23rd January: Hollywood Sign & Venice Beach

On the 11th day of our trip, Idriss and Khalid were still in San Diego, while Enrique, Max, Audrey and I headed to Griffith Observatory since we had been told that the view from there was amazing. Which it was:

Of course, I also took an obligatory photo of the Hollywood sign in the distance:

We decided it would take too long to walk to the sign, and chose to go to Venice Beach instead. Experiencing the famous LA traffic, it took us 1 hour to get there by car. I very much enjoyed walking along the promenade, as it was quite warm and sunny yet not too crowded. Some of the buildings looked very interesting and the food choices also attracted my attention.

On our way, we met up with Robert, whom I got to know during a summer space programme in 2016 – the same programme where I also met Enrique. We told him about our impressions of Hollywood - that it actually wasn’t as spectacular as we thought it would be. Apart from the Hollywood Boulevard, which was shorter than we expected, streets look pretty normal. We imagined everything would be over the top, like the Las Vegas Strip, but found Hollywood to be a very nice, even beautiful place. During our drive through LA to Venice beach, we also noticed that streets and houses were more spacious than we would have imagined. Robert explained that the building of the city wasn’t well planned and that with new building projects, people were more aware of using space efficiently. It was great catching up with him, while enjoying the sunset.

24th January: Malibu & Shopping

Enrique and I went to Malibu to witness the extent of the fire of last November. Thankfully, we didn’t see too many burnt down houses. In fact most were intact, while unfortunately a lot of nature was affected. Where usually grass would cover the hills, they were now completely brown.

In the afternoon, we went shopping to the Citadel, an outlet center, before the guys went to a basketball game. 

Audrey and I went home, and we couldn’t resist to take a selfie on the Hollywood Boulevard:

For lack of other choices, we watched an episode of the American Bachelor (okay, as my friends know, I would still have chosen to watch the Bachelor had we had other choices ;)).

Written by Julia Heuritsch | Uploaded on 3rd February 2019