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