LA

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'Mam I work for the US government, when I say here I mean the United States of America'. This was the reply from the security at LAX after mum had asked whether he meant: had we been to our hotel before OR had we been to the US in general before. We knew the wait was going to be rather long when we arrived at LAX and unfortunately the flight from Japan had arrived just before us which meant the queues were full of extremely slow Japanese! However we eventually got through after giving our finger prints and having our photos taken, then got a taxi to our hotel. Driving through Hollywood was really good and our taxi driver was very friendly, he even gave us the holy book from his religion because we were 'nice people'. Awww. We stayed at the Magic Castle which was amazing. We were greeted with sparkling lemonade and then told our free bar included lots and lots of food and drink - I managed to devour 5 hershey bars within 2 hours of arriving. We made sure we made full use of that during our stay in LA! We went shopping at The Grove in LA which had amazing shops - Abercrombie, Ugg etc. We managed to spend quite a bit of money in that place! The weather was beautiful the whole of our time in America too.

For tea on our first night we went for tea at the Hard Rock Cafe which was really good. It was really busy and as you can imagine the portions were huge!! Only Dad and I managed all 3 - starter, main and dessert! We went for a walk around LA which was surprisingly really nice and saw the walk of fame. We even saw a commercial being filmed with some famous bloke from the American 'Deal or no deal'. It was VERY High School Musical. I would have loved to have joined in and danced up the steps with them! Haha.

On our second day after our amazing eat all you can eat breaky at the hotel, we went on a Hollywood home of the stars tour which was an open top bus that drove around the Hollywood hills, Beverly Hills etc. It was so good keeping our eye out for celebs. We were shown houses such as Tom Cruise, Christina Aguilera, Orlando Bloom etc. But the best was definitely Michael Jackson's old house. It was so weird driving past his black gates that had been all over the news when he was found dead, it felt unreal. We went down Rodeo Drive where Pretty Woman was filmed and saw the Beverly Wilshire Hotel. Afterwards we did a bit of shopping before returning to the hotel for a swim in the pool. In the evening I persuaded mum to return with me to The Grove shopping centre as I decided I couldn't leave Hollywood without the bag I fell in love with and didn't buy the day before! After we were meeting the boys at the Beverly Hills sign and were offered a limo there for $25. Stupidly we turned it down and got a taxi which ended up costing $20. Next time hey! We went to the 'In and out burger' for our tea which did the most amazing burgers. We got a couple of DVD's from the hotel to watch that evening with our snacks (including popcorn!) from the free mini bar.

In the morning unfortunately it was time to leave LA. However we managed a quick trip to Venice beach which was nice, like a posher version of Blackpool, much more up market. We had a look around the millions of shops and saw the 'muscle men' working out on the beach. Then it was time to catch our flight to Canada!

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