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Published: September 26th 2013
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Our last stop on the west coast of North America was LA. On one hand we were expecting the glamour of Hollywood, and on the other hand a city with long distances where you need to have a car to do anything at all. In order to not have to drive too far to see the glamour part we found ourselves an accommodation in East Hollywood, a few miles from the stars, footprints and the Chinese theatre.
Alexander, our host, used the proud name "Gemini Manor" for his house. It was a house filled with collected oddities, made even more into a labyrith by Alexander renting out every available space so that you needed to circle around certain rooms. We had our own bathroom, although the bath tub was filled with a clown and a creepy monster and therefore not in use. Alexander was busy with guiding his mexican workers preparing his house for his burning man party next Saturday (we missed the party as we were already in Lima at that time) so he outsourced part of the presentation of the house to one of the other tenants. Because it was quite crowded and because we hanged out quite
much with the other tenants our overall impression was that this felt more like a hostel than a B&B. In addition to the amount of people the preparation for the burning man party Alex told us he had rented out the whole house for Friday to a film crew, and that he was worried about how he would be able to hide all the tenants for one day...
We were almost at walking distance from the main sights of Hollywood, so we decided to walk there. It took roughly an hour to get to the Chinese theater where we, like everybody else, compared our feets with the footprints of the Hollywood stars. The weather was sunny and warm, but the city itself felt mostly like a huge suburb. This feeling was all over town, there were the beachy suburbs like Malibu and Venice, there were the rich suburbs like Beverly Hills, and there were the etnic suburbs like Thaitown and Koreatown, but everything was just suburbs. On the other hand we never got ourselves to Downtown, maybe there it would have been different.
In addition to exploring suburbs (or I guess you should call them neighborhoods, but they
felt more suburby than neighborhoody), we also went to see the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. We had especially looked forward to their photographic department, but only a small special exhibition was open. Also otherwise it felt quite many of the buildings were either closed or part of a special exhibition not included in the regular ticket (and, in addition to that, the needed additional tickets were sold out).
After four whole days in LA we flew onward to Fort Lauderdale. Fort Lauderdale was not really on our list of places we wanted to see, it was just on our route as all cheap airline tickets to South America seems to go from Florida. We took full advantage of having no plans, the water temperature in the ocean was around 30 degrees celcius and the weather was sunny except for a few showers in the afternoon. We therefore spent most of our time on the beach, either reading or swimming in the waves. First time ever I have been able to enjoy a beach holiday for more than an hour or two, here we basically spent two full afternoons on the beach! After two relaxing days we then
left North America behind us for what we felt as a big step into the unknown, going to South America where we will be traveling for the next 4 months!
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