4 hours, so it was almost lunch time when we decided that we would make our way towards our next hotel of choice. Tonight we were staying at the Rotex in Koreatown, it was opposite Manna, the restaurant I was going to be having my little reunion that night with my friends from LA.

After arriving at our destination we checked in and had a top floor room with a view of the Hollywood sign, very nice, we headed out and wondered around the Korea town for a bit. It was huge! We walked for a good 2 hours exploring before coming back, having a nap and watching an episode of Jersey Shore.

We crossed the road the an all you can eat Korean BBQ place called Manna, here we were going to wait for my friends to turn up and eat, drink and be merry! It was packed! This was obviously a very popular place, they had loads of huge parties of people all cheering and having fun, reminded me a lot of Korea, we sat down with Clara, Kieu, Kevin, Chris Bae, Abe and Mike. I felt bad for Paolo because we were all reminisicing about times we had when we were all studying abroad, these guys all live in LA but they barely ever meet up so they were catching up with each other as much as they were catching up with me, but all was good, such a great group of people that anybody can get on with. The BBQ was all you can eat, so we were there for a good 2 hours of eating. It was a lot of fun and I felt really at home with everybody and it made me realise how much I had missed it.

After dinner we proceeded into the heart of LA Korea town and went for some good old fashion Korean drinking, Soju time. I don’t recall the name of the place, in the LA Korea town there are hundreds of Korean bars, its unreal, in the one in New Malden there is perhaps 1 Korean bar. I gave Chris Bae my ID and but they didn’t even check so it was no issue (sucks being under 21 in the USA). We played a whole array of drinking games, that’s the best thing about drinking in Korean bars is that you order drinks by the bottle and so its easier to play drinking games with shots. Here Baaby Susan had joined us with three of her friends whom only added to the great night we were so far having!

But once again I was disappointed by the fact that the bar shut at 1am, I think I take 24 hour drinking for granted back home, but no worries! Everybody came back to our hotel room and the party continued! The toilet got flooded and someone had picked up about 6 cans of 4loco so you know we were going to have a good time! The night ended with some people crashing and some going home, all in all a bloody brilliant night in LA!

There are not many pictures of the night, which is either good or bad, but I do have a couple so I hope they will suffice.