The night we arrived in Los Angeles, we decided to stay in a hostel in Inglewood. Because Bas was officially too old to stay there, we had to move to another place the next morning. The good thing about this move was the location of the second one: on Hollywood Boulevard, just in the center of 'where everything happens!' It was a funny place with a lot of people who came to Hollywood to 'make it': scriptwriters, actors, stuntmen, people who wanted to start a gym over there, et cetera. The only 'bad thing' about the place was that there were quite a lot of young people (teenagers or people in the beginning of in their twenties) who had to party every night and still needed to find out their alcohol frontiers. And the only way you can define those is by crossing them of course! Those parties took place in the kitchen, just next to our dorm (just on the other side of the wall from where our bed was located), so I'm glad that we didn't have to stay there for a long time.

Because during the first few days of our stay in LA we weren't able to get an affordable ticket to South-East Asia, we decided to stay a bit longer. The good thing was that we were able to stay with a friend of Bas who lives in Inglewood. The first four days of our stay there he was out of town, but he told us where we could find the keys and his car! It was really excellent that we could use his car while he was out of town. Besides the fact that it was excellent, it also is just necessary. Los Angeles is so huge it really is amazing! So what did we do over there? We went to Venice Beach and walked up to Santa Monica Beach, which was really funny. The beach guards are the same as in Baywatch, the people look the same as on TV and there is a real skating- and biking boulevard. We even saw a roller-skate-dance-training which was so cool that I think I want to do that as well when we get back home. There were two piers, one with a real amusement park and lots of volleyball fields on the beach. Another thing that I liked a lot, was a big open air gym facility: rings, rekstokken, koorddansen and touwklimmen (sorry guys, this is too hard to translate in English). You can imagine how my arms felt the next morning when I woke up.

The next day, we went to Beverly Hills, just to gaze at the enormous houses. They were not really beautiful, but definitely huge. Besides, the lanes with extremely high palm trees and big leaf trees were beautiful. Of course we went to the Universal Studios which was smaller than we had expected, but very nice. Especially the tour through the studios and the film locations was nice. We saw the oldest 'Western' street of the Studios (which was even older than the Studios itself). A lot of Western movies have been shot here. We saw the village where 'Murder She Wrote' was taped, we saw the big blue screen where Jim Carrey walks through the 'sea' in 'The Truman Show'. We saw a lot of stuff that has been used in different Jaws movies (on the pictures you will find out that Bas really was in trouble playing with the shark). We saw a street set of New York in the fifties or sixties. They are shooting a movie there right now with Renee Zellweger and Ian McGregor, so we had to be quiet when we passed. We saw a Mexican village where they simulated some different weather conditions, including a big flood!

We drove into a subway station where we experienced an 8 point something earthquake, including the falling down of the road above us, the cars that came down, another subway wagon crashing next to us, floods, fire, et cetera. Besides this tour, we saw some other good things as well: the Waterworld show, which is just a bit bigger and definitely more spectacular (better performers as well) than the ones in for example Warner Brothers in Germany. We saw a 3D show of the Terminator, which is not really one of my favorites, but the show was really good, with actors on the screen appearing in the theatre for example and reappearing in the movie.

We also went to downtown LA (which by itself wasn't really interesting: just tall office buildings and some shopping centers) to see the biggest Andy Warhol Retrospective ever. This really was a nice exhibit, especially with the background stories on all the pictures. What really amazed me is that the entrance for this exhibition is 17 dollars! And this is nothing compared to the fees that you have to pay when you want to park downtown: the most expensive option we saw was 3 dollars for 15 minutes with a maximum of 30 dollars a day!