Beverly Hills, Santa Monica, Venice (CA)

We had a quick breakfast in Anaheim before starting our packed day of sightseeing. Today was Beverly Hills and Venice Beach!
It took us about an hour to get to Beverly Hills. The distance is about 40 miles, but we still only saw a fraction of Los Angeles. The city (or cities) is so huge! An hour or even an hour and a half is not uncommon for a daily commute here.
After parking the car at the library, we walked past the Beverly Hills Police Station. A place I remember very well from my childhood, when I used to watch the Beverly Hills Cop movies every other weekend I spent at my grandma's house. Axel Foley rules.
Beverly Hills looks like the movies. Very clean, very rich people, very expensive cars and lots of palm trees. The weather was gorgeous, blue skies. Our first stop was a designer sample sale, where you can buy prototypes (or samples) of clothes that might go into production and then probably cost a small fortune, if you can get into the store at all. These are usually guarded by friendly bouncers who make sure that the people who want to buy the stuff do not disturb the people who can buy the stuff. Birte and Amelia tried on a few dresses but didn't buy anything. We did, however, take a picture of Birte with a pink poodle, the dog of...maybe the designer?
We spent the next hour window-shopping, watching other people and fancy cars, always waiting for someone famous to come out of one of the shops.
At some point we walked back to the Library, drank a coffee and started a little criss-cross drive through the wealthy, but still accessible neighborhoods. I joked around and said, we should find an Open House, where real estate agents show you around. A minute after I said that, we passed by a real estate agent's sign for an open house! Now we had to do it. It was a big house, but to be honest, not very beautiful. Neither from the outside nor from the inside. It had a weird mirror cabinet in the first floor and more bathrooms than a hotel, it seemed. That is something very American anyway. It was not for sale, but for rent. 15000 dollars a month.
The next stop of the day was Venice. The famous city on the beach. The place Arnold Schwarzenegger had in mind when he left Europe and started his amazing career in the USA.
We parked the car and walked along the seafront. Not a minute went by without seeing something. There were so many strange things and people. Everyone was just being themselves. People were running around half naked, riding weird electric monocycles, chilling in their pimped out cars, and selling weed and magic mushrooms on every corner. As usual, I took way too many pictures. We bought ice cream and went to a big skateboard pool where we watched the pros and wannabes for a while. Then we went to Muscle Beach, a place where you'll find lots of outdoor exercise and bodybuilding equipment and lots of people who are strong and want to show it!
It was getting dark and we still wanted to see the Santa Monica Peer, which was a little further north than we had parked. Since the walk had taken us quite a while, we decided to rent bicycles, which was really fun!
Santa Monica Peer is mostly an amusement park. In Las Cruces, New Mexico, when we got the oil changed on our van, the cashier told us to go to this place. It was the only tip he gave us for the rest of the trip. We were skeptical. Now that we had reached the Peer, which by the way is the end of Route 66, we felt confirmed in our original assessment. It was loud, colorful, expensive, and way too crowded. At the end of the Peer we read an information board describing a man who worked here more than a hundred years ago. He was the model for a cartoonist who came here once and was enchanted by the man's charisma. He created a cartoon character of him that would become famous as Popeye the Sailor!En savoir plus