The wonderful Downtown LA and Disneyland

We landed in Los Angeles and got the shuttle bus to the Alamo rental place. We had already booked our economy car so all we had to do was pick it up. 

We thought Alamo would assign us to a car but instead the guy just said turn left and pick a car. We chose a 5 door white Hyundai. I got the sat nav prepped with our hotel address. This didn't work. Apparently there are many Main streets in LA so we ended up driving to a posh neibourhood  that was currently holding a high school market. We figured this was not the main street we were looking for so we took a stroll to the local library to ask somebody for a better address to put in our sat nav. 

Cj, was actually pretty good at the American driving. He didn't like the huge 7 lane highways into La as we quickly realised that lanes come off all the time so if you are not in the correct lane you're driving off the highway. Our sat nav was pretty quick at re-calculating so in the end we got to our hotel. 

We were slightly worried about LA's well known ghetto side and didn't want to end up driving down them, little did we know that our hotel was pretty much in a ghetto. Our first impression of LA wasn't very good. We arrived early evening so we felt slightly vulnerable walking around downtown trying to find somewhere to eat. We couldn't see any restaurants around our block so we decided to pick-up a large pizza to takeaway back to the safety of our hotel room. The pizza was american size huge. 

(Our hotel is the building that say's Cecil)

The next day we decided to leave pur hotel room. I wanted to see the Disney opera house so we went for a little walk. Downtown didnt seem as dodgy in the day but there were some odd characters roaming around with trolleys. The opera building was situated in LA's financial district so a few blocks away LA looks a lot better. We grabbed lunch in a cool food market. It was crazy, very busy and to order food you have to yell your order to the waitresses across people sitting and eating at the bar. We split up briefly as Cj wanted a burger and i wanted a chinese. Being very english i started to queue until a mexican man told me i have to just push my way to the front and yell my order. This frazzled me so he kindly did it for me, plus he could speak spanish so he got the waitresses attention quicker. He was on his lunch break and told me we have come to California at a good time as the weather was supposed to be good. The weekend before was horrid rain. 

After our down town exploring we got into the car and drove to Citidel outlets. My cheap trainers from Malaysia had finally given up as i have already had to sew them back together once before. We came here to get me some cheap nike trainers. It was also good to see the more stereotypical posh side of America after our downtown experience. 

My new trainers!

To get out of our hotel block we had to drive down a road called skidt row. This was a road we wanted to avoid driving down. Cj was panicking we'd end up having to stop at a red light. The path was full of make shift tents made out of blankets, ground sheets and umbrellas. There was a lot of homeless people hanging around in groups. The buildings were very run down and abandoned. We were shocked as we've never seen anything like this before. Luckily the lights stayed green and we were off that road pretty quickly. 

We picked up our car from the valet parking an was on the road by 8am the next morning. We were quite glad to leave downtown and be on our way to disneyland.

Disney land is located in a place called Anaheim, which is about 40mins from LA. We had an amazing time at the original disney. We were worried that going here on a saturday was a bad choice. It wasn't too busy though and it was a hot, sunny day. Our favourite ride was big thunder mountain and the Indiana Jones ride. It was a long day as we didn't leave until 10pm. We checked in to a motel up the road for 1 night. 

I won on the Buzz ride, whoop!!

Frozen in the parade