KOOKS!

We checked into our hostel (and met the 90% Australian travelers and staff-typical) and slept for 15 hours on the first day/night. When we had regained some normalcy we took a trip to 'Ralphs' which is kind of like Aldi except way cooler - we stocked up on good vibes and took some pictures of the retardedly fattening foods available here for cheeeaaaappp!! The stove in our hostel took 30 minutes to boil eggs, maybe we should have gotten $1 hamburgers.


Venice beach is the kookiest place either of us have ever seen. EVER. The boardwalk is like nothing we were expecting- a million tattoo shops, cheap rip off clothing, homeless people yalking and laughing hysterically to themselves, medical marajuana 'clinics', tie dye, skaters, joints, pimps, hos. The whole place smells like joint. The beach is beautiful though, its like baywatch (minus the Hoff), we hired bikes and rode for a couple of hours all the way up to Santa Monica and saw the gradual rise in real estate from state housing to mansions. Hiring bikes was also a nice way of circumventing the kooks.

We were done with Venice in a couple of days so we packed up to head to Hollywood. Again we were pretty much the only white people on the public bus and we met a new friend called 'Sly' (name tag still on from perhaps an earlier AA meeting?)- he would mutter a few words and then crack up laughing so we just kind of laughed and tried not to appear nervous. We changed buses and after a long time and lots of uriny bus smell we had arrived in Hollywood yayyyyyyyyy! We got off the
bus, looked down and saw stars on the pavement, looked up and saw the Hollywood sign :)

Again our hostel is in an 'unsavoury' area of hollywood boulevard - when asked about the area, the hostel people say 'turn left but never go right' when you leave through the front gate.

The hostel itself, however, has some pretty nice perks. 20 minutes after checking in we were shuttled off to a FREE thanks giving dinner which was totally free( did i mention it was free?). We met a few other fellow travelers from our hostel. We sat down, ate food, met a few cool people and booted once the food ran out. Once again our bus ride home was an interesting/creepy experience but we made it back none the less. As we found out later that night, kooks come on a sliding scale and the kook who checked into our dorm that night was somewhere around the Tom cruise circa Oprah interview end of the scale. Its hard to describe him in a way that does justice to his kookiness so we thought it would be better to describe the random items that he had brought with him. Among his suitcases, boxes and plastic bags, he owns one pair of glittered (mirror ball styles) platform hiking shoes, a pink womans purse as a toiletry bag (which was never used, judging by the stench of his beard/layers of soiled clothing) and multiple boxes that seemingly contain nothing but other boxes and pieces of scrunched paper. Traveling essentials, no doubt. He also seemingly did not find sleeping to be a red flag for conversation so at 1 am when we were (trying) to sleep, we were well briefed on his life story and traveling history. He woke us up to tell us about how his laptop got stolen in London in August etc and then left the room (he did not return until the next evening). LA is kook central.

Love
Wolf and Amy

After 20 hours of flying and 15 hours of sleep

The flight to Auckland was rad because we got to sit in the emergency seats on the plane. This was great for leg room (especially for Amy as she is so tall)-The seats apparently came with some responsibility or sommat re helping open the doors in an emergency- except we just fell asleep and luckily we didnt need to use our training. Auckland airport was GHEY because of two reasons; 1) Apparently Auckland airport is run by my 2nd grade teacher because there was no chewy gum "allowed" to be sold ANYWHERE! so not only did we have gross breath, our ears were blocked so we couldnt even communicate :( and 2) the staff at every store didnt let us use our debit cards or atm cards so we even if there were chewy available, we wouldnt have even been able to pay for it! Why a store in the international section of an airport would not allow overseas credit cards was beyond us, thankfully Amy was too tired to argue so we slept and waited. A few hours later we were on the plane- LA bound.

By LA, all four of our eyes were completely blood shot and it took customs a while to realise that this was probably normal and we werent a pair of dodgy kooks. The sunlight of LA at 7am was beautiful... We were greeted by a massive 'man of colour' outside who proceeded to tell Wolfie how pretty his girlfriend was (Felt 50% flattered, 50% sceptical)... turns out he was a missionary wanting a "small" $20 donation for some thanksgiving dinner blah blah bullshit! We took a mulligan on this and made our way to the local bus (BIG MISTAKE). We wanted to save cash on the shuttle...silly us.



We got on the bus where we stuck out out like two very white sore thumbs. There was us (the sore thumbs) and the remainder of the bus was comprised of a colourful mixture of 50% employed, 50% unemployed. The bus driver let us on for free because he was unable to break the $100 bills that we had, adding extra soreness to the aforementioned thumbs. We are still debating weather he was truly unable to break our $100 or if he thought it would be a nice gesture to two tourists that may not make it off the bus. The Shaquana opposite us looked us all up and down and shook her head at the nerve (or courage?) of us getting on this bus which was apparently bound for welfare town. We started to notice that most people were in fact homeless and generally kooky (the dude sitting next to us was singing and tapping on our seat the whole time). We then got off the first bus and decided it may be good idea not to be flashing $100 bills on city buses so we looked for the first place that would A) not mug us and B) change said notes. We finally found a store that looked like it would probably fill said criteria but in order to break we had to spend $5. This is where we were first struck by how cheap food is in America. We tried to find the cheapest thing to make five dollars but we ended up with a donut, a large crazy tapioca drink with whipped cream and a large bottle of water. By the look of the other customers in the store, if we took out the bottle of water, we were eating the typical American breakfast. There was heaps of people there getting their morning donuts (as one does). We got on another bus which took us to Venice Beach.

More later.
Wolf and Amy