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Published: September 7th 2011
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Today's blog will probably be pretty short and sweet, as most of the day was spent doing exactly the same as what we did yesterday! We woke up slightly later than usual at around 8am, before getting ready to head down to breakfast. This was the usual pancake/waffle batter, and we both opted for waffles with syrup, and Craig also had some jam on his, which was yummy!
We wanted to be at the beach fairly early today, but noticed that we were running a little low on suncream, so after checking on the internet for the nearest (and the cheapest) place to get some from, we hopped on the 733 bus for a couple of stops and got off at a CVS pharmacy (this is pretty much exactly the same as boots, but mixed with a supermarket!). We saw an offer on some suncream which was buy one, get one half price with a CVS store card, so we signed up for one (these were free by the way - they only wanted a phone number and a signature!) and got ourself a bargain!
We had a quick look in the 7-eleven opposite, but the prices didn't seem
that cheap, so we went back to CVS to pick up a bottle of pop, some cool ranch doritos for Craig (ranch appears to be his new favourite flavour for everything!) and some chocolate to satisfy any cravings that we might get during the week! We popped back on the bus to the hostel, dropped our stuff off in the fridge, and went to the room to apply our suncream before heading out to the beach.
At this point it was dinner time, so before reaching the sand, we stopped off at 'Big Daddy's' to get ourselves something to eat. Emma had a garlic chicken pizza slice whilst Craig had his first ever corn dog (basically a hot dog on a stick deep fried in batter). He was very impressed. After eating, we headed onto the beach and basked in the sun for a good few hours, occasionally watching the surfers in the ocean. Emma went for a short dip in the water, but wasn't there for long as she panicked when a lifeguard started blowing their whistle and signalling some of the surfers to move away from the rocks and assumed that they meant that everyone needed to
get out of the water Jaws-stylee!
Craig went to watch some of the skateboarders for a little while, but mostly the afternoon was spent just chilling on the sand. At around 4:30-5:00, we came back to the room as we were feeling quite hot and wanted a shower to wash the sand off. Once all clean, we went downstairs for some tea, which was boiled rice with mixed vegetables with a variety of condiments and seasoning to choose from. After having our fill, we came back upstairs to grab our bus passes, the camera and some money before we went to visit Santa Monica pier at night (as planned yesterday).
We got the 733 (this bus appears to go everywhere!) down to the pier, where the sun was just setting over the ocean. We went down to the beach to take a few photos, before going back up to the pier to have a look around. We ventured inside the arcade that we mentioned yesterday, this time prepared with money! Craig had a go on an 'Elvis' themed pinball machine and won loads of free goes so his 50 cents went quite a long way! He also had
a go on a retro Pacman machine (which was ridiculously difficult so he rage-quit quite quickly). Emma had a little go on a Guitar Hero arcade machine, but was a little disappointed that her dollar only got her one song (though she did make it to #4 on the leaderboard - with the difficulty on hard!). After Emma had finished playing guitar hero, we walked a little around the arcade, spotting the worlds worst grabbing machine called "The Chocolate Factory" - a questionable name for a game that literally had one single twix inside it (see pictures). We also stopped to watch a guy in a shirt and tie GOING FOR IT on Dance Dance Revolution. We took a video and we will try to upload this as it is pretty hilarious.
Once we were done at the arcade, we walked a bit further up the pier and took a few more photos of the fair lit up at night. The dancing (if that's what he wants to call it) gorilla appeared to still be boogeying away and we took a few sneaky pictures as if he had seen us he would have wanted tips for them! We walked
back along the pier and waited around 15 minutes for the 733 to take us back to Venice Beach.
We got back to the hostel and ate some of the chocolates that we bought earlier, which were Hershey's version of maltesers called 'Whoppers' - although Emma didn't really like them 😞
We plan to head back to the beach most days throughout the rest of our time in Venice, so we apologize in advance if the blogs are very same-y/short over the forthcoming days!
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bex
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hey! what kind of price are the hotels/hostels costing you per night? How much is your budget for the trip? Can you include prices you have piad where possible and carry on with the bus numbers and information like that because im finding this blog really helpful :)