LA day two

Hey there all,
Wanted to fill you in on all the info from my first full day in Los Angeles.

Got up in the morning (somewhat late, after the late arrival the night before), and hopped on a bus. It's not until you start travelling around this city that you realise just how massive it is - when you can take a bus for an hour and only be a fraction of the way across the city, that ought to give you some indication. Bus service is reasonable here, as far as buses go - they're frequent, cheap (5 bucks for an all day pass, which also works on the subway), and clean, which is all you can ask of public transport.

Ended up at UCLA (it's amazing how, no matter how different a city is, Universities always have a certain feel to them). In fact, I was there for the Hmmer Gallery of art - I'd recently read a review by the New York Times, and figured hey, as long as I was in town, I might as well pay a visit. In the end, I spent a couple hours down there, at the very interesting exhibit and in the uber-bookshop there (it has a whole section on architecture, including such gems as 'The Architecture of Parking', and another one called 'On Weathering'. So pretty much a whole bunch of awesome books which would be of greatest interest to absolutely everyone :P :P

After the Hammer Gallery, I hopped on a series of buses and (eventually) got to Santa Monica (like I said, it's a freaking huge city). The pier at Santa Monica has a Funfair on the end, plus it gives you and awesome view all the way back down the coast (there's a continuous, wide beach along the Los Angeles/Pacific shore for miles and miles) and north, up the coast towards Malibu and the mountains.

Coming home from Santa Monica again took an age (especially in the tail end of rush hour), and included a stop at the quality fast-food joint In-N-Out Burgers (est. 1948, best burgers on the West Coast, apparently) (Note for my Mum: I swear I'm not eating fast-food at every meal - breakfast and lunch yesterday were both healthy).

Eventually I got back to the hostel, and ruined the whole day... long story short, I went down to get some stuff for breakfast, dropped my wallet somewhere, then spent a panicked couple of hours before finding out that someone had picked it up and reported it to the card company. Thank God. Gotta get in contact with the dude and collect it today, which is a great relief.

Anyway. that's about all I got for today - one last note though - I'm currently experiment about how I'm gonna deal with photos over here, so as a test, I've uploaded all of the photos from yesterday to Flickr - here's the link in case you're interested in having a flick through.

Well, seey'all later, hope all is well on the other side of the Pacific.

Jono