San Fransisco and LA

Hello everyone! So comes the time for a new blog post, a time you have all looked forward too, I'm sure =P This week has been spent in San Fransisco and Los Angelos, California. It was, of course, awesome, undescribeable, perfect... Whatever you want to call it, it was great.

The pictures I have now re all from the first day, after that my battery died, hehe. But I'm going to try my best to get pictures of peoples' facebooks. So in a while it should be more accurate.

Day 1, Saturday.
After nearly having missed the flight to San Fransisco (it was nerv wrecking, I tell you) I arrived at the Airport at 12.40 local time. I was immidiately met by an EF Representative and she brought me to a group of other exchange students, like me waiting to get to the hotel.

The first day was not that exciting. Everyone arrived at different times so all we could do was to get comfartable in our rooms and get to know each other at the hotel. The smart ones who brought swimming suites (apparently not me) took a swim in the outdoor pool. The weather was cold and windy, as it so often is in San Fransisco, which is located in the northen California. I would say we had an average temperature of 16 degrees while there.

Day 2, Sunday.
This was the day the fun begun. We took the bus to down town to pick up a tour guide at the Pier 39. The guide took us around San Fransisco by bus and we saw the bay, the beautiful park with a name I cannot remember, the city, the hippie district and of course the Golden Gate Bridge. Wow, that bridge... it is amazing. We had to stop there to take pictures of course, so that everyone can see that we were really there. Other than that we saw Mrs Doubtfire's (how do you spell that?) house and the house they used in the tv show Full House.

In the afternoon we went back to the pier and everyone was let free to go and eat lunch, do some shopping and look at the street artists. I went with the three other swedes, to guys and a girl, and a german guy. I am glad he went with us, case it made us speak english. I mean, we can speak swedish in Sweden, now we are here. We saw a street show with a fake Jack Sparrow. He was quite goos actually, better than I expected. And we met a black street singer who could sing Min älskling du är som en ros by Evert Taube. He was amusing, haha. In the evening we went to Union Square and had dinner in a chinese restaurant. After that we strolled around in China Town. That was sweet, I bought that little red book, "Quotations from Mao Tsetung" or something like that.

Day 3, Monday.
This was the day we went to Alcatraz, the safest and most famous prison in the world I believe. Al Capone was once a prison there, among others. Noone has escaped as we know of, but a few have been close. Three prisoners even managed to get in the water, but we do not know if they survived or what happened to them. We took the farry to the island and then went on an audio tour in the prison. It was really interesting.

The third day was also the day we were supposed to walk across the Golden Gate bridge. But as we went over by the bus we noticed people climbing the wires, and well on the other side we heard that the bridge was closed for pedestrians. The people climbing were protesters carrying a big bandana saying that China should liberate Tibet before hosting the Olympis Games. You might have seen it on the news, I know they did in Norway. So you might have seen our bus go by =) We also walked the steepest most winding street in San Fransico and hopped on the trolley. In the evening we had dinner on Pier 39.

Day 4, Tuesday.
Not much happened this day. We spent the entire day on the bus and arrived in Loas Angelos around 12 o'clock at night. We stopped, however, in a small coast town and had some lunch. It was really nice with the beach and coastal line.

Day 5, Wednesday.
Finally, we were in Los Angelos, the world's capital of movies and movie star. We started off by picking up our tour guide at the farmers market. The guide took us around LA, showing us the Hollywood sign, and different places were they'd shot movies, among other's Richard Gere's hotel in Pretty Woman. We went to Beverly Hills, although we were not aloud to ge in and see the movie stars' houses and stuff.

We went to the Walk of Fame, that was the coolest part, for sure. With all the hand and foot prints of famous people. There were a lot of fake Spider Mans, Marilyn Monroes and even a Jack Sparrow (he sucked, thogh). They want you to take pictures with them and tip them a few bucks. Then we went back to the Farmers Market to have some lunch and do some shopping. It was a lot of fun.

Day 6, Thursday.
This was the Beach day. We got an oppurtunity to sleep in in the morning for the first time, so we left the hotel around 10 am. Nornally we left around 8 so it was nice to sleep a little longer. Basically we just spent the whole day at the beach. It was quite windy but that did not stop me from getting a bad sun burn. I know some girls had it so bad they could not bend down and needed help to put their clothes on for like two days afterwards. I'm glad I didn't get it that bad.

We left the beach in Santa Monica (by the way, it's were they shot parts of Bay Watch and other movies and tv shows) around 5 pm and went to Venice Beach which is the most famous beach of all. Countless movies were made there. We didn't stay there long though. The tour leaders were afraid to loose us among all the wierd people and drug dealers and such. After that we went by the Paramount studio and finally to the Universal Studios. We didn't go in, it costs too much. We walked around and did some shopping in those strange theme park streets. Later we had dinner in the Hard Rock Café.

Day 7, Friday.
Disneyland! And easily the warmest day on the whole trip. It was so hot, I just wanted to lay down. And of course the sun burn didn't get better, even though we used sun screen (yes, we did). It was a fun day, but I wish I'd been younger, I would have enjoyed it more. But well, we went on a crazy Indiana Jones Ride, it was so much fun, we even came back later to do it again. Yeah, there isn't much to say. We jumped into lines for random lines we didn't even know what they were, haha, for example a submarine tour in Nemo's world, and a boat tour in Pirate of the Caribbean-land. We had mexican food for dinner, Soft Tacos Monterray. Obviousley I had to get that, right Linnea?! ;) It was so spicy, my mouth was on fire, is that what you eat all the time? You're probabely used to it by know, eh.

Well and that was it folks. The night between Friday and Saturday almost all of us stayed up. Since we came back to the hotel around 10 - 10.30 and had to get up around 2, to go to the airport at 3 am. Brutal, but necesarry. Almost everyone's flight left around 6 or 7 in the morning. The trip back went all fine. I didn't go into the US this time, so I didn't have to fill in all the documents asking hundreds of stupid questions. I hate flying in the United States, it's so strict and uptight. The staff isn't even nice, at least not the people I met. Canada is so much more relaxed ;)