Day Thirty Five: Universal

Los Angeles is quite cool in the morning and often cloudy but it soon becomes a bright sunny day. We were going to enjoy the good weather at Universal Studios. There are a few different ways to get to Universal. You can go by taxi, get a shuttle or take the train. We chose the train. The station is a five minute walk from our hotel along Hollywood Blvd. Then it is only one stop to the Universal Station. Then you get a free shuttle up the hill.

Star that has contributed so much to Hollywood

Wall mural in the train station. Love the Cactus!

We arrived and it was sunny. It was a bit confusing trying to find where we were supposed to change our voucher for tickets but it turns out we need to go to the group sales desk. Once we had our tickets and front of line passes we made a beeline straight for the studio tour. They take you around the lots and filming may be happening while you are there. There is also a King Kong 3D experience and some other little extras that I will let you discover if you go. Overall it was interesting and a lot of fun.

Purchasing the Front of Line Pass was definitely the right decision to make. You get to skip the line once at all the rides and you get reserved seating at the shows. We never waited more than 5 minutes for a ride and at one point during the day the wait time for the Transformer 3D ride was 120mins for non-pass holders. Despite Heng's apprehension about fast rides he went on all of them and none were too terrifying.

Wisteria Lane from Desperate Houswives

Watch out Heng!!

Animal actors show

Going down to the second half of the park

Megatron.

There's a minion on my head

I have been to Universal Studios in Japan and Singapore. I thought that this Universal had a little bit of a confusing layout but you have the Studio Tour, which the others don’t have. It was a great fun day.

Above our hotel is a hill and on top of the hill is a restaurant called Yamashiro. This means mountain castle in Japanese. It is an amazing Japanese structure with gardens around it and was built a long time ago. We loved the fell of the place and you get beautiful views while eating. The food is fusion food and we had mixed feelings about it. Heng asked them to make vegetable tempura instead of seafood tempura and we were less than impressed. The batter was too heavy and they covered the tempura in mayonnaise.

What a beautiful restaurant

Garden inside

View of the city

However I ordered the Wagyu beef with vegetables and the whole dish was fantastic! So delicious!! Heng had Sushi for the main and it was adapted to be vegetarian too. That was ok. Then we had their dessert sushi. It was really good! The rice was sweet rice pudding and all the “fish” was actually fruit. It was a fun dish. This is an expensive restaurant but we concluded that if you order from the menu and don’t ask for changes it tends to be better.

Delicious Wagyu beef

dessert sushi

I thought since I had been in America during the summer I should get a tan. It doesn't seem to have happened so I thought I would go all out for the last couple of days. Unfortunately this is the result below. (Ok maybe this was an accident...)

Beth "red lobster" Clarke

Day Thirty Four: Travelling Day

Another day on the move but not by car this time. We are flying from New Orleans back to Los Angeles. However that wasn’t happening until the evening. So we headed out to spend a little bit of time in New Orleans.

For lunch we wanted to try Gumbo. A sort of soup stew, it is a well-known New Orleans food. Not really to my taste I have to be honest. The flavour is ok but I didn’t really like the gloopy texture and all the bits of things that were in there. Oh well it was still worth a try.

Gloopy Gumbo

It was a short taxi ride to the airport and then we were on the plane and off to Los Angeles. We had organised a transfer from the airport and it went really smoothly. Sooner than we thought we were checking into our hotel, The Magic Castle. Our room was a one-bedroom apartment and it is bigger than our old house. Not sure what we are going to do with all the space, but it would be awesome for staying longer as there is a full kitchen.

Rotating toilet seat cover at the New Orleans Airport

Our living room

Our bedroom

We are only one block from Hollywood Blvd so it is convenient if you want to go see all the stars on the pavement and the Chinese Theatre. For dinner we headed to that area upon the recommendation of the staff at our hotel who are very helpful. They had recommended an Italian restaurant. The food was really nice. The lighting was really muted so I apologize for the photo quality.

Wine holders hanging on the wall

Delicious Spaghetti