Los Angeles is a sprawling web of freeways and palm trees. If you try to cut through the city during rush hour in an automobile, you may as well be wading through molasses. So we took our equivalent of the Oyster, Walrus or Beaver cards we have at home and implicated ourselves in LA County’s complex networks of public transport.
It was quite easy actually: the CC007 Culver City bus shuttled us to the Metro, we added value to our cards, then we tapped our way onto the trains and rode them through the blue and red veins of underground Los Angeles.
We did a google maps guided tour of downtown LA provided by our hosts, which walked us past impressive buildings like the Bradbury (where parts of Blade Runner were filmed), through the hectic-but-hip Grand Central Market (where we ate these pizza bread / taco hybrid things – because I’ve become a massive cheesehead), up the acute Angel Flight micro-railway, and looped around to finish at Union Station. We were already getting vertigo looking towards the heads of the palm trees, but some of the buildings on the tour were massive! The Walt Disney Concert Hall provided a complimentary audio tour (up to 2pm), which was dry but informative, and it’s a really interestingly built place if you want to check it out.
After the tour we headed back towards Hollywood and did the walk of fame. Hollywood Boulevard itself is pretty rough and the star trail was more like a gauntlet of leaflet pushers, but we got a few pictures of our feet standing on the names of actors, directors and musicians we like and were knackered by the end of the walk. We looked at the Chinese Theatre then curled back on ourselves and limped along Sunset Boulevard, back onto the trains, back onto the bus, back into bed.