The City of Angels

Greetings encore une fois!

We're here: this is the last recording of overseas things before I go home.

Let's go.

Just in case you missed the memo, I was heartily unimpressed with Los Angeles.

To be concise: it's ugly, I didn't feel safe, people weren't so nice.

But even so, the touristy things had to be done, so here is your introductory tour of little friendly, downtown Hollywood.

To start, a relatively shiny shopping plaza, right next to the Chinese theatre (right next to our hotel, too, you go hotel).

The mosaics on the ground are real quotes from real movie-making people on how they got where they are. Everything from directors to costume designers. No names, but pretty interesting.

And now Grauman's Chinese Theatre, with everyone's imprint -

I like this. V cute.

The oldest one I could find.

From the very large -

To the very, very small.

So this is going to be a running theme through this post, but the main thing I learned about Hollywood here is everyone is frakking tiny. I'm not even slightly a small person myself, but holy crap, are all these decades of leading ladies miniaturised.

It brings to mind that this is a culture built over a century of enforcing the idea that smaller is better, more attractive, perfection, leading to lots of the image and industry problems we have today...but that is much too serious for this blog. Another time, perhaps.

What even, Doris Day.

Ugh, yes.

More yes.

Best.

Whoopi, one of my many idols, with the imprint of her hair. Brilliant.

I love this - the glove, what looks like his children's prints, but haunting, because this was done just months before he passed.

Yay! There was a Twilight one, but no one cares about that.

Lunch at the good old reliable Hard Rock Cafe, where they had fancy Tony Stark-like screens to fiddle with.

A Hollywood must: Madame Tussaud's of course.

Super creepy, in fact.

You come out of the lift to this:

They're all just kind of...standing there...quietly...waiting...

Obviously, the idea is to take as many moronic, touristy photos as possible. We took up the challenge with gusto, so here goes.

One of the most interesting things about doing the Mme Tussaud's is finding out how tall everyone is. Or, as I already touched on, how bloody tiny they all are. Everyone knows Hollywood people are thin to a fault, that wasn't shocking, it was more their body shapes - all these ladies were petite, as in the petite that requires you to shop at special stores for small people, lest you are stuck in the girls' section at Target.

We've all been there.

Tiny Gaga.

Ellie, injecting some class into the Tussaud's experience.

Johnny Depp looked a bit of a douche, with this bizarre bob haircut thing and I don't know what was happening.

Bloody hell, he was tiny too.

I knew she was tiny, but damn girl.

Tiny Scarlett.

Saw this movie. It was pretty damn good. Had to get this pic.

James Dean is unsure.

Still in Tinyville.

Elvis was TALL. The things you know.

I'm very good at this job.

He's quite small too, innie?

Pretty much my top bloke now after seeing Django Unchained.

Leo wearing super weird things - possibly Blood Diamond- era things? Odd. Lizzie wanted a pic of her dangling a fake Oscar in front of his face and laughing manically.

Phone home.

Muscular, but still tiny.

Super, super awkward.

Cannot keep face completely straight and in character when in the presence of such assholery.

Alas, the end of my impeccable pose-copying.

My favourite: the superhero room :D

That's harder than it looks.

This one looks nothing like Antonio Banderas nor Zorro.

Things I knew, but still odd: RDJ is quite tiny also.

SO THERE IS SOMETHING A BIT ODD HERE.

Tiny: the Holy Crap edition.

There was an odd big wax gap there. I was just looking.

Out of the creepy statues and into the creepy as f*** death masks.

Why do these exist. Why.

I aim to be as forever lovely as Meryl...

Speaking of creepy...

The only God I bow down to.

All in all, nice work, Mme Tussaud, even if you're a little on the creepy side.

In other news, we went to Six Flags about a half hour drive away, which is a brand of amusement park dedicated mainly to housing the most horrific (fantastic) roller coasters in the world.

Here be the six flags, which was the only explanation we ever got for the name.

There were about twenty rides with a definite 'extreme' flavour (you know how extreme it's going to be by how much they strap you in) and dozens of other good ones. My companions were rather sickly/chicken but kudos to them, I only had to go on one ride by myself.

We again reaped the rewards of it being mid-week, mid-winter, being able to go on rides multiple times easily, sometimes without even having to get off.

There seemed to be a little Canadian-themed section. It had Shania Twain playing out the front, and the restaurant was decked out like this -

O Canada.

The ever excellent pirate ship ride...

At the end of the day, lined up for funnel cakes, which is cake batter funnelled out in a long stream to make a kind of waffle thing, then deep fried and smothers in cream and ice cream. It's as good as it sounds. I reckon we ended up waiting for longer than any ride. Quite worth it, however -

Ellie's chocolate monstrosity.

Back to Hollywood.

Fun fact: not sure if the famous, palm-lined bit of Sunset Boulevard exists; we sure as hell couldn't find it. Sunset Boulevard is very long.

To finish, I've spared you dozens of tedious shots of all the stars on the boulevard (somewhat because I didn't take any due to not feeling comfortable stopping on Hollywood boulevard and taking pictures of the ground), but here's me and this lovely lady, whose name my mother read somewhere and thought it wasn't so bad...