Day 12 - LA (dee dah)

(NOTE: Day 7 has been posted, finally!)

Woke up 7:30, grabbed complimentary breakfast (was okay, but at least it's free, so that automatically qualifies it as good).

The building is loaded with Texans coming for some college championship game called the Rose Bowl (football; it's Alabama vs. Texas but the final is played every year in LA). Since boarding the Milwaukee flight yesterday we could spot them a mile away with their CRIMSON TIDE Alabama outfits, and they were all over the place. It felt like there was a Southern invasion going down (get it? Down?)!

On the way down to breakfast we waited for ages for the elevator, and when we got it, so did everyone else, since it appeared to be the only one working. From floor 9 we went down to almost each floor for someone else to hop on (by floor seven this became "cram" on). By floor five the doors opened and the Texans waiting outside just gave up trying to get on, and said "we hope you get stuck" and left it at that. It was all in good jest - these Texans are a real hoot!

We bought metro cards to ride into UNIVERSAL STUDIOS but the entire trip takes about two hours! A day pass is $5 each plus $2 each for a TAP card, whereas a single fare is $1.25 - we'd need to make at least three stops there which amounts to a "perfect ride" (ie. no mistakes) of $15 so we still save money and this way we've got the option of touring a bit today. In hindsight the passes were a better investment because we did make a couple of mistakes, however there was little or no security in the metro and the turnstiles were open, so it relied on an honesty system for people to pay to get on.

We met a friendly bus driver named Andre that helped us out a bit with a free ride. On the bus another lady overheard us figuring out our trip so she volunteered to use her iPhone to give us some help! Almost everyone we've seen in the US has either a Blackberry or iPhone. This lady was an air-hostess from Texas so we all shared our knowledge to combine into The Most Formidable Tourist Trio LA has ever seen... In downtown LA... On Thursday 7 January 2010... On the 117 bus...

(As an aside: an interesting experience has been contrasting the various metro systems! NYC is definitely the best and most "robust". It's so easy to get around anywhere and it's fast too! The NYC maps are fairly simple and cost-wise, it was +-$30 for a week there. Definitely a must if you're staying there for four or more days! I was also very impressed that they use electric hybrid buses. DC is physically the cleanest, but also it would appear, the most basic. We found DC to be a lot different to NYC, and I'd say a lot poorer in service. LA has rated in the middle; probably the dirtiest in my opinion, but more extensive and faster than DC)

Interesting tourist info: in LA we can tell when a train is arriving in the subway, because we get a big gust of wind about five seconds before the train emerges from the tunnel. This gust carries on until you can see the train, and it's pretty neat because all of a sudden you're buffetted by this constant wind that has obviously been expelled from the tunnel ahead of the train!

We took on Universal Studios which initially seemed like an overpriced version of Gold Reef City, but we soon got into it. I bought bottomless popcorn for $5 (bleh... Not as good as home, but it's popcorn), and we brought in our own cooldrinks (I had sugar-free FUSE and Kat had her obligatory cherry coke).

Everything inside is super expensive, but the rides and shows are all included in the ticket-price. That's $60 per person, but there's a special on that allows "buy one day get two" so we scored, provided we planned to return the next day. You can buy tickets at the venue but you can sometimes be stuck in queues, but at the time we were there, the queues didn't seem too bad at all.

UNIVERSAL STUDIOS is in UNIVERSAL CITY which seems to be a little suburb for UNIVERSAL (the company). The journey TO Universal City showed a really grotty and fairly monotonous and ugly single-storey suburb, but Universal City itself (almost TWO HOURS by metro away from LAX) cleans up a lot. The area seemed much more appealing and nice ... Cleaner. The weather was sunny which is something we've not experienced for our whole holiday to date! During our metro ride I had decided LA stands for "Los Anus" because it was a hole, but Universal City has helped to raise my opinion to a "Los Average". The smog here is intense, and traffic even on the back roads is busy!

Back to Universal Studios, we took the studio tour, where we visited Wysteria Lane (while they were shooting on set for Desperate Housewives... No secrets divulged!!), the set of the Ghost Whisperer (also live shooting going on), and enjoyed the "surprises" on the tour like the Fast & the Furious car explosions and spins, Jaws attacking us, the subway earthquake, the Mummy scarab attack, the Jurassic Park dinosaurs in the bushes, and of course Norman Bates (a LIVE actor attacking us - although Kat had no clue who Norman Bates or the Bates Motel were so it was a bit lost on her...). We also saw a lot of movie stock like Magnum's red ferrari, the APC from DOOMSDAY, the JURASSIC PARK jeep, the DoLorean from BACK TO THE FUTURE, and a few other famous gizmo's. Of particular noteworthiness was the scene for Spielberg's WAR OF THE WORLDS; we got to see that all too!!

Doc's DoLorean from B2F

Shame on you if you don't know Amity Island.

It's the main reason it was unsafe to go into the water...

This place looks like a train wreck...

No wait! It's a plane wreck!

IT'S THE WAR OF THE WORLDS!!

TRAVEL TIP: queue at the back of a boarding line for the studio tour and you get the left side of the tour car which probably has more to see than the right side, but expect to get slightly wet - nothing too serious though!

After that tour (which was really cool), we took on the Terminator 2-3D show. Kat had no clue what to expect, and I had a vague idea. The show was AWESOME and apart from the miniseries, my Terminator experience is now almost complete. T2 is almost TWENTY YEARS old now, so it has dated a bit; the show had cheesy moments like the T-1000000 (that's "Tee one million", the super terminator guarding Skynet which is taken out by a lone Arnie and a kid John Connor), but all-in-all, a really thrilling and entertaining hybrid of live-action and 3D action. The acting was intentionally cheesy and at times it did feel like a promotion from Robocop's OCP. There are a few surprises which are cool and I do recommend it!

We capped off the day with WATERWORLD, supposedly the top rated live-action show in the world, and it really did live up to the reputation. We had planes catapulting onto the set (seriously), explosions and pyrotechnics galore, big bangs, people flying, diving, crashing and burning (a dude was on fire). It was awesome!! The actors included a dude from GI JOE (the movie), some chicky from TWILIGHT, a dude from CSI LAS VEGAS, and one or two others I can't recall :) ... All Hollywood actors though! This is a really awesome show to watch, and it is full of action and thrills and spills (oil, water, and fake blood).

This set was very well built!

Impressive... very impressive... hopefully the fish-guy will "land" a major victory this time.

Oh, although Kat would prefer me not to mention this, we also did the House of Horrors. Kat screamed like a girl before we even properly started the "ride", and I spent the rest of the "ride" carrying her through scare after scare. It stopped being hilariously scary when Kat was crying and crushing my hand in terror. An unbiased opinion? It's really good - even I had some scares, and the live monsters (actors dressed up really well) were creepy. I recall rather "unfondly" of how Jason (from Friday the 13th) chased behind me with his knife and how Frankenstein was lunging after Kat. Of course, there was a tunnel of corpses we had to navigate with the obligatory zombies clawing at the white projector screen to our side; that was a nice touch :) ... I doubt Kat will do that ride (or anything like it) ever again, but I would :)

This is a real outfit from a Zombie Invasion! Day of the Dead! It's real! It's real!!!

Bruce Campbell. Army of Darkness. Google it :)

By then the park was closed so we enjoyed some fine Panda Express chinese dining for $9 and then took the subways home.

It must have been free night off for all the residents of the local mental bins in LA, because we got to enjoy the company of some interesting locals on the metro: a guy singing to himself and scratching at the train wall, another wanting to date girls and go to the morgue, and a woman sputtering and humming behind us. The closest "sane" person of interest was a dude with a multi-colour didgeridoo! An aside: I'm convinced the biker kiddies on the subway train were munching on some dubious cookies too...

We made it home via a very complex network of metro trains (that even surfaced onto the main roads, which totally flummoxed Kat and I had her almost convinced we were on a bus) and complimentary airport shuttles.

When we made it to the hotel, I collapsed in bed and I can't remember the rest :)

This crazy park had surprises everywhere...

These Terminators are a real hoot when you get to know them! High five! Yeah!!

(everyone was queuing up for photographs on the motorcycle, so no-one had any clue why I would want a shot like this one, but Kat did a great job of pulling it off, despite the funny looks we got)

Help! This isn't a prop! Damn this park and its surprises! This one wasn't funny!!

These are "candy apples". The picture doesn't do them justice. They're huge!!

Compare Kat's hand to these candy apples. They're huge!!!

Marilyn Monroe made entirely out of jelly beans! Sweet!

(punny...)