USA Part 1: Los Angeles

So I'm now on the other side of the country, on the East Coast, in Orlando, Florida! It's not much of a "sunshine state" at present. More of a """"""""""""sunshine""""""""""""" state if "ya nom tom b0ut". Okay. I'll stop with the failed slang. I probably don't own the right to be typing in Americanisms yet.

One day. One day.

Anyway, after about a week, I'm happy to be.. I don't even remember what I was saying. I tend to get caught up whenever I'm blogging. Ignore that. Now, the only places I really visited in LA were Chinatown, Downtown LA and Little Tokyo - Chinatown because that's where I was staying, and Little Tokyo because.. well, it's Little Tokyo. 'Nuff said. Oh yeah, we also visited Olvero Street, which was pretty awesome.

The old Chinatown is an almost-ghost town. Words of advice? If you don't believe me, go there and I guarantee you'll be out of there in less than an hour. Apparently there's a new Chinatown in Alhambra, but we didn't go there. Time was too tight, but we have another 3 days in LA on the way back while we're staying in Hollywood.

The old Chinatown is really.. isolated. Shops aren't very busy to begin with, and everything shuts at about 5pm. Total culture shock. The other things I wasn't so used to:

• Exclusion of tax with prices
• Tipping people (you get used to it really quickly..)
• J-walking is totally illegal and no one does it and police actually care about j-walking
• Driving on the right side of the road (well this is the same in Korea but still)
• Drivers sitting on the left side of the car

Ahh well. It just takes time, I guess. Anyway, have some photos of Chinatown.

Oh. Another thing. Check-in times in America are weird. On average, it's about 3pm. Totally unexpected because we landed in LA at like 10 so we had 4 hours of doing nothing. With 40 hours without sleep, it was so painful. I felt like I was the entire walking dead. I slept extremely well. I fell asleep at about midnight and then didn't wake up until.. 4pm. I was still jetlagged though. Oh man, even now, my sleeping pattern still isn't regulated. It sucks. The next day I didn't do anything for obvious reasons - things start closing at 5 and I only woke up at 4 so that was pretty much ruled out.

The next day though, we visited Downtown LA. Totally dead. I guess we didn't go to the shopping/fashion district which is apparently more lively, but all in all, relatively dead. It's a lovely place and has lots of buildings, but.. there are more buildings than people. Literally.

Little Tokyo is the opposite. Well, for LA it's pretty alive. It's so cute! But then again I'm totally in love with Japan and anything Japanese, really.

We had lunch at Mr Pizza. Alice posted a photo when she was in Korea and I saw several branches of it when I was there too, so I was pretty curious about it. Turns out they were right. It was amazing! So good. Like, totally puts Australian pizza franchises to shame. It's not that oily and they use really good ingredients. On the way out from Little Tokyo, I found a Yoghurtland and had to have some. Frozen yoghurt is the reason I exist. Seriously.

Mango yoghurt with strawberry boba, mochi, strawberries, gummy bears and gummy worms. :-)

Olvero Street is amazing also. It's a whole other culture. By now, you'd probably realise that there's a huge Mexican population in California and the US in general. San Jose, Santa Monica, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Santa Fe.. (just to name a few) give a big clue here. There were lots of little market stores and food and the atmosphere was wonderful. I bought a little skull thing in a unicorn suit. It's awesome. Mum wasn't happy because I didn't bargain, but hey, it's adorable and it's mine. That's all that's important, right?

Will post when I get more time! Lots of love. <3