Day 30- Hollywood and Beverly Hills

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We went to Denny’s for breakfast this morning, as apparently it’s a classic American diner that everyone has to have breakfast at, at least once. I’m sure everyone is aware of this, but far out the portion sizes are huge here! Definitely couldn’t finish everything. We got metro cards at the subway station and loaded them with juuust enough for the time we’re in LA (each time you tap it takes $1.75, no matter how far you’re travelling, so as long as we don’t take more trips than expected we’ll be fine), and hopped on the subway to Hollywood!

It was so surreal. We walked the walk of fame and got probably as close as we could to the Hollywood sign (so, miles away) and decided to go check out the Dolby theatre and see if they’d started setting up for the Oscars yet. They had. It was so cool. There’s a giant white tent that you’re not allowed into but you can walk behind it to get to a mall, and the security guards will try to stop you but you can have a sneak peek inside at the red carpet. Of course, there was no one there except guards and officials etc but it was cool to see inside. So, you know, not to brag or anything, but I’ve pretty much been to the Oscars.

We walked around for a bit, constantly declining the millions of invitations to buy a seat on a Hollywood tour, and eventually we decided to get the free bus to Beverly Hills. (Side note, I had been told by a friend not to catch any LA public busses because it’s scary and unclean, and I wish I had listened. Moving on.)

Beverly Hills is beautiful, and made me realise no matter how much money I earn I will never be able to afford to live there. We wanted to walk down Rodeo Drive, which as I understood was a strip of luxury stores (such as Louis Vuitton, Valentino, Coach etc) where a lot of celebrities did their shopping, however when we got to it we realised there’s a long strip of fancy houses to walk past first. Fine by me! These are some of the most magnificent houses I have ever seen. They’re huge, made with materials like marble or sandstone, and have beautiful green lawns (very well maintained) and fancy curve-around driveways. Their cars are incredible too. Not just the ones parked in the driveways, but the ones that sped past us too (pretty sure the speed limit was only 50mph, but I suppose when you have a red Ferrari in Beverly Hills it’s hard to go slow).

Anyway, we reached the shopping strip, obviously didn’t bother going in to any (I am very clumsy and would definitely cause harm if I went into any of them) but it was beautiful to walk through and look into the windows. We got some gelato from Fatamorgana as we walked around, and when eventually we hit an area that was no longer Beverly Hills we decided to get the bus back to downtown.

It was about 4pm when we got back, so we headed up to the spa to watch the sun set. We went out for dinner a few hours later and found Sweetgreen, a salad bar!! You choose which salad you want and they put it together in front of you, and then they have an array of organic juices to have as well. It was super filling and amazingly low calorie, I was in heaven.

There’s not too much else we can really do at night considering I’m now underage, so we went back to the apartment to play cards for the rest of the night. Hollywood and Beverly Hills definitely did not disappoint!

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