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Published: September 11th 2011
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We're updating this a little late due to a mix of a busy day and lack of wifi in the room! So yesterday, we woke up to our final morning at Venice Beach hostel. We got up at around 7:30, got showered and dressed and went for our last breakfast, for which we both had pancakes, as the queue for the waffle makers was quite long!
We came back to the room to pack up any last bits and bobs that we had used that morning, then went downstairs to check out. We had decided that we would spend most of the day at the beach before going to Downtown L.A, as we wouldn't be able to check in until after 3pm anyway. The people at the hostel let us leave our cases in a back room until later on, and we headed down to the skate park.
There was the usual few good skaters and the odd bad one - in particular this older guy, who seemed a bit crazy, kept flinging himself around trying different random tricks and completely failing every time. It was pretty obvious that he had never actually ever landed any of them!
Craig then got a bit hungry and already knew what he was gonna eat. He had had his eye on a deep fried pizza slice from Big Daddy's since we arrived at Venice Beach on Sunday, and today was the day that he was going to have one! He paid his $3 (Emma wasn't hungry just yet so didn't have anything), and we went on sat on a bench, noticing a few seagulls with their beady eyes trained on Craig's food.
We took some pictures of the slice (which is basicaly a cheese pizza slice dipped in batter and deep fried) before Craig ate it, and he said it was very tasty, although very greasy (and probably
incredibly bad for you)! We went back over to the skate park and took a few pictures, mainly burst shots of some of the tricks that some of the guys were doing. We also noticed a kid playing with yo-yo's who was AMAZING. We got a video of him and took a few pictures to put on here. We heard someone say that he had won quite a few competitions, which wasn't surprising, he was literally THE best yo-yo-er that we had
ever seen! Emma also went down to the ocean to take a few pictures, as we hadn't took any on the beach on the few days that we had spent on there!
At this point it was around 1:45, and Emma was getting a bit hungry, and opted for a (unbattered) pizza slice. Once that was eaten, we went back to get our cases from the hostel (noticing a very camp-looking seagull standing on a wall - see pictures) before getting on the 733 (the miracle wonderbus that takes you everywhere - it literally dropped us right outside our hotel in downtown L.A.!).
Our first impressions of the Cecil hotel were good (the lobby looks amazing), but we knew that the rooms were fairly basic from pictures and reviews that we had looked at online. We checked in fairly quickly and got given our room key - which was for the top floor of the hotel! We took the lift up to the 15th floor and entered our room - as expected, it was pretty basic but would do the job. It has a bed, sink, TV, closet etc, the only thing that it doesn't have is a
bathroom, but showers and toilets are just a couple of doors down from us. We checked out the view, thinking that being on the top floor, we
should have a good view, but alas, we're next door to an even higher building and we got the wall facing it! We could just about squash our faces up the window to see a tiny triangle of the street below! We had a look on the netbook to see if we could get wi-fi in our room, which we couldn't, but we knew that we could get it in the lobby downstairs.
We dropped off our stuff in the room and went to check out the hotel. We found the laundry room (which we had planned to use the next day to wash our clothes) and had a look in the cafe that was attached to the hotel (although this was a little expensive for what it was, really). We also tested the internet connection in the lobby, which worked, but was a bit slow.
We then had a walk around some of the shops in the streets surrounding our hotel. Around here, there are various different shopping districts, consisting
of a few blocks, where the shops are all of the same type (for example, a fashion district, toy district, jewellery district, etc). We checked them out for an hour or so, along with scouting some places for us to eat, as no food was included in the room price. We noticed a chinese place round the corner which did a plate of rice, chow mein noodles and any entree (e.g. chicken curry, pork riblets, garlic chicken, beef broccoli, etc) for just under $4, which we considered for our tea that night, although we weren't feeling hungry just yet.
We then went back to the room for a few hours and watched some TV. 'Miss Congeniality' had just come on one of the channels so we watched that until around 7:30pm. We assumed that we would want some tea by about this point, but neither of us felt particularly hungry, so instead we just got some crisps out of a vending machine downstairs. Craig went to the lobby for a bit to watch some 'Minecraft'-related videos on YouTube, but as the internet connection was so ridiculously slow he managed about 2 and a half (half-hour long) videos in just
under 2 hours! Emma went back to the room and watched 'Miss Congeniality 2', which was on straight after the first one, and Craig eventually came up and just caught the end of it (which was based in Las Vegas, which is our next stop so got us a bit excited!).
We watched a bit more TV after the film (a lot of it was about 9/11 due to the anniversary being the next day) and fell asleep at around 11pm. Tomorrow would be a bit of an in-between day, where our main aim would be to get our laundry done!
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