Venice Beach, L.A. Downtown, Beverly Hills, Bel Air and Malibu

Dear friends, the last weekend we planned to stay in the region and to visit L.A. and its surrounding. On Saturday I met Kristina and we decided to do a beach day. Our target was the famous venice beach. It took us some time to go there, because there was a lot of traffic and once there we had to find a parking spot. This wouldn’t be so complicated if only they would accept credit cards, but they didn’t and since we now are used to pay everywhere with plastic, we didn’t have enough paper. So we first had to find an ATM and then we could buy our entry to the parking lot. Once there we took our cameras and started to walk around on the beach, but in the beginning we walked in the wrong direction. So we still had the beach, but we didn’t see a lot of the stuff famous for venice. But still it was nice to get some lovely beach pictures.

We then decided to turn around and to walk back and then to go in the other direction. After we passed the parking lot, first there was a passage where we passed a lot of the beach houses. It was amazing to see them and most of them were very special and some seemed that somebody realized his dream from childhood. So there was one that looked like a giant tree house. And there were others looking like jungle houses etc. Once we passed this passage, we came to the most famous part of venice beach, the gym directly on the beach, the tennis and basketball courts, the skateboard park etc. We passed all this on the beach walk and on the right side there were all the little shops, bars and bistros from venice. We decided to walk further on the beach walk to get an impression of the rest of the promenade of venice. It was amazing to see what you all could get there. It started with simple fruits, water and drinks, some snacks and foods to T-shirts and souvenirs up to medical descriptions of marihuana. Yes, this is true; we crossed probably about three to four places, where they advertised the doctoral prescription of weed. By now, in the state of California it is forbidden to smoke weed, but if you get a receipt from your doctor it becomes legal. They assume that soon it will be legalized, but for the moment they are in this grey zone. So they have different cabinets, which are “specialized” to prescribe weed ;) We didn’t try to find out how hard it would be to get one of these documents, but I doubt that you would walk out of these cabinets without your receipt. There was even one cabinet, advertising for weed and botox. For the second one they had a slogan like botox on the beach! I think it is the best if you will rest just after a botox treatment on the beach with all the sand and the sun! ;) But in terms of advertising it is amazing what you see around here, if you drive along the highways you see all these ads for lap-bands and one of my first impressions of California was when I took the shuttle from LAX down to Irvine and there was a huge poster advertising faked tits for $2999 ;)

We walked further on until the end of the promenade and then we turned around and decided to go for a drink and something to eat in one of the many bistros and wait there until sunset. It was amazing to sit there and observe all the people passing by. Once we finished with dinner we were surprised, then other than normal they didn’t directly bring the bill, but they asked us if we’d like some more drinks etc. Typically once you finished with your dish, here they come and take your plate even if the others still have some food on theirs. And once they took the last plate, they directly bring the bill. But here it was different and so we had to ask for the bill. Then we walked towards the beach and waited until sunset to take some amazing pictures. Once the sun was down we walked back in direction of the car and then we drove back towards Irivne.

The next day we wanted to explore some more L.A. and its surrounding. After we got up, we decided to go to Starbucks to have some breakfast. Then we put the coordinates of the L.A. union station into our GPS, started the motor, released the brakes and made us on the way up to L.A. Once we were there we parked in front of the union station. So we started by exploring L.A. main station, that is supposed to be one of the most beautiful stations over America, built in 1939 in a Spanish style. From there we decided to take the metro to go up some blocks and after two stops we left the wagon and started to walk around in the city. First we went to the Westin Bonaventure Hotel. This is not only a hotel, but there is a complete shopping mall in the basement of this hotel. In the center of the hotel there is a nice bar and some restaurants. The lower floors were all kind of open, so that there was a kind of a big entry hall with all these galleries and passing ways. On one of the floors there were small balconies with sofas and on another one there were some training equipment and there was a track to do some jogging on this floor. We then took the elevators to go a little bit up to get a good view over downtown L.A. the nice thing about these elevators is that they are on the outside of the building and they are made out of glass, so that you can enjoy the panorama out of the elevator. We also changed the elevators, so that we could get the view of the different sides of the hotel.

Once we had all of the different views we left the building and walked in direction of the Walt Disney Concert hall. It was about a 10 minutes’ walk until we saw the shiny roof and the tip of the hall. We had a nice day and the building is pretty amazing. It is hard to describe it, so best is to post here some pictures and then you can have a look at the rest that are on my Picasa page. The building gives a nice background for pictures and so besides us there were a lot of other people with cameras using the location as coulisse. Once we had enough pictures we started to walk back to the union station. It took us some time, but it was also a good possibility to see some more buildings and places of interest in Los Angeles. Once back in the car we decided first to drive by Mulholland drive, which offers some nice places with a great view over Los Angeles and from there you also see the Hollywood sign. It’s not the best place for the second one, but at least we could take some pictures. From Mulholland drive we drove then down to Hollywood and went onto the sunset boulevard. This leaded us through Beverly Hills, Bel Air to the Pacific. It was nice to drive through all this big Villas, but in the end most times you only see some gate entrances and the hedge of the properties. Once we were on the Pacific coast we went onto the pacific coast highway, facing towards Malibu. It took us some time to get up there and once you’re there it’s not so spectacular, because you only see the street side of the houses and most part of the beaches are private, so you have no chance to get there. We still found a public beach, where we walked a bit around and waited for the sunset, but right now it isn’t this good for taking sunset pictures, because the sunset is behind the beach in the mountains. We spent some time on the beach and decided afterwards to travel back to Irivne, after all Kristina had to catch the train to San Diego.