San Francisco

Apologies for the lack of posting over the last couple of days. Although we have found a fairly nice internet cafe near to our motel in L.A., we have generally just been checking e-mails and looking up bus routes as it's 1.75$ for 15 minutes.

Anyway, the last few days have been quite eventful. We are currently in San Francisco staying with a friend in the centre of town. After posting this, we are going to go for a little explore.

But back to L.A. After the last post, we went out and found the Hollywood sign. We caught the subway a few stops down Hollywood Boulevard walked back. This took us about 2 hours as anyone who's been to LA will tell you, the streets are quite long. We realised this again the next day when we caught the bus over to Beverly Hills. It took us quite a while but soon we were wondering around all the ridiculously expensive shops on Rodeo Drive. We stopped for lunch (I had a chilli dog and Jordan a salad and fries) before heading over to Santa Monica. There we sat in a beach bar and had a pint... well as close to a pint as you can get - about 600ml. We then wondered around the pier and tried to get in the sea but it was a little bit too cold. Jordan got annoyed because she was then covered in sand as the sun cream we have been using is practically just grease. Due to our sandy state, we decided to do the long bus ride back to the motel to have a shower.

That night we decided to go out for dinner and walked down Hollywood Blvd looking for a restaurant. We passed some decent looking Italian places but were taken in by a swanky looking bar/restaurant that seemed to have some reasonably priced food. We decided to go in and were seated and brought menus. The waitor explained that it was a tapas style affair so the prices became a little less attractive. We then looked at the wine which was around the 50$ mark. At that point we were quite worried that we may have wondered accidentally into a really expensive restaurant. We ordered a couple of dishes each and a bottle of Chablis and worked out that we would probably end up spending about 80$ which isn't too bad but was a little more than we planned on spending. The waitor brought us out our food which consisted of some rather overdone flame grilled asparagus, mashed potato with truffle oil, miso soup and the largest mountain of calamari you've ever seen. After eating a bit of these we decided that there may be a reason that the place was empty apart from ourselves and another table. We picked at our food for a while before decided that we should just pay up, finish our wine and go. We paid the bill and sat in a more comfortable area drinking the rest of our wine. It was at this moment that we had a great idea. As the food had been so bad, we would not tip. The problem was that we had already put a tip in bill. We chose our moment carefully and quickly emptied the tip into Jordan's bag before making a hasty getaway. The tip money went to good use on beer and crisps to fill our empty bellies.

I'll leave the next day for another post as we really should go out exploring. I am currently uploading some pictures to Flickr so you can have a look at those while you wait with baited breath for the next post.