I don't think I've said this yet, but the street signs in the USA, in Los Angeles in particular, are so much better than they are in Australia. They're actually hanging over the intersection, near the traffic lights, so you can actually see them easily! What a great idea!
Anyway, with that said I've researched the bus lines to get somewhere near Dodgers stadium, but bus routes only tell you about the major intersections they stop at, not every single stop. So I'm on a bus for about 30 minutes all the while trying not to miss the stop I'm after, but with no real idea when it's coming up or if I've missed it already. To further complicate the matter, because I'm sitting so far back in the bus, I can't see any of the street signs out of the front window. That's bus problem number one. Bus problem number two is that by the time you see the street you wanted, you're probably too late to ring the bell to get off, and you end up going one stop too far. Not a big deal really, and I think that's what ended up happening.
So we get off the bus in some less-than-great looking area, and there's no Dodgers Stadium in sight, and no signs saying where to go. Took a guess and walked up this big hill at an intersection, and simply by luck there is Dodgers stadium in the distance!
So we've found the stadium, but it's a huge complex with heaps of car parking, and the whole place is dead so I've got no idea where the hell to go from here. After wandering around the perimeter for a bit, we find an open gate and head to the security booth. I tell the guard what I'm here for and he says to wait around for 5-10 minutes and he'll take us up. A few minutes later another guard drives up, I wasn't watching or paying attention to it, then drives off shortly after. I've waited a good 10 minutes now and go back to the guard, only it's a different guard! They've just switched over and the first idiot has just gone. The second guard hasn't come up and asked me why I'm just standing around, nor does he know that I'm waiting for the tour. What was even more fun was that he just gave me directions how to walk up to the stadium myself, and said the first guy should have just done the same. Great job guys.
So we arrived for the tour, to find the tour guide and...noone else. There's noone else on this tour but us. This is going to be awkward, given that I know a small amount about baseball but absolutely nothing about the Dodgers. Anyway the tour went better than expected and between us we managed to come up with enough random baseball questions to keep the guy busy - even a few he didn't have an answer for, so I think that's a success.
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| The view facing back to downtown LA. The tour guide didn't have an answer for why the stands are facing in the exact opposite direction. |
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| A nice, if slightly old, stadium, but you're staring out into the car park and mountains. |
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| Lower level view. They have a "Think Blue" sign over on the hill. |
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| Supposedly the seat colors represent the sun, the sand and the water. To me the order seems wrong... |
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| World Series trophy. |
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| Home plate from the old stadium (in Brooklyn, New York). |
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| World Series trophy and bats (before they gave out trophies). |
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| The players dugout. |
By the way, after a few visits to the podiatrist, I can barely stand looking at a photo of the back of my leg anymore. Although any other photos with me in them aren't far behind.
I decided that downtown LA was within walking distance, and for once I was just right. As I've already mentioned there's not that much to see in downtown LA, but the Disney Concert Hall is quite a spectacle. The camera ran out of juice after that, so there's no photos of Grand Central Market (which is much less grand than it is central) and whatever else was around. Supposedly Union Station is a nice place, but we did not get over there.
So with that out of the way, it was back to Hollywood. Purchased tickets for MT's Wax Museum which I didn't have high expectations for, but it was actually pretty good. The wax figures are way more realistic than you'd ever expect, you could almost be mistaken for thinking it was a real person sometimes. Most wax figures were very similar to the celebrity but occasionally you'd find one that just seemed way off.
Before dinner there was just enough time to visit the location of the house where they filmed The Real World: Hollywood. Woo! The filming finished maybe a year or more ago so I wasn't expecting much, and there wasn't much there, but still it was an accomplishment.
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| Sadly the photo was taken from too close, so all you see is a gate! |
Had to do a whole heap of laundry using the in-hotel coin laundry that night, which in itself isn't worthy of writing about but I do have a fun story about it. Jason decides to ignore the warning on clothes that say DO NOT TUMBLE DRY and just throw all kinds of stuff in there, things with zips and the like. So anyway, our room is just a couple of rooms down from the laundry / ice / vending room, so when I'm standing near the door I can hear this regular clunking of zips hitting the cylinder of the dryer. It does not sound good, but it's passable I suppose. I did this every few minutes just to check that everything sounded ok and wasn't getting any worse. Then all of a sudden I hear this crazy loud clunking that is just unrelenting, and I think something's caught in the dryer and the whole thing is going to explode or something. So I drop what I'm doing and go running down the hall to see what's going on. Come around the corner and there's just two people using the ice machine. It was the ice machine! They just look at me wondering what's going on, while I was trying to understand how a simple ice machine could make that much noise.
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