Catch up Part I: What? I eat carrots!
I know, it’s been about a million years. We’re sorry. But we’ve gone to loads of major cities lately, and there is just not much time left for journaling. We’ve been out having way too much fun, then falling into bed the moment we get back “home,” wherever that is for the night. But I’m going to do my best to go back to where we left off and fill in all the blanks. And it’s going to be so long that I’m posting in installments. Let’s start with SoCal…
I believe we left off at Mission Viejo. As you all know from Jaz and Jon, we got ditched in Vegas after I won a lot of awesome money (which I’m still pretty psyched on), so we had to give an emergency call to Moira for our early Cali appearance. I felt so bad that it was such short notice, but she was amazing about it and told us to come on over. It was really awesome to see her and her family since it had been about 7 years since the last time I saw them, and they couldn’t have been better to us. We had nice beds, good food, a pool to swim in, and loads of help planning our way around the gigantic state of California. We also got to go to Laguna Beach, which was awesome so we could totally see what a bitch Kristen is, and how LC is so much better and stuff. While we were there we also figured out our Los Angeles couchsurfing situation, and after two good nights in Mission Viejo, we headed out.
The guy who ended up helping us out in LA was Scott from couchsurfing. We talked to him on the phone a lot, and he was really helpful in telling us how to get there and where to go and whatnot. He explained he would be really busy while we were there, but we could stay, and the first night we could meet up with him to hike up to the Hollywood sign. We left The O.C. early in the morning to get to LA by noon, which actually turned into 1pm thanks to really sweet LA traffic, and then we parked in a very expensive lot so we could walk around Hollywood a bit. We basically just did the touristy thing and walked down the Walk of Fame to Mann’s Chinese Theatre, or “Hands in the Pavement” as Jasmine likes to call it, and hung out with some pretty awesome street performers that made up raps with our names in them. Then we decided we should do a tour of the stars’ homes because doesn’t that just sound like the most awesome thing ever? We found a guy who gave us a good deal and would take us around in a limo, so we went with that one and hopped aboard with some foreigners. It was pretty cool and it was obvious from early on that we were going to have fun with this tour guide. He got super psyched when we started asking him for obscure people’s houses, and especially when I asked about Jason Schwartzman’s house. Then he mentioned Elliott Smith, and we were like “Where did he live?!” and the guide got even more happy. He started pointing out places like Bud from Married…With Children’s house, Sylvester Stalone’s mom-who-reads-butts’ house, Cher’s mom’s house, and the Fresh Prince house which is actually occupied by Bob Newhart. We went all over Sunset, Beverly Hills, the Hollywood Hills, and Bel Air with this tour, and we also stopped at Rodeo where we got out for a minute and walked around with a lot of people who could have been famous since everyone looked like it. At the very last minute we also saw a celebrity - Rachel Leigh Cook of She’s All That fame drove right past us. If only it had been Vince Vaughn…but she’ll do. So the tour soon came to an end, and we had to get back to our car by 6pm. We were cutting it really close, so the tour guide told us he’d drop off the foreigners (who had pretty much no idea what was going on the whole time and just kept taking pictures of everything we saw), and then he would drive us to our car since we were his last tour of the night. On the way back to Vine we asked him if he was on Myspace, and he totally is, so we interviewed him right then and there through the rear view mirror. He then admitted to us that we were the coolest people to ever take his tour, and that he actually called his friend when he dropped us off on Rodeo all excited to tell him he had people on his tour that wanted to see Elliott Smith’s house. He signed a release form that told us his name was Brian, and he also told us about some places we should try to hit up while in the city. We then gave him our phone number and names in case he wanted to hang out, and parted ways.
We went to an awesome vegan restaurant called Truly Vegan, which was awesome, then we met up with Scott for the Hollywood sign hike. It took us a minute of getting lost in the Hollywood Hills, trying my best not to hit a Bentley, before we got to the trail. We met Scott, then started hiking. We got to the top of the mountain right at sunset, and it was really awesome to see the city that way. We actually stood right behind the Hollywood sign, right up next to the radiation towers, so that was awesome. And Scott pointed out all kinds of crazy things to us down at the bottom, such as the Holiday Inn with neon green lights that they used in Donnie Darko. Once it got pretty dark we decided it would be a good idea to head back down, and we went back to Scott’s to set up camp. We sat around and talked to him about our experiences for awhile, and just about life in general, then finally thought it would be a good idea to go to sleep about 1am.
The next morning Scott went to work and the three of us began a trek to the Watts Towers. It isn’t just a clever name, as they do stand directly in the middle of the ghetto of Watts. We only got turned around once getting there, and found it right next to an awesome white trash family that had the tv turned up all the way blasting Nickelodeon. Technically you’re supposed to pay $7 to go inside the gates and take some sort of tour of the towers, but they were easy to see from the outside and it was too hot to hang out there for too long of a time. Plus $7 is a lot to tour a 100 foot or so area. Basically what they are, though, are these three towers that this guy Simon Rodia decided to build because he wanted to do something big and be famous. He quit drinking and focused all of his attention on building these towers with all of his free time. And as you probably saw from our photos, they’re pretty awesome. When Watts had their infamous riots, everything in the area was destroyed except for these towers, so they’re pretty powerful. Really cool to look at, too. Once we were done there, we thought it’d be fun to find this huge pig mural that wasn’t too far away. Big mistake. Instead of finding a mural we ended up driving around the entire Los Angeles ghetto of Watts, Compton, and South Central. I mean, we weren’t menaces while drinking our juice in the hood or anything, but it wasn’t that much fun to be driving up and down looking for streets that didn’t even seem to exist. We finally escaped without getting shot Tupac style, and headed back to Burbank for some food. We found another awesome authentic Mexican place called Fiesta Taco that was run by the Mexican version of Mario, then headed back to Scott’s for showers. Have I mentioned it was ridiculously and awfully hot in Los Angeles? Because it was. They were having a massive heat wave that totally sucked my soul out of me and splattered it all over my body. I had to take a cold shower to even feel remotely better about life, and once I got out of it I was pelted with heat and sweat once again. Pretty terrible. But it felt much better when the sun went down, and it was time for us to meet up with our Myspace friend Ivory. She picked us up since we couldn’t go anywhere without getting lost, and we went back to her apartment for the interview. She then showed us a pretty amazing store called Wacco’s (at which time Baker called me to inform me that our 48 Hour Film won “Best Costuming” that night at the best of screening), and later took us to an art opening. It took us awhile to find this art opening, and we actually ended up driving around LA for about an hour because she was given the wrong address, but we did eventually get to it. It was really cool painting of hookers in mansions by this up and coming artist, and it had free refreshments which was cool, but it was crowded as balls. People were overflowing out of the place. And there was even another person filming another documentary there as well. We were out of there about an hour after that, and planning on heading home when Brian, our limo drive, totally called us to hang out. So we had Ivory take us to our car, and we met up with Brian and his friends at a bar owned by a guy from the Afghan Whigs called The Short Stop. It was a pretty cool place with good music, but they kicked us out right at 2, so we decided to go back to Brian’s place since he lives in the Hollywood Hills. It was so awesome, with another great view of the city. We hung out on the balcony of his house listening to music and talking for a long time. And then he said “I wonder if my roommate is back from his date yet…” so he looked into his window and was like “holy shit, come see this!” so we did, and his roommate was definitely back from his date, and they were doing it. Then later they came upstairs and introduced themselves, and went to shake our hands, and we were all totally grossed out and not sure if we should. It was hard not to laugh, too. But the girl ended up being from Dayton, so we hung out. Finally at 4am we decided to head back to Scott’s for some sleep.
We slept semi-late the next day, and then Scott took us to breakfast at Café 101, which was where a lot of Swingers was filmed. Totally awesome. I love Swingers. Then the three of us headed to Venice Beach. Talk about a crazy place. There were so many different people there; all sorts of street performers, hard ass dudes working out at Muscle Beach, and loads of skaters and whatnot. I actually got in the water, which was semi cold, but I had to pee, and the waves were pretty awesome. They definitely knocked me down a few times. Then we laid out for awhile and hung out, and then we decided it was time to go find an In-N-Out Burger. For those that don’t know, In-N-Out is a semi-fast food burger place pretty much only found in California, and it’s totally family owned and operated, and community oriented. It also only has four things on the menu: a Double-Double, hamburger, cheeseburger, and French fries. But there is a secret code to order things in special ways. For example, being that I do not eat meat, I would order a grilled cheese (everything on a bun except for the hamburger patty - lettuce, tomato, pickles, special sauce, and cheese), and then I would also get it animal style, which means with onions grilled in mustard. I got my fries well done because I like them crunchy. And they have chocolate, vanilla, and strawberry shakes, but I got it neapolitan style. Let me just tell you, that it is amazing. And cheap. Everything is made totally fresh, and it just tastes so good. We decided we would have to eat it again, and soon.
That night we were going to go out, and we tried to go to The Dresden, which was also in Swingers, and is where Marty and Elaine play - the couple that inspired the SNL skit with Will Ferrell and Ana Gasteyer as a couple playing a night club that are all crazy. It didn’t work out, though. Jaz wasn’t feeling well, and when we went inside it was all fancy and so crowded you couldn’t move, plus the couple wasn’t playing, so we just headed back to Scott’s since we had an early morning the next day. We fell fast asleep and set the alarm for 6am so we could get a good start on the Pacific Coast Highway up to San Jose…
-Melissa
I believe we left off at Mission Viejo. As you all know from Jaz and Jon, we got ditched in Vegas after I won a lot of awesome money (which I’m still pretty psyched on), so we had to give an emergency call to Moira for our early Cali appearance. I felt so bad that it was such short notice, but she was amazing about it and told us to come on over. It was really awesome to see her and her family since it had been about 7 years since the last time I saw them, and they couldn’t have been better to us. We had nice beds, good food, a pool to swim in, and loads of help planning our way around the gigantic state of California. We also got to go to Laguna Beach, which was awesome so we could totally see what a bitch Kristen is, and how LC is so much better and stuff. While we were there we also figured out our Los Angeles couchsurfing situation, and after two good nights in Mission Viejo, we headed out.
The guy who ended up helping us out in LA was Scott from couchsurfing. We talked to him on the phone a lot, and he was really helpful in telling us how to get there and where to go and whatnot. He explained he would be really busy while we were there, but we could stay, and the first night we could meet up with him to hike up to the Hollywood sign. We left The O.C. early in the morning to get to LA by noon, which actually turned into 1pm thanks to really sweet LA traffic, and then we parked in a very expensive lot so we could walk around Hollywood a bit. We basically just did the touristy thing and walked down the Walk of Fame to Mann’s Chinese Theatre, or “Hands in the Pavement” as Jasmine likes to call it, and hung out with some pretty awesome street performers that made up raps with our names in them. Then we decided we should do a tour of the stars’ homes because doesn’t that just sound like the most awesome thing ever? We found a guy who gave us a good deal and would take us around in a limo, so we went with that one and hopped aboard with some foreigners. It was pretty cool and it was obvious from early on that we were going to have fun with this tour guide. He got super psyched when we started asking him for obscure people’s houses, and especially when I asked about Jason Schwartzman’s house. Then he mentioned Elliott Smith, and we were like “Where did he live?!” and the guide got even more happy. He started pointing out places like Bud from Married…With Children’s house, Sylvester Stalone’s mom-who-reads-butts’ house, Cher’s mom’s house, and the Fresh Prince house which is actually occupied by Bob Newhart. We went all over Sunset, Beverly Hills, the Hollywood Hills, and Bel Air with this tour, and we also stopped at Rodeo where we got out for a minute and walked around with a lot of people who could have been famous since everyone looked like it. At the very last minute we also saw a celebrity - Rachel Leigh Cook of She’s All That fame drove right past us. If only it had been Vince Vaughn…but she’ll do. So the tour soon came to an end, and we had to get back to our car by 6pm. We were cutting it really close, so the tour guide told us he’d drop off the foreigners (who had pretty much no idea what was going on the whole time and just kept taking pictures of everything we saw), and then he would drive us to our car since we were his last tour of the night. On the way back to Vine we asked him if he was on Myspace, and he totally is, so we interviewed him right then and there through the rear view mirror. He then admitted to us that we were the coolest people to ever take his tour, and that he actually called his friend when he dropped us off on Rodeo all excited to tell him he had people on his tour that wanted to see Elliott Smith’s house. He signed a release form that told us his name was Brian, and he also told us about some places we should try to hit up while in the city. We then gave him our phone number and names in case he wanted to hang out, and parted ways.
We went to an awesome vegan restaurant called Truly Vegan, which was awesome, then we met up with Scott for the Hollywood sign hike. It took us a minute of getting lost in the Hollywood Hills, trying my best not to hit a Bentley, before we got to the trail. We met Scott, then started hiking. We got to the top of the mountain right at sunset, and it was really awesome to see the city that way. We actually stood right behind the Hollywood sign, right up next to the radiation towers, so that was awesome. And Scott pointed out all kinds of crazy things to us down at the bottom, such as the Holiday Inn with neon green lights that they used in Donnie Darko. Once it got pretty dark we decided it would be a good idea to head back down, and we went back to Scott’s to set up camp. We sat around and talked to him about our experiences for awhile, and just about life in general, then finally thought it would be a good idea to go to sleep about 1am.
The next morning Scott went to work and the three of us began a trek to the Watts Towers. It isn’t just a clever name, as they do stand directly in the middle of the ghetto of Watts. We only got turned around once getting there, and found it right next to an awesome white trash family that had the tv turned up all the way blasting Nickelodeon. Technically you’re supposed to pay $7 to go inside the gates and take some sort of tour of the towers, but they were easy to see from the outside and it was too hot to hang out there for too long of a time. Plus $7 is a lot to tour a 100 foot or so area. Basically what they are, though, are these three towers that this guy Simon Rodia decided to build because he wanted to do something big and be famous. He quit drinking and focused all of his attention on building these towers with all of his free time. And as you probably saw from our photos, they’re pretty awesome. When Watts had their infamous riots, everything in the area was destroyed except for these towers, so they’re pretty powerful. Really cool to look at, too. Once we were done there, we thought it’d be fun to find this huge pig mural that wasn’t too far away. Big mistake. Instead of finding a mural we ended up driving around the entire Los Angeles ghetto of Watts, Compton, and South Central. I mean, we weren’t menaces while drinking our juice in the hood or anything, but it wasn’t that much fun to be driving up and down looking for streets that didn’t even seem to exist. We finally escaped without getting shot Tupac style, and headed back to Burbank for some food. We found another awesome authentic Mexican place called Fiesta Taco that was run by the Mexican version of Mario, then headed back to Scott’s for showers. Have I mentioned it was ridiculously and awfully hot in Los Angeles? Because it was. They were having a massive heat wave that totally sucked my soul out of me and splattered it all over my body. I had to take a cold shower to even feel remotely better about life, and once I got out of it I was pelted with heat and sweat once again. Pretty terrible. But it felt much better when the sun went down, and it was time for us to meet up with our Myspace friend Ivory. She picked us up since we couldn’t go anywhere without getting lost, and we went back to her apartment for the interview. She then showed us a pretty amazing store called Wacco’s (at which time Baker called me to inform me that our 48 Hour Film won “Best Costuming” that night at the best of screening), and later took us to an art opening. It took us awhile to find this art opening, and we actually ended up driving around LA for about an hour because she was given the wrong address, but we did eventually get to it. It was really cool painting of hookers in mansions by this up and coming artist, and it had free refreshments which was cool, but it was crowded as balls. People were overflowing out of the place. And there was even another person filming another documentary there as well. We were out of there about an hour after that, and planning on heading home when Brian, our limo drive, totally called us to hang out. So we had Ivory take us to our car, and we met up with Brian and his friends at a bar owned by a guy from the Afghan Whigs called The Short Stop. It was a pretty cool place with good music, but they kicked us out right at 2, so we decided to go back to Brian’s place since he lives in the Hollywood Hills. It was so awesome, with another great view of the city. We hung out on the balcony of his house listening to music and talking for a long time. And then he said “I wonder if my roommate is back from his date yet…” so he looked into his window and was like “holy shit, come see this!” so we did, and his roommate was definitely back from his date, and they were doing it. Then later they came upstairs and introduced themselves, and went to shake our hands, and we were all totally grossed out and not sure if we should. It was hard not to laugh, too. But the girl ended up being from Dayton, so we hung out. Finally at 4am we decided to head back to Scott’s for some sleep.
We slept semi-late the next day, and then Scott took us to breakfast at Café 101, which was where a lot of Swingers was filmed. Totally awesome. I love Swingers. Then the three of us headed to Venice Beach. Talk about a crazy place. There were so many different people there; all sorts of street performers, hard ass dudes working out at Muscle Beach, and loads of skaters and whatnot. I actually got in the water, which was semi cold, but I had to pee, and the waves were pretty awesome. They definitely knocked me down a few times. Then we laid out for awhile and hung out, and then we decided it was time to go find an In-N-Out Burger. For those that don’t know, In-N-Out is a semi-fast food burger place pretty much only found in California, and it’s totally family owned and operated, and community oriented. It also only has four things on the menu: a Double-Double, hamburger, cheeseburger, and French fries. But there is a secret code to order things in special ways. For example, being that I do not eat meat, I would order a grilled cheese (everything on a bun except for the hamburger patty - lettuce, tomato, pickles, special sauce, and cheese), and then I would also get it animal style, which means with onions grilled in mustard. I got my fries well done because I like them crunchy. And they have chocolate, vanilla, and strawberry shakes, but I got it neapolitan style. Let me just tell you, that it is amazing. And cheap. Everything is made totally fresh, and it just tastes so good. We decided we would have to eat it again, and soon.
That night we were going to go out, and we tried to go to The Dresden, which was also in Swingers, and is where Marty and Elaine play - the couple that inspired the SNL skit with Will Ferrell and Ana Gasteyer as a couple playing a night club that are all crazy. It didn’t work out, though. Jaz wasn’t feeling well, and when we went inside it was all fancy and so crowded you couldn’t move, plus the couple wasn’t playing, so we just headed back to Scott’s since we had an early morning the next day. We fell fast asleep and set the alarm for 6am so we could get a good start on the Pacific Coast Highway up to San Jose…
-Melissa