JoelNothman.com

Don’t get the impression I’ll always be blogging this regularly. But where I’m staying in LA there just seems to be a strong wireless internet signal from some neighbour.

And that, of course, means I should tell you about where I’m staying. It’s a small building owned by 82-year old Sylvia K who dances, goes to shiurim (Jewish classes), keeps a guest house, and is the grandmother of Ilana who is showing me around the city. I have closet, kitchen and basically anything else i need to get by, and am a short walk from numerous kosher restaurants.

So Ilana took me out to one for lunch (after I’d freshened up from the plane). Pico Kosher Deli (my first real deli) had a line that we stood in for 20 minutes before a table became free. Ordering a turkey and pastrami sandwich, I finally realised what people mean when they talk of the large serving sizes of American food. Woah. I took half a sandwich home for later.

In the afternoon, Ilana gave me a ride down to Santa Monica beach. Yes, it’s summer, and a very hot day. Although the water wasn’t as pleasant as Bondi’s famous blue, it was still refreshing to walk through, ankle-deep. So I walked and walked and walked, and finally came to Venice Beach, which is known for its wacky street performers among other things (Ilana compared it to Nimbin). Swarming with tourists, the strip has the usual collection of stalls selling printed t-shirts and hats, nargila (hookah) pipes and ice-cream, as well as artists offering a portrait or their own new style of painting, and buskers doing anything from scratching a mix of vinyl tracks, to sculpting with sand or manouevering rubber snakes while wearing basically only a loin-cloth and balancing on one foot (pretty random).

I walked back towards Santa Monica Pier, but despite the fairgrounds crowded by tourists of all nationalities, there wasn’t much to do there, although there were some interesting new challenges to win big fluffy toys, like docking a remote controlled ship into its port.

I returned to my place in Beverlywood on a Big Blue Bus (on which I kept on nearly dozing off) and via getting a little lost finding my street. I eventually made it out to try another of the kosher restaurants, and again ended up with leftovers having not realised how enormous 1 piece of pizza would be. Tasty, though! And it leaves me with a nice salad for my trip to Vegas on Sunday hopefully.

After a bit of a drive around some of the main highlights of the city (Beverly Hills and Sunset Boulevard), we decided I would probably be tired and jetlagged and should go home to sleep before a fast day tomorrow (where we hope to see Hollywood and the Getty Museum, maybe) and yet I’m not asleep a few hours later. I think I might go do that now.