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Published: September 10th 2011
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So today was our final full day at Venice Beach. 😞 We didn't really want to spend the day lying inthe sun again and risk getting burnt any more than we already have, so we decided that we would save some money today and walk down to Santa Monica, hang out there and look around the shops, then walk back later on.
We got up at about 8am, got ready and had some breakfast (waffles once again!), got our stuff together and hit the boardwalk for the long walk down to Santa Monica. As we got to Venice Beach, a guy in sunglasses came up to us with a clipboard asking if we wanted to be in a commercial, saying that there would be dancers, wrestlers and "maybe an elephant". We were pretty skeptical about the elephant thing, so we politely declined and carried on our walk, commenting to each other that there was probably not gonna be an elephant there at all.
The walk to Santa Monica seemed to take a lot less time than the other day (I think we were walking faster and didn't stop for any rests this time) and we were there in no
time. We stopped at the pier to cool down a little, as you get a great breeze from the ocean on there, before heading down to Third Street. Again, we had a peruse around some of the shops (Craig wanted to go in Puzzle Zoo again, as he had so much fun in there yesterday, lol) but didn't actually buy anything.
For dinner, we went to Subway and split a foot-long crispy chicken sub, which was delicious and saved us a bit of money, as ordering two six-inch subs would have been a fair bit more. We had a look around a few more of the shops before going back to the beach to walk back to Venice.
We took the walk back a little slower (our feet were starting to hurt a bit by this point), looking at some of the stalls that line the boardwalk. We saw the SMALLEST dog ever on one of the stall tables (it wasn't for sale btw, or else Emma may have got herself a new little pet), which looked like a chihuahua puppy, which was literally smaller than a rat, it was
tiny! The original plan once we got back
to Venice Beach was to go and sit in some shade and watch the skaters on the skate park, however once we had dragged our tired feet back to Venice (we had probably walked about 6 miles altogether), we noticed that they were still shooting the commercial right by the skate park (on the street section of it actually), so we wandered over to see if there was an elephant there.
There wasn't, but a guy with a microphone kept saying that "Susie the elephant was just moments away". We were still a bit skeptical as to whether a
real elephant was on it's way (we thought it could be someone dressed as an elephant), but we stuck around anyway. The commercial was showing the durability of what looked like wooden or laminate floor from some sort of home store (kind of like homebase), so they had been 'testing' out the durability of this floor by putting things on it such as breakdancers covered in steel wool, wrestlers in high heels, a marching band and some skaters. So far, there wasn't a mark on the floor, but the final test was to put the elephant on it.
We
waited for around half an hour to an hour, with the guy still saying that the elephant was "moments away", and some guys set up a dinner table on the stage/floor, with a big fake roast chicken, fake cupcakes, glasses with fake wine (made of water and red and blue food dye - it looked pretty real actually!) and decorative items such as flowers placed around it. Finally, a truck pulled up with 'livestock' written on it, and Susie the (very much real) elephant finally made her appearance!
The keepers got her all dressed up in a hat, collar and tie, and we were told that Susie would be performing a magic trick on the floor - from the set-up, it was clear what was going to happen! A guy (who we assumed was her keeper at wherever she came from) lead her onto the floor and they filmed a few shots of her waving a magic wand around. The big "trick" then followed. As you may have guessed, this consisted of Susie grabbing the table cloth from the dinner table as if to sweep it from under everything, but she just flung it into the air and everything
went crashing onto the floor. The elephant then decided that she wanted to eat everything that she had just destroyed, and her keeper desperately tried to distract her with real food so that she wouldn't try to eat anything whilst the remains of the table contents were swept away from her (although we are pretty sure that she did eat one of the plastic cupcakes!). Her keeper must have fed her about a thousand carrots, apples and oreos (yup, elephants appear to love them too!) before the end of the shoot, and Susie took a bow before being lead back to the truck.
At this point, it was around 5:30pm, so we went back to the room to chill for a bit. We played on the netbook for a while, contemplating on when to pack up our stuff ready for in the morning, but decided that we would do it later on. We went down at about 7pm for some tea, which was spaghetti today, then came back up to the room. Craig watched some more 'Falling Skies' on the netbook, whilst Emma finished the book that she had borrowed. We then packed up most of our stuff into
our suitcase, trying to separate the stuff that we had worn so that we can wash it when we get to the next place (we're not too sure about the laundry situation here).
We finally finished packing and went to bed at around 11pm, ready for our final sleep at Venice Beach. Tomorrow we move on to downtown LA for a couple of days, before heading to Vegas on Monday!
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