Los Angeles Part 1

We have so far spent 3 full days in Los Angeles.  We arrived on Monday 1st August at about 3pm so we just relaxed with the other people from the contiki group.  On Tuesday we left the Kyoto Grand Hotel and headed for our home for the next 6 nights the Beverly Garland Holiday Inn.  We arrived here shortly after midday and we were lucky enough to get checked into our room straight away.  For the rest of the afternoon we did washing.  For dinner we met up with the people from contiki and we headed down to Santa Monica Pier for dinner.  It was a really pretty place and the food was pretty good as well.  We wandered along the pier for a little while before we headed back to our hotel.  On Wednesday we did our hop on hop off tour around Los Angeles.  It was a really big day, we saw all the major sites like the chinese theatre, hollywood walk of fame, Madam Tussards, Rodeo Drive, The rest of Santa Monica and lots lots more.  We didn't finish doing that till 6pm and we made our way back to the starting point which was Universal City and we had dinner.  You don't realise how big the city really is until you are actually here.  We got back to the hotel pretty early as we were both stuffed from the day.  The tour we decided to do on Thursday was the Movie Star home tour.  We got picked up from our hotel and taken around to all the different areas the stars live in like Beverly Hills, West Hollywood and the Hollywood hills.  We saw the homes of Shirley Temple, Julia Roberts, Bob Barker, Tom Cruise, Orlando Bloom, David and Victoria Beckham and many many more.  It was very cool and for some of them we weren't just looking at the gate, we could see the mansions as well.  We also got to see the Hollywood sign, unfortunatly we couldn't go up to the sign but we got to see it from a distance and it was still pretty cool.  Once the tour finished we got dropped back off at the hotel where we had some lunch and walked to the post office to post yet another parcel home.  Tonight we are just going to stay around the hotel for dinner as tomorrow (Friday) we are heading to San Diego Zoo.  So stay tuned!!!!!