While a lot of my time in Los Angeles was spent hanging out with my new friends, there were a few times when I had to play the tourist card and actively make an attempt to see some of the typical or cliché LA sights. One afternoon when Jake was busy with work, I met up with a guy who I had chatted to on Couchsurfing just before my arrival in LA. This was before I had met Jake, who had assured me that he had no problems with me staying with him for the entire duration of my time in the city, but when I explained to David that I was no longer seeking a place to say, I told him that I was still keen to hang out and meet new people while seeing the city. And so that’s how David ended picking me up with his boyfriend Danny (who ended up knowing Jake because he played dodgeball – he knew everyone!), and we went for a drive from West Hollywood down to Santa Monica Pier.

Traffic was pretty terrible, and since most of the commuting I’d been doing around LA was between WeHo and the neighbouring suburbs, it was really my first experience of the notorious LA traffic. But we eventually made it to Santa Monica and found a park, and Danny and David took me to one of their favourite bars in the area that did cheap and strong margaritas. I had a couple before we wandered further down to the pier itself.

When I was told we were going to Santa Monica Pier, I didn’t know exactly what to expect. A rickety old wooden platform over the ocean with a couple of old dudes fishing on it, perhaps? I couldn’t have been more wrong: similar to Pier 39 in San Francisco, Santa Monica Pier was almost a small theme park in its own right, with carnival rides, shops, restaurants and food stands. It looked like a partial tourist trap, but it also looked like the place some of the bored teenagers on The OC used to hang out, like an outdoor mall with a Ferris wheel.

We wandered down to the edge of the pier, and while it was fun to check it out and take a few pictures, I wasn’t particularly interested in any of the rides or games or shops. If I’m totally honest, the thing that probably excited me the most about being at Santa Monica Pier was seeing the sunset over the ocean. As a dweller of the east coast in my own country, a sunset over the ocean was something that was actually impossible for me to witness, and I was never one to get up early enough to watch an ocean sunrise. I suppose Hollywood being on the west coast of the US has probably played a part in the way the idea of ocean sunsets have been romanticised into popular culture, but regardless, it was still nice to watch the big burning ball of gas sink below the watery horizon.

***

“Are you going to any TV show tapings? Be a part of a live studio audience?” A few people had asked me these questions in my first few days of being in LA.
“Um… I… I don’t… is that… is that something people do?” I hadn’t made that many plans at all, but going to watch a TV show being filmed hadn’t even popped up on  my radar. There weren’t any TV shows with live studio audiences that I could think of that I’d really want to watch, or at least not enough to pay for it. Maybe something like being in the audience for Ellen DeGeneres’ show, but even my experiences with The Katie Show in New York had showed me that those tapings were lengthy ordeals (although I won a computer for my efforts, so I’m not really complaining).

Enter Jake and his endless connections to people all over the city.
“Hey, Warren works at the CBS Studio Center! Perhaps I could see if he could get you into a studio audience?” So he made the call where Warren confirmed that he could, and I figured that I might as well go along and do something typically Hollywood, especially if it was free anyway. Jake drove me out to the studio and dropped me off, but not before running through the complex and helping me take a few photos of things that caught my eye. I couldn’t go past the memorial plaque of Will & Grace, and I also stopped for a picture on the outdoor set of New York City, a strip of street that was done up to look like the east coast city, which had provided the filming set for a number of shows that had been set in New York City, like Seinfeld.

 

Afterwards, I headed to the studio where I was going to sit in on the live studio audience of the Melissa & Joey show, a sitcom that I had never previously heard of. I was excited, however, when I realised that the Melissa from the show title was none other than Melissa Joan Heart, the one and only Sabrina, the teenage witch. I’d loved that show as a kid, and while Melissa was definitely not a teenager anymore (she’s a mother of two, actually), she was still a decent comedic actress. It was also kind of interesting to be a part of the audience while the show itself was being filmed. They did each scene at least twice, even if they nailed them, just to make sure they had enough good takes during editing and producing, which meant that the filming of a 20 minute episode turned into at least a couple of hours. It was a light-hearted sitcom though, and I enjoyed watching it – if you ever find yourself watching an episode where there’s a distinct snort of laughter coming from the studio audience, you’re welcome. Warren worked on the production side of things, so I didn’t see him again until the filming was over. He came and found me once everything had wrapped up, and while I didn’t get to meet any of the actors on the show, he was able to give me a an autographed photograph of the cast. Free experiences with free souvenirs – doesn’t get much better than that. When he finished work, Warren drove me to dodgeball, where I was reunited with Jake.

***

My only other brush with anything related to TV was actually one of my biggest highlights in LA, at least as far as touristy sightseeing goes.
“Well, there is one thing that I’d really like to see,” I confessed to Jake one afternoon, when we were brainstorming about things to do. I explained to him how I was a huge fan of the TV show Charmed, and how I had been shocked to learn that the house itself was not located in San Francisco.
“Oh yeah! It’s here in LA, I think. There’s a bunch of streets over in Echo Park that are just filled with famous houses from movies and TV shows. We can totally take a drive out there.” So that’s what we did, and I finally got my photo with the Victorian style magical manor.

 

***

Now, there’s probably one glaringly obvious tourist attraction in Los Angeles that I haven’t mentioned yet. But the truth is, I never really had any intention of going to Disneyland. As a child, I’d been to Disney World over in Florida, and it had been awesome, but I’d also been 9 years old. Not that I wouldn’t have had fun in Disneyland as an adult, but being on the backpacker budget that I was, it wasn’t a priority. I also learned just how enormous and spread out LA actually is when I tied to locate Anaheim on a map, and realised that it was at least an hours drive to get out there. Coupled with my lack of burning desire to go there, I had written it out of my plans. Until I remembered someone I knew who actually lived in Anaheim.

The Trans-Siberian Railway felt like almost a lifetime ago, but the friends I had made on that once-in-a-lifetime journey were still fresh in my memories and blog posts. During our emotional goodbyes in St Petersburg, I told Kaylah that I was definitely going to be in LA at the end of the year, since I already had my final flight booked out of LAX. So we made a promise that we would catch up when I was there, but it was only when I got to LA that I realised just how large the city actually was. West Hollywood and Anaheim felt like worlds away, and while I wanted to see Kaylah, I didn’t want to make her drive across the city on her day off, just to hang out in WeHo, where I’d been spending most of my time anyway. Though as fate would have it, when I mentioned it to him, Jake informed me that he actually had a reason to drive out to east LA.
“My dad actually lives out that way, and he’s got a whole bunch of furniture and other stuff that I need to pick up!” he told me. “So, if you wanna go meet her out that way, I could drive you somewhere and then go see my dad while you two hang out?” As things had seemed to be happening lately, everything turned out pretty perfectly.

We met up with Kaylah, and set a rough meeting time for later in the afternoon. I was so excited to see Kaylah again – she’d been one of my favourite people on the Trans-Siberian tour, and we’d always had ridiculous amounts of fun together. Kaylah was a correctional officer in a juvenile detention centre, and before we’d met up she told me that Knot’s Berry Farm, a rollercoaster theme park over near where she lived, was doing a free entry promotion for all law enforcement personal, a category in which she was included. Free entry was also extended to a second person, so we agreed that that would be a fun way to hang out and catch up, interspersed by some rollercoaster rides.

It wasn’t until we actually got there, though, that Kaylah admitted she wasn’t even a huge fan of rollercoasters. I started to feel bad, but she assured me that she still wanted me to go on them if I wanted to. It hadn’t been that long since I went on a bunch of rollercoasters at the Six Flags in New Jersey, but I do love them, so Kaylah took photos of me while I screamed my lungs out on the various rides. We also rode dodge ’em cars together, which was a bit of a throwback to the time Kaylah and I had rode quad bikes through the Siberian wilderness, and I had been sure that I was going to end up flipping ours and crushing us. Luckily there was slightly less chance of doing that in an LA theme park.

After a few hours at Knot’s Berry Farm, we left to grab a bite to eat at the nearby TGI Fridays. We also ordered some ciders, and it was there that I experienced for the second time what had happened to me in that little bar in Flagstaff – the waitstaff would not accept my drivers licence as a valid form of ID, saying that it needed to be federally issued. Most Americans aren’t even aware of the fact Australia actually has states, so it is pretty infuriating that they can be such sticklers about little things like that. What’s worse is that I had been using my drivers licence in every other place in California, so I knew it wasn’t actually a legal thing like it had been in Arizona.
“Look, this is my ID, I’m clearly over 21!” I tried bargaining with him.
“I’ve never seen an Australian drivers licence before though,” the guy said with a laugh, clearly nervous but trying to deflect my clearly mounting irritation. “It could be a fake.” I put the licence in my mouth and bit down on it, tugging at the plastic.
“It’s very real! And what, you know exactly what an Australian passport looks like? Do you want me to Google a New South Wales drivers licence? It’s real!”
I even sent the dude back to check with his manager, who also regretfully informed me they were unable to serve me.
“Whatever,” I said and just rolled my eyes. I mean, I didn’t need to have a drink or anything, but it was more just the principle of being refused that annoyed me.

After all that, Kaylah and I wandered down to the nearby Disneyland. There was a whole street of shops and smaller things to look at before actually entering the gates into Disneyland proper, so we just walked down that, taking photos and dodging toddlers and families and mothers with prams as they made their way to the happiest place on Earth.

I mainly just had fun hanging out with Kaylah, telling her all about what I’d been up to since we’d parted ways in Russia, and reminiscing about all the fun we’d had all those months ago. Eventually it was time for Jake and I to head back to WeHo, so Kaylah and I drove to meet him and then said our goodbyes once again. Though the fact that it was our second goodbye, and that we’d met each other again on a completely opposite side of the world so many months later, proved that in a world as small as ours, for travellers like us, goodbyes were only ever temporary.

***

The day spent out in Anaheim with Kaylah was actually my last full day in LA, and that evening would be my last night before I flew out the following morning. Jake was feeling a little glum about it, considering how I’d been living with him for over a week now, and we’d been having so much fun. Yet even to the last moment, he was still thinking of cool and interesting things we could do in LA. “Something you wouldn’t know about if you weren’t from around here. I want you to leave saying just how awesome a time you had in LA.”

There’s a place up on the hills of Hollywood Heights called the Magic Castle. It’s the clubhouse of a private organisation that promotes and supports the art of magic and magicians. You have to either be a member or be signed in as a guest by a member, and of course Jake knew – through dodgeball – a member who was a magician. The dress code of the Magic Castle was formal evening wear, so I had to borrow a shirt and tie from Jake, and on my last night we made our way up to the Castle, where we were greeted by Jake’s friend Jeb. The castle itself is technically more of a Victorian mansion, and stepping inside felt like you were stepping back in time itself, with the polished wood furnishings, luxurious deep red carpets and dapper gentlemen and elegantly dressed woman gliding through the hallways. Jeb gave us a tour of many of the castles quirky and interesting rooms. I’m not supposed to give away too much, but there was a piano that plays by itself (or is played by  ghost, depending on who you ask), and can even take requests (I requested Pokerface).

There was also a table in a more open area where magicians could set up and perform card tricks and other small magical shows. Jake and I sat around the table while Jeb performed one, and I wish there was more I could say to explain what he did but then if I knew I would probably be a magician… and then I definitely wouldn’t tell you. There were also a few other shows that you could attend while visiting the Magic Castle, and Jake and I got almost front row seats to a show with a mentalist. Now, I have to admit this show actually scared me a little bit. I don’t want to give away too much, but the general idea was that he could supposedly see our thoughts or read our minds. It seemed like more of a psychic than anything to do with performance magic or magicians, but I was curious. He asked for three volunteers: someone who was good with drawing, someone who was good with numbers, and someone who was good with words. I enthusiastically volunteered to the be wordsmith. After watching the mentalist successfully sketch a drawing that the first woman had secretly drawn, without ever seeing it, and know the number that another woman was thinking of, which she had picked from the top of her head and hadn’t told him, it was my turn. Out in the front of the theatre room with him, he asked me to imagine I was in a library. I was to go over to one of the shelves and pull out a book. I had a bit of a brain freeze, and for a few seconds the only book that came to mind was the Bible. But then, for some reason, I’m not sure why, The Jungle Book came to mind, and so my word that the mentalist would have to correctly identify was ‘jungle’.

He asked a handful of questions, all which had seemingly nothing at all to do with The Jungle Book or the word ‘jungle’. I was so confused. Yet when he claimed that he had it, sure enough he scribbled on a big sheet of paper and produced the word ‘jungle’ in big, black block letters. I was actually stunned. I’m not exactly a skeptic when it comes to psychics or magic, but this seemed way above the pay grade of a normal magician. I was dying to know how he knew, short of believing he was actually a psychic, but of course a good magician never revealed his secrets, and I left the Magic Castle with a burning curiosity, as well as a reluctant resignation to the fact that I would probably never find out how he’d gotten inside my head.

“So. Last night in LA. Anything else you really wanna do?” Jake said to me as we climbed into the car after the show was over. We locked eyes for a moment.
“Are you thinking what I’m thinking?” I said with I grin.
“I don’t know… I might be…?”
“Taco Bell?”
“Let’s do it!”

***

And so after having such an amazing time in LA, having more fun than I ever thought I would and meeting such a cool bunch of people, it was time for me to get travelling again. It was something that you think I would be used to by now, and while I can admit that it does get a littler easier, it’s never exactly easy. I’d travelled all around the world, and fallen in love with a handful of places, and LA was definitely high on the list of places that had actually started to feel like home. Combined with the fact that endless travel had eventually started to wear me down, I was almost reluctant to leave.

“You’re gonna have such a great time in Hawaii,” Jake said to me as he drove me through the mid-morning traffic to the airport. “I mean, I’m gonna miss you like Hell, but I’m also excited for you,” he said with a smile. I was pretty quiet. I guess saying too much during goodbyes always made them a little harder. Eventually we arrived at the airport, and Jake hopped out to help me get my bag out of the car. Then we had our final hugs and kisses, and I told him that I would definitely be back one day. How could I not? Jake had done so much for me during my stay in LA, literally driving me across the city to see things and meet people, introducing me to all of his friends, rescuing me from creepy guys and giving me a place to stay for the entire time too. He’d gone so out of his way to make sure I’d done and seen things that would make me remember my time in LA as something amazing, but in reality it had just been him being himself that had made it so awesome, and that was the reason I knew I’d one day come back.

He was parked in the cab drop-off point though, so we couldn’t draw the farewell out too long. So we said our goodbyes, I waved as he took off down the road and out of sight, and then I headed to the terminal to catch the flight to my final destination.