We're now in San Diego after having had a really nice couple of last days in Los Angeles. We made it up to the J Paul Getty Center without too much difficulty and with a considerable amount of pride in ourselves. The place is magnificent, the museum is in 4 massive wings and is set in the most amazing gardens. You get great views of the LA skyline in the smog and it's a surreally calm place after the madness of the city. It was boiling hot the day we went up there and so it was great to spend time in the air con, but there's not much art up there I was familiar with, so we decided to take an architecture tour instead which was really interesting. The guy who designed it, Richard Meier, sounds a nightmare and was completely anal about angles and measurements between trees planted in the gardens and stuff...We spent the afternoon up there and then drove to Hollywood. 12 miles took us an hour. Not because we got lost but because the roads are really stop-starty (that's a new technical term I've started to use!) but we got there in one piece. We'd been the day before but we wanted to see Hollywood Boulevard in the night so we could see all the lights and stuff. It was worth the trip. We had a burger in a place called Mel's Diner, which is one of the places you see in all the guidebooks and so of course is never as good as you plan for it to be, and then went to Ripley's Believe It or Not, a museum of all things freaky (they call it an 'odditorium') which is completely aimed at tourists and not really worth doing, but you live you learn! We drove back to Santa Monica up Sunset Strip which is where the Viper Rooms is (owned by Johnny Depp and where River Phoenix died) - it looks like a hole and apparently is full of underage kids drinking white wine spritzers...sounds like an average night out in Newport to me!!

Yesterday we decided to walk to Venice Beach which was allegedly half a mile from Santa Monica. It wasn't. But it was a pleasant enough walk/trek if you don't mind your homeless people crazy and your morning breeze permeated with the scent of very strong pot. It's ok, Mum, we avoided all eye contact! There were hundreds of shops selling t-shirts with messages across the front that you wouldn't your grandparents to see and the homeless people set up stalls selling all sorts of random stuff. We walked right down into Venice proper as we'd heard about 'Muscle Beach' where the local steroid heads come to work out for all to see. Maybe they don't do it on a Monday, but we walked a long way to see absolutely nothing! While we were walking there were regularly LAPD helicopters flying reallllllly low over the beach as if they were looking for someone/something, which was a bit disconcerting, but we're cultivating good blase faces, when in actual fact we both know that the other one is feeling less than 100% sure of what the hell we're doing.

Anyways, last night we went onto the Promenade in Santa Monica again for dinner with an Irish girl who'd arrived at the hostel by herself that afternoon from Fiji. She was on the last leg of her trip...had started out with a friend, but they'd pretty much fallen out and the other one had gone home. I thought she was very brave but she said it had been fine. We came back to the hostel to discover that one of the other beds in the dorm was now home to a lady who on our first day, I'd seen hacking the zip off an empty suitcase with a Stanley knife and a glint in her eye. It's all good though! This is the character building stuff, isn't it?!

We survived the night and set off this morning south on the 405 Freeway to San Diego. A Swedish girl we'd met had recommended a place called the Banana Bungalow which is on the beach so I'd booked 3 nights in advance over the phone. Almost immediately the atmosphere in San Diego felt different from Santa Monica. It's much more laidback and 'surfy'. The hostel from the outside looked like some sort of beach shack...which is pretty much what it was. We rang the bell and waited for the (what looked like an armoured) gate to be opened, which it eventually was. The hostel was the polar opposite of where we'd come from, but we didn't think that was necessarily a bad thing. We paid our $75 dollars each for the next 3 nights and listened to the various rules and regulations and were then shown to our dorm which was about 6 foot away from the front gate. There were no lockers, no bedding and no reasons you'd want to stay there any longer than absolutely necessary. We stood for a moment, used the bathroom (unpleasant in itself) which had a sign on the door with another list of rules, including: "No smoking on the property. You should take your Bob Marley stuff to the beach." I mean, I know I'm not into all that stuff, but I'm not a prude either, but that mixed with the little to no security and the fact that we were sharing the 'dorm' with a couple of male 17 year old potheads didn't really do it for me. We wandered out for a crisis meeting, grabbed the trusty Rough Guide and drove into the city centre and booked into a different hostel. We went back to the other place to see if we could get any money back and to pick up the bits and pieces we'd left there so no one nicked our beds, but while we were standing at reception waiting for someone to appear we saw a large angry sign telling us in no uncertain terms that no refunds are ever given. So frankly, this must happen to them regularly. So now we're staying in the Gaslamp Quarter in San Diego...about 100 quid worse off, but feeling considerably happier. I'll update you...x