spead-outed-ness? someone told us that the population of LA county is 28 million – 18 million legals and 10 million illegals…. vs 21 million for all of oztraylia…

So far we’re having a blast.

The flight over was…. long. It wasnt too bad, except for the people in the row in front of us who insisted on putting their seats all the way back so that they were nearly sitting in our row. The food on the flight was ok, jackson had a couple of decent sized sleeps, was disappointed to wake the first time and find out we werent in disney land yet, the on demand tv that QANTAS has worked most of the flight. Chris got to watch Blades of Glory and a rugby league movie with Andrew Johns as the main actor (I didnt mind it!) & Kylie watched Knocked up (didnt get a good review) and Blades of Glory and Jackson watched the cartoons and the flight path channel (ok, cc watched it too! (“are we there yet? are we there yet? are we there ye?”).

We arrived at 730am Saturday and had pre-booked our room so we could check in to the room straight away, which was great. The hotel we’re staying at is very nice. It’s in a great spot and it’s a very big apartment (photo’s to come).

Santa Monica is very pretty – I highly recommend staying here when in LA. The pier, the third street promenade, the palisades park (which overlooks the pacific ocean) and some of the other treelined (both palm and others) streets here are all very nice. LA wasnt a city I was looking forward to staying in, but i’ve had a great time.

The weather… the weather is great – it’s pretty similar to what it is in Brisbane during the day, and it gets cooler at night.

We went to Universal Studios on Sunday, which was an enoyable day out!

Public transport here in LA sucks (even more than my usual perception of the usefulness of public transport) and the city is so spread out – so, we got a taxi car service to take us out to the park. The traffic is shocking too – i blame the bad public transport facilities Our driver (Allan) was a real interesting guy who covered many topics, surely the most interesting was how he just wanted to meet a nice girl to marry and settle down with, you know – someone to do his washing, cook his dinner and clean his house…. and NOT be like his current girlfriend who promised she could do all those things, but was just like all other LA girls who have no interest in those things and just want to spend his money… oookay. don’t worry oz girls, I told him there were plenty of aussie girls who were looking for men like him!

At Universal Studios Jackson got to meet Dora the Explorer, Diego and Spongebob Squarepants! There’s some great photo’s of this coming to the slideshow. We enjoyed the backlot tour, which was a tram car ride around the stages of the Studios and includes some of things you most often see about Universal Studios, including Jaws the Shark jumping up at the tram, famous film locations, the airplane crash scene from War of the Worlds, the tanker truck on fire in the subway which floods and the crashing helicopter. Jackson managed this ride pretty well until the “mummy” section where Whoopi Goldberg gets covered in cockroaches – he hated this and it freaked him right out… We saw the “WaterWorld” show which was very entertaining – it was incredibly noisy – Jackson didnt like the loud noise and would cover his ears up and turn away, but he was very interested in what was going on and would keep turning around to watch, but the noise would then scare him and he’d turn away… and so on and so on

We’ve all enjoyed the shopping here. Kylie has warmed up for her NYC efforts, by practicing her attack plan on some of LA’s finest, including the third street promenade, montana avenue and the beverley center. The beverley center was a bit disappointing – but the drive there took us through Beverley Hills & Bel Air (yo yo fresh prince), past UCLA (HUGE campus) and a few other spots of note.

Kylie’s favourite shop here has been either Zara, where she bought lots of great stuff for her and Jackson OR the Banana Republic where she bought more great stuff. Chris’ favourite was Victoria’s Secret… or The Gap

We’ve enjoyed walking around and checking things out. Yes – we’ve been walking…

The palisades park is very pretty. It’s right along the front of Santa Monica on the ocean and has a few walking paths and has a lot of palms trees and it leads you to the pier. The pier is a good spot to spend an hour or so, Jackson loved the carousel here!

Chris’ work meetings were great – it was nice to see the TQ offices and sit down with JD and have a chat, the meeting with Disney went well.

tomorrow we check out of LA and fly to New York…. LA has been fun, my opinion of the city has definately changed.

photos to come soon – just click the big picture link on the right hand side soon (by soon I mean – after we put Jackson to bed and if I am not asleep by then)

bye for now, cc, kc and jacko…