Los Angeles, California

LA was to be the first stop on our American leg. Los Angeles is Spanish for the City of Angels and is the second largest city in the USA with a population of 3.8m. LA was founded on September 4, 1781, by Spanish governor Felipe de Neve. It became a part of Mexico in 1821, following its independence from Spain. In 1848, at the end of the Mexican-American War, Los Angeles and the rest of California were purchased as part of the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, thereby becoming part of the United States.

LA is the home of Hollywood and it is known as the "Entertainment Capital of the World", leading the world in the creation of motion pictures, television production, video games, and recorded music. The importance of the entertainment business to the city has led many celebrities to call Los Angeles and its surrounding suburbs home. This has resulted in LA becoming the the world's eighth most economically powerful city, third in the U.S. behind New York and Chicago.

We were a bit cautious as we had heard all the horror stories about the gangs and homeless problems in LA and we were staying in a hotel in Downtown LA which is the heart of the trouble apparently. However apart from the streets stinking of urine, a lot of jakey homeless people, 1 of whom we seen stand and pee himself, and a few blocks where we were the only white people, where we stood out like a sore thumb it wasn't that bad!

We were shocked to see the sheer numbers of homeless people sleeping rough on the streets and it's something that you can't prepare yourself for until you see it. I think the problems have always been there but I'm not sure how much worse they have gotten as around 3 million people in the US lost their homes in 2009 due to the recession. As for the high crime rate, 2009 seen a 50 year low so big Arnie must be doing a decent job as Governor of California.

We spent 2 nights here and the main tourist attraction for us was Hollywood. We spent a day up here where we were surprised to see how tacky it was. The Hollywood Boulevard 'Walk of the Stars' reminded us of Blackpool with all the cheap T-shirt shops and people dressed up as stars (badly!) that you get a photo with. It was still cool to see it and spot some of the stars of movies and music who had their names in stars on the pavement.








From here we went to the Highland shopping centre where you get a not too bad view of the Hollywood sign on the hills in the distance. This is connected to the Kodak Theatre which is used to host the Oscars and American Idol final.






















It was then time to leave LA and start our journey through the USA on the infamous Greyhound bus. It started well with us taking a walk to the station the night before to enquire about the tickets and we walked through a real ghetto town where we were the only white people. There was people lying in the street in their own urine and even someone setting up a tent on the pavement! When we got to the bus station there was an old jakey woman behind us in the queue. Luckily for us there was a poor Korean standing himself who she targeted to spout all her random crap to. Turned out that she must only have had around a 30 second speech that she repeated over and over again. The next morning we went to get the bus and she was still hanging around outside the station! We could only imagine what lay in store for us on the bus!