Thursday, August 9, 2007

Day 3 and others

Well seeing that now I'm a bit more awake and have some time to myself in the house, I figured I'd do another blog. There was to be a v blog because I took my camera for a walk with me today, but there wasn't anything incredibly interesting to show. I'm kind of regretting not taking it with me in the car yesterday with the speedy drive-by tour.

But ok. The plane trip over here was nothing short of tiring. The short trip to Auckland I could handle. I watched "Black Sheep" on the way up and it was pretty cool though a little gross at... Well most of it was pretty gross. Think the whole zombie thing where if someone gets bitten they turn into a zombie too. Well when a sheep gets bitten by one of these zombie sheep they turn into a zombie sheep. When a person gets bitten by a zombie sheep... Well... You'll have to see for yourselves. But seriously, think Resident Evil, only with sheep and a big paddock and a lot of New Zealanders saying the word 'six' (well, it was either in the movie or around the plane and airports, but I heard a lot of New Zealand accents saying six). The trip to LA started off OK. I watched "Blades of Glory" and had some dinner and then had the full intention of going to sleep.

But you will not believe how frigging uncomfortable it is on those seats, especially when you have a big butt that prevents your feet from sitting on the seat with you. Next time if I do something like this I think I'll try extra hard to get into a class with better seats. They don't even really lean back far enough to give you the impression that you're leaning back. So after about an hour's sleep on the plane, I was pretty well jetlagged. Don't even get me started on how painful the customs sheets and going through customs was. By the time I got to getting my luggage, I was so tired and such that when a baggage handler I had asked for help because my last bag seemed to be nowhere in sight was hitting on me, where I would normally be flattered I was about ready to flip him one of my fingers. But eventually I got out and found Kristy, everything was happy again. We went to a 50's style diner called "Bob's Diner" (which was OK though a little greasy!). We also went into this Pirate store which Kristy has been talking about for ages but never actually gone in herself. The Pirate store was also awesome. We got home, I made that blog entry and passed out. I did get up again for dinner, and to say hi to Kristy's boyfriend Richard, but it wasn't very long before I was asleep again. I think we watched "Dogma" because we were talking about Alan Rickman at some point too. It was a good movie but I can't remember when we watched it.

Yesterday was pretty laid back but a lot more fun than the plane trip on Tuesday. Kristy as I've learnt over the year, has insanely weird sleeping patterns and so we didn't really get moving outside of bedrooms until midday. We had a very simple but awesome breakfast (did I mention that Kristy is an AMAZING cook?) and watched some American TV (which isn't so different to Australian TV except for the ads) and a movie... And then we thought we better get moving.

Wednesday's mission was to get me a 'cell' phone, as well as look at some computers for Kristy as she's wanting to upgrade. So we drove out to this place called "Fry's Electronics" first... Apparently it's a chain like Harvey Norman, Dick Smith, etc. Except this place is GIANT. It's about the size of Myers in Melbourne. Each store has a theme too, like one has an Alice in Wonderland theme, stuff like that. This one had a 1950's sci fi movie theme, and out of the front of the building there was a huge UFO crashing out of the front of it. Throughout the place inside were green aliens in space suits, giant ants, jeeps cut in half, another huge UFO... They even had a 1950's style diner where you could sit on tables shaped like cars, and every Saturday night they put movies on a big screen above the diner counter, so it's just like a drive in. It was pretty nuts to say in the least. I also learnt that saying "50's style diner" is kind of redundant because they all seem to be 50's style.

After that we went to the shopping area where Kristy works to go to Best Buy. The area was built on top of some Aeroplane thing, and I think everything around here has a theme because everywhere outside, there were huge pictures of aeroplanes. So we got me a Motorolla (C134 or something like that for those who are interested) cell phone with an AT&T prepaid plan on it for around $22 for the phone and an extra $25 for credit that would last me 3 months. We suddenly discovered the downside of the Cash Passport, which is that you can't actually use it just anywhere, you actually have to go to a proper ATM and withdraw the money. So Kristy ended up paying for it and so I had to go get some American money and fork it over.

We went past a few more places on the way back, places like the Warner Brothers studio (with the tower that the Animaniacs supposedly live in) and the Warner Brothers Ranch, and a lot of other studios (which is amazing there are so many around here when I haven't yet been to Hollywood proper, we're on the other side of Hollywood Hills so I haven't even seen the big sign yet!). We got back and put the phone on the charger, so it could get its batteries all full and get ready to cause a lot of havoc. We made some dinner, watched some TV and stuff and generally had some fun for the evening (including having some stuff called Mochi which is a sort of rice paper thing around ice cream. The stuff we had was chocolate flavour and it was AWESOME). I took some photos including some of this weird thing that's a cross between a potato and an apple and starts with the letter 'j' which is pronounced 'h', but I can't remember the name of it so we'll leave it until I do.

After dinner we decided to put the recharge card on my phone so it would have some money on it. This proved a lot more difficult, starting with the fact that somehow I managed to set the setup system off in Spanish (everything here is done in English, Spanish and often French as well). Eventually, we got the money on it. So that was the first problem solved.

The second one being that although I could make calls, it didn't seem like I could receive them. We went through the system again, went around in circles for a while only to find out we couldn't really get anywhere because we needed to speak to customer service and the place was closed up for the night. About now it was reaching midnight, and soon there would be an earthquake that none of us noticed. I went back and flipped through the instruction manual to see if there were any settings I had to change. I suddenly read that I had to go through an activation process which needed two sets of numbers which were on some part of the packaging... Which I had since thrown on the bin. Which we had thrown into the dumpster/skip.

Not wanting to wait until tomorrow when there would be more rubbish on top of it, Kristy decided that we should go out, in the middle of the night, to retrieve all the packaging. Unfortunately the thing wasn't exactly full, and we were both short and the torch wasn't so great. We had a broom to help us. It seemed like a simple task, but when the bag that was holding it didn't have handles, it suddenly became harder. We managed to get the plastic casing and one of the cardboard pieces out. But there was still another cardboard piece and it had BARCODES on it. We though that this might be what we were looking for and put the plastic on the ground without looking at it. The cardboard proved to be a lot harder than the plastic casing, and it turned out that the only way we could get it would be with me holding the flashlight and Kristy using the broom (she has a height advantage over me and I was struggling to get the broom to REACH the cardboard on my tip toes). I'm better at aiming a flashlight than I thought because I was able to manage to point it in the right place when I was down the side where I couldn't see anything and just could reach up and point the thing down and hope for the best... Kristy wrote a thing on it last night for her online journal which I thought summed up the whole 'adventure' pretty well:

"...We set out for the dumpster behind my building. We quickly decided a flashlight was going to be necessary. We searched for a flashlight in the apartment and found none. I knew I had a broken one in my car, so we gave that a shot. It was in three pieces and missing the lens, but somehow it actually worked. Knowing the dumpster was nearly empty and we were going to need something to dig with, we grabbed a broom and headed back out back. After a little shuffling around, we located the package and made an attempt to hook it and pull it out. We got the first two pieces easily enough, but the third, a small, round piece of cardboard which looked suspiciously important, was much harder. I tried to sweep it up the side of the dumpster, but it kept slipping back down into corner. I tried catching it in the bristles of the broom and lifting it that way, but it would not be caught. And then (Laura) was struck with a truly inspired idea! We'd take a page out of Macgyver's book and use some chewing gum to snag the bastard!

Chewing gum is surprisingly un-sticky in real life. The first piece fell of the boom handle immediately. The second piece I wrapped part way around the eye on the tip of the handle in hopes that it would hold better. And it did. For a little while. I managed to get it stuck to the piece of cardboard right before it, again, dislodged itself from the broom handle. A few minutes late, I managed to knock it off the cardboard as well. So so much for MacGyver.

In the end, after about 30 minutes, I somehow got it onto the top of the broom and lifted it to safety."

In between there we also managed to get it into ANOTHER person's rubbish bag, and tried to use its handles to lift it out with the bag. This was working well until the bag tipped over and everything in it fell out.

...After all that, I found out this morning that the numbers I was looking for were on the bottom of the plastic casing... So we didn't even really need the cardboard. Damn you Murphy's Law.

Today I set out on a quest to be able to fix this. After spending some time on their website, I discovered I still couldn't get it to work, so I rang up customer service. After about half an hour of her confirming what I already knew, I was transferred to their technical services. I spent about an hour or so on the phone to them and got about... Nowhere. They said they'd ring back after they'd done something, but I couldn't be bothered waiting and so went out for a walk. At least I'd used the numbers on the plastic casing by that stage.

On my walk I came across a shop where Cinglular/AT&T actually sell their services. Thinking I'd have better luck in person, I went in and wasted another hour of my life. Well, not quite. We managed to get it receiving calls from OTHER cell phones, but not landlines. In the end I was told that I would have to wait 24 hours from its activation to have it fully operational...

So the moral of this story is: Buying cell phones in the USA really sucks.

I kept walking afterwards... The lights here are also weird. There are a few exceptions on one way streets where there is a little yellow button on the poles, but at most intersections with traffic lights, to cross the road you don't press a button and they don't make noise. You just stand there until the lights turn to red and the red hand becomes a little white running man. And you really do have to run, they don't stay like that for very long.

Eventually I made it to some place called the 99c store where everything really is literally 99c (they have one cents here). Sometimes you can get a few things for 99c, and anything that's marked higher than 99c is still 99c. So I bought some sunscreen (because it's incredibly HOT outside and I don't think I've seen a single cloud today), two bottles of water that were 99c together (the tap water here is not actually drinkable without a ton of filters) and... A Hershey bar. The chocolate was very good. I headed off back towards the apartment, but decided to stop for lunch at a little pizzaria where they sold pizza by the slice. I'm very happy that I only ordered one slice because the slice was about half a pizza. It was good, and that led me to my next dilemma which had been solved by Kristy the last time I went out for lunch at Bob's Diner on Tuesday... The tip. Unlike in Australia where you might tip if you're feeling especially generous, you tip EVERYWHERE you eat here. It's considered extremely rude if you don't leave a little extra money on your table when you leave at most places, and there's usually a sort of maths as to how much you leave. Unfortunately, I didn't know if this pizza place was one of these places. They had a jar up the front, so I assumed you paid tips there instead of leaving them on your table. In the end I just gave them my spare coins and a dollar bill and hoped that was OK!!!!

So that has been my adventure in the US up to now. Hopefully when I update next I'll have some video for you all!

Later!

Tuesday, August 7, 2007

I'm here!

Well hopefully some people have managed to remember the URL and find their way here...

Anyway, I'm in the USA now and I'm jetlagged and I maybe would have had some video soon but I forgot to charge the camera's battery before I left!

I'll post more when I am a bit more awake, for now I'm having (another) sleep :)