America

I seemed to have lost Tuesday. It's quite a strange feeling but my week so far has consisted of a Monday and the first of Wednesday... Tuesday hasn't happened for me. It's a strange feeling.

We have arrived safely in New Zealand. We have booked into our hostel which seems pretty decent. The owner is friendly and was happy to chat about the city for a while... it turns out he has visited Milton Keynes before which I thought was funny if slightly odd.

As not much has happened here, I thought it would be a good opportunity to write about our last few days in America and our overall thoughts on the place. We spent our last night in the Venice beach area. The hostel was alright although we were in a 3 bed dorm so we had to share with one other person. It worked out okay but we felt a bit nerdy when we were in bed by eleven and we was off out drinking some more. Our excuse was that we had to check out in the morning and we had already had a fairly heavy night the night before at a bar called the Powerhouse in Hollywood. That was quite a fun night. We ended up talking to a rocker couple called Vic and Brook (how American can you get?) and drinking 3$ pints.

Venice beach was a really fun place during the day. It was very hot so we sat by the beach and I got in a few times. There was a real festival atmosphere with stalls selling all kinds of things and street performers along the promenade. We had some dinner in the evening and had a walk up the beach as the sun set. After popping back the hostel, we decided to run out to get some bottled water - our room was ridiculously hot. The place was a little scarier at night. There were gangs of people hanging out everywhere and the lively atmosphere of the day was long gone. We promptly bought water and retired to bed!

We spent our last day in L.A. just lounging on the beach and having a long lunch in an Italian restaurant just off the sea front.

It has been a strange but fun couple of weeks. Although it may have seemed like we have been moaning about a lot on this blog, we have had some really fun times and after some initial feelings of disappointment when in L.A. we have decided that we would definitely come back. I think L.A. is maybe hyped up a bit too much. Hollywood is touristy and a bit rough and Sunset Strip consists of very few bars that are really far away from each other.

San Francisco, on the other hand, was a great place. You can be a tourist and do all the touristy things or you can just hang out in bars and soak up the atmosphere. There are a lot more places to just sit in SF than L.A.

I really should sleep now as I didn't sleep on the plane (how do people do it?) but I am wide awake. I think I'm currently on about 26 hours but I could be screwing my maths with all the odd time zone business. We have much better access to the net here so I will hopefully update this blog a little more over the next few days. I may even chance hogging all the bandwidth and upload a few pictures to Flickr.