I'm in San Francisco, how cool is that?! It totally rocks, I love this city.
So since I last updated, I've travelled over the Pacific and crossed the date line (very confusing - this week has just gone on forever). For a start, I left Brisbane, but only after I cuddled a koala, which was fantastic - it was so cute and just as fat and teddy-bear-like as you'd expect. It was hard to tell how happy the koala was about getting cuddled by me, but hey, they're supposed to be stoned on eucalyptus the whole time anyway.
Next I headed down to Sydney where I stayed with Rachel for my last few days in Australia. It was lovely - I got to wander around and visit all my old haunts, including Newtown, and it was great to catch up with Rach (thanks for the hospitality!) and I also saw my friend Claire, my first roommate in Sydney.
I left Sydney on Thursday and flew to Fiji, where I had to stop to pick up my round-the-world ticket from when Vic and I split up, all those months ago! I hadn't planned to do anything in Fiji, but when I arrived and realised I had 8 hours til check-in for my next flight, it occurred to me that I didn't have to stay in the airport - so I dumped my stuff in the left luggage office, changed some money and took a bus into Nadi town centre, somewhere Vic and I had never got around to visiting before. I was very pleased with myself for saving $10 taxi fare by successfully navigating the bus, though it wasn't actually that difficult. I got into Nadi town centre where I wandered round the market. Those familiar with the Australian situation will not be surprised that the first thing I bought was a huge bunch of bananas for $1: the hurricane in Queensland wiped out most of Australia's banana crop, and they made a decision not to import bananas, with the result that those that are on sale are ridiculously expensive, so I hadn't had one in quite a while. Anyway, I gorged on tropical fruit and ate roti from a street stall for lunch: it was an excellent break from the pre-packaged sterility of airline food, and the humidity a welcome change from frosty airconditioning!
Volleyball match in Nadi
Downtown Nadi was interesting though not wonderful - I explored a maze of little streets with shops, cafes and market stalls, and wondered where the tourists were, as I saw only Fijians during that time. (I was happy with how little hassle I got, actually - I'd heard that Nadi could be a rough place for a tourist, with people trying to rip you off/mug you at every turn, but no one really paid me any attention which was a relief). Eventually I walked an extra block and discovered all the tourists, on a much wealthier, touristy high street full of expensive souvenir shops and hotels. The contrast was bizarre, and made me wonder why the tourists kept to their patch so much: did they never think "I wonder what's down that side street, I'll go check it out?"?!
After a few hours I returned to the airport, much refreshed, and checked in for my LA flight. A 10 hour flight, delayed by 2 hours...there was alot of sitting and reading. I think I got maybe 2 hours sleep - I am terrible at sleeping on planes. I was, however, pleasantly surprised by the plushness of the Qantas flight - free drinks, meals, pillow, blanket, seat-back tvs and films. Of course, that's normal for long-haul, but after so many crappy Virgin Blue flights (that's the Australian equivalent of Easyjet) it seemed like great luxury to me. Imagine my pleasure at getting to watch Final Destination 3!! There's something to cross off the "Things to do before I die" list.
I arrived in LA at 3pm on Thursday, clock-time, having left Sydney at 8am. Needless to say, I was incredibly confused, but the excitement of being in a new country kept me going. Immigration was actually no problem to clear - they scan your iris or whatever extremely speedily, and take no-mess fingerprints. The best question on the landing card was as follows:
"C: Have you ever been or are you now involved in espionage or sabotage; or in terorist activities; or genocide; or between 1933-1945 were you involved in persecutions associated with Nazi Germany or its allies?"
They might as well just ask "are you a) good or b) bad?"
I took a minibus to my hostel, which was just off Hollywood Boulevard, and spent an afternoon wandering about.
I'd had alot of warnings about how seedy and horrible LA in general, and Hollywood in particular, would be, and to be honest I guess they were justified. I enjoyed my one night there, but it's a pretty dodgy place really - both run-down and touristy. Still, I saw the walk of fame, I saw the Hollywood sign - what more can you ask? I met some people from New York in the hostel, as well as alot of Australians, went out to a sports bar where they were showing beach volleyball (is it really necessary for women to wear skimpy bikinis to play this? It wasn't actually ON the beach, it was being played in an arena) and ended up with a 4am stroll on Sunset Boulevard. I was thrilled - it was like I was living out my 3rd year dissertation.
However, my body was certainly not overly happy that I stayed up til 5am. I'd been up for 24 hours clock time - in reality more like 36 hours or something. Ouch. I had to get up next morning before 10am in order to check out and catch my bus to San Fran...that did NOT feel good. We drove for 6 hours through fantastic Californian scenery - rolling hills gave way to parched yellow grasslands, and I even spotted some tumbleweed - and arrived in San Francisco, where I checked into a really nice hostel. Sadly they only had room for one night, so yesterday I had to move to my current, far less salubrious hostel, which smells funny and has only 1 shower between all 60 residents, as far as I can tell.
San Fran is really cool. My guidebook says it is considered the most European of all American cities and I can certainly see that - it reminds me alot of Italy in places. It's really pretty, with a huge Chinatown area (I've seen alot of Chinatowns in my time, and this is undoubtedly the best), a delectable Italian area (there just aren't enough meals in the day) and a great wharf area where I ate fresh seafood last night. You can see Alcatraz, which looks just as forbidding as in the movies, and the Golden Gate bridge, which to be honest I'm not overly impressed with - it's just a bridge, man. Yesterday I did some sightseeing on my own - I stumbled across a great open-air art exhibition - and then met up with a girl I met at the hostel. We explored at length, and headed out to the bars in the North Beach area in the evening.
Aside from the fabulousness of San Fran, being in America is both exciting, oddly familiar, and weird. Despite all those films and books, it actually feels far more foreign than I was expecting, and the money confuses me (there's no $1 coins, only notes! The coins are tiny and in weird non-decimal denominations (ie. the "quarter")! Plus you're supposed to tip everybody...and there's lots of homeless people who ask for money so authoritively that I keep failing to say no - I'm probably single-handedly funding San Francisco's drug problem...ah well.
Oh, and the Americans all think I'm Australian, which is funny. I can't deal with the fact that people's American accents are real - they all sound to me like they're copying accents from the movies, or something.
Good to see the people of San Fran exercising their right to free speech
