How to Deal with Jet Lag in Los Angeles.

Greetings,

I started this blog because I wanted to write down all my travel stories, but now I have too many and not enough time. But in any case, let’s take a short break from Iceland and travel to Los Angeles.

Los Angeles Airport

I have never been to the US before, and I didn’t really know what to expect of it, because people say that you either love it or hate it, and it is very different from anywhere else (well, I guess not so so much different from Dubai… since we have all the same restaurants as in the US).

Anyway, when we arrived at Los Angeles airport, after the long and tiring 18 hours flight with Qatar Airways, the customs guys were quite surprised that a Russian girl is travelling with a bunch of French guys… from Dubai? And asked me why am I doing this? Mmm, why not? What’s the answer really?

The day was rainy, we took a bus from our terminal to the car rental place, which was like ten minutes drive – very convenient. Having booked everything online, we just had to wait until our car was ready for pickup. Meanwhile, I was hanging out in the parking, trying to photograph the planes in the reflections of the puddles.

Driving In LA

We were lucky to have our first drive through Los Angeles during the rush hour, so basically what might have taken us 15 minutes, took us an hour… but there are also so many traffic lights in Los Angeles! I think Google Maps are not aware of this fact when building an itinerary.

Airbnb and Searching For Food

After spending at least 15 minutes fiddling with the lock to open the rental house, we finally parked inside (which was in itself an adventure, since it was rather tight). The place was a house in West Hollywood, charming, but impossibly gay in its decorations and an unlimited supply of vaseline in every cupboard. In my bedroom, there was a picture with Northern lights on the wall, like they knew 😛

We went out in search for food, and found our new base in Los Angeles… which we apparently shared with Jim Morrison and Janis Joplin – Barney’s Beanery! So we fought jet lag with help of some beers and burgers.

Afterwards, we even felt brave enough to go out to another bar where we found some American guys who were surprised that we were getting married in Cyprus, California…. but we were getting married in Cyprus, Cyprus – the island in the Mediterranean which they apparently never heard of. That was just too funny.

We tried to go to another bar, but we were so “happy” that couldn’t find it, so we got into Uber to find there was already some girl inside (I didn’t know you can share Uber with other people), and made friends with her in 2 minutes and started encouraging to pursue whatever her dream was (can’t remember so clear what exactly her dream was).

Thankfully, we made it home safely, some of us more damaged than others, but that night we learned that Los Angeles was definitely fun.

Santa Monica Beach

Next day was overcast again, and we got rained on while driving down to Santa Monica beach. My driver knew a map of LA by heart thanks to playing GTA V, so we never got lost, and too bad that the weather was not great, since it seems like a cool place to visit on a sunny day… but again, just another reason to come back.

Santa Monica beach and Venice Beach are such “colourful” places that I think they deserve to have their own separate post.

So bye for now!

Much love,

Anna