Day 3...Down & Out in La - 29th June

Ate our free shitty pancakes complete with butter flavoured syrup. mmm yummy. And free coffee with powdered milk (nearly wretched at that one!). Then it took us a two hour mission to get to Santa Monica where we wandered around Santa Monica Pier and the shops and stuff. We went on a mission with two Sarahs who were from Perth and it was fun getting lost together. Santa Monica itself was quite nice and saw the red board-shorted baywatch lifeguards, and lots of fat people (no photos taken Inny and Neil - sorry! There are just too many of them!)

Saw our first famous person! He's the guy with scars on his face and does a lot of medieval movies like braveheart and that. His name is Tommy Flanagan and check out the movies he is in on http://www.imdb.com/. He is in Gladiator, Braveheart, Sin City, Charlies Angels etc. I was quite happy with my spot and was trotting around the rest of the day very pleased with myself for that one! We went to Fred Seagal in Santa Monica to go star spotting but didn't see any. We will try the Melrose one later on as that's where I saw Billy Zane last time! Then we did the 2 hour mission back home were we watched some cable (Busty Cops 2) and got ready to go out.

Our hostel is ok, kinda gritty (as is a hostels want) and you can't walk around our bed at all but its a double, and the window keeps everything cool and we have our own crapper as well. (Not that we've crapped, our systems are all out of wack). Our room is right outside the laundry and stereo room so we get all the noise but that's ok. I'm pretty genial about everything now that I'm traveling, I didn't even mind that we got busted naked in the shower by staff. Hey hey!

Anyways, we went out and had dinner at The Standard on Sunset Boulevarde. The view from the pool deck over downtown LA was fantastic - but there were no seats so we ate inside at the restaurant and had our first decent meal in days. (The American version of health is quite low here!)

Then we walked down the Sunset Strip and stopped off at the House of Blues which is a famous cult spot. There was a big black bouncer there and I asked sweetly if we could come inside for a few drinks? He said sure, put some wristbands on us and turned us loose inside. The decor was great, with balcony views of LA. There were lots of bigwig looking people there and we spent a drink or two laughing at 5 -6 young well groomed girls giggling and pouting and vying for attention for this normal looking bald old dude. He must have been a producer or agent or something. I took a photo of Nate laughing at them. Then we met some people from Sony. A pretty girl talked to us about Vegas and had a great accent. She said pool like poo-wal. Her job was to act as broker between a movie that wanted to use a particular song and the Sony owned artist who had made it. Kind like property management but between movies and musicians. Kinda cool really. The rest of the Sony team asked us if we were there for Teddy Geiger who had finished playing just before we came in. And we were like "who?" No. Then they asked us who invited us. And we were like "...ah...no one?" It transpired that we were at a VIP private party! They were all quite surprised that we got in haha!

Then we meandered up the Strip towards Johnny Depp's club, the Viper room and saw a movie being filmed in a limo and at a store on the way. I took a photo in case I saw it later on anywhere (like last time where I saw Be Cool being filmed and didn't know it!) After being "checked" by the floor guy to see if we were cool enough to get into the Viper room ("We are from Australia to see the Viper Room!"..."Thats near Kentucky right?") we went in. Ahhh Johnny Depp. I'd pay any cover price to you any day darling. Plus this is where River Phoenix died, in Flea's arms no less. It's a mecca of a spot. Watched some weird rock band with an Indian singer who were actually pretty good and had a dance around. Then off we went home!