I'm testing the email feature of Blogger Pro. You're supposed to be able to post by emailing. If this function works, this means I can post to my blog while traveling and using pocket explorer.

These past two nights I've woken up dreaming that I was at some Hollywood party. God, what a frightening dream. I have no interest in achieving that kind of lifestyle. My sister loves partying with the Hollywood people. I think the only reason she married that record company guy, who she's now separated from, was because he lived in LA and he went to parties with Hollywood types like Arnold Schwarzenegger. Not me. Maybe I've been dreaming about being a Hollywood party because I was in LA last weekend.

Flying to LA was fine. It only takes an hour to get there. To get to my hotel, I got in line for the Super Shuttle and it only cost me $15 with tip. The hotel I booked, the Wyndham Checkers, was reasonable at $129/night. It's not the best hotel in the downtown area but for the price I paid, I got a great deal. My room was little small, but there was a small pool and a Jacuzzi on the roof. The rooms were also richly furnished and I even had a flat screen TV with speakers, a separate modem and desk in my room. The only major drawback was the workout facility which was pitifully small for a hotel in downtown LA. I did manage to workout in gym on Friday night and even hung out in the Jacuzzi in the morning, only because the workout room was packed.

The Wyndham Checkers even had a top 20 restaurant downstairs, which served excellent food although a tad expensive. Dinner for one set me back $60 with tip, but the food was great. My salad had flower petals mixed in. Gotta love a restaurant that serves flower petals on their salad. The halibut I ordered was cooked well and sat on a bed of garlic mash potatoes surrounded by a dressing of scallops, corn and red and green bell peppers and was very very yummy. Paying $9 for a glass of okay pinot noir was the only low point to the meal.

Since the Checkers is the middle of everything, I wasn't that far away from the MOCA, lots of restaurants, a Rite Aid, and even a downtown shopping mall with a Macys. I walked to Rite Aid to buy a bottle of water for $1.50, instead of paying the $6 they would charged me in the room for same amount of water. The only bad thing about my trip was walking around with my backpack all day. I had to check out of the hotel at 12 noon so I carried by backpack with me everywhere after that. Next time I will pack more carefully because after a couple of hours, I felt like I was carrying at least 50 pounds on my back. I'm sure my pack wasn't that heavy, but it sure as hell felt like it.

The great thing about my trip, other than seeing the Andy Warhol exhibit, was how I got back to the airport. I took the LA Metro. LA has their own transit rail system and you can take the Metro to a station and shuttle takes you to the airport.

LA's Metro is strange. You buy a ticket but then you don?t have to show it to anybody or put it through a machine. There are signs everywhere which say that every person must have a ticket to ride the train, but there is no enforcement. The fare to the airport was fantastic at $1.65 for a one way trip with transfer. I had to transfer to another train to get the LAX stop. And like the Metro in London, the trains are color coded, so it's hard to get lost on the system.

The only problem with the Metro if you're not using to being in a big city, it might scare you. Riding the Metro in LA isn't the pleasant experience that it is here in SF and the Bay Area or in London. Riding the Metro in LA was more like riding public transportation in a not so great part of NYC or in downtown DC. There were people riding the train that I would be deathly
afraid to run into late at night and maybe just a little less so during the day. I think the LA Metro went through some of the bad parts of LA like Compton and Watts, where the racial riots took place a number of years ago. Not that I would know because I don't know LA that well, but I thought I saw signs outside of the train for those neighbourhoods.

I mean, I don't really care. I've lived in DC and spent a lot of time in NYC and I had to get around on public transportation so I was used to less than ideal public transportation situations, but if you're not, I think taking the Metro to LAX would be a very scary experience. To me, it was just interesting to rid the Metro only because I started thinking about my favorite stops on the DC metro system like the Dupont Circle stop.

Once I got to the airport drop off stop, which is called Aviation, taking the shuttle to LA was fine because it was full of airport employees. I guess there aren't very many people who have discovered the joys of taking The Metro to LAX.

And Saturday night is great night to fly because it's a slow time. My flight back to Oakland wasn't crowded and neither were the airports. This was so different from my experience the day before when I flew to LA at 11:00 am on Friday morning and the flight was completely full and airports were overflowing with travelers.

I definitely plan to go back to LA, now that I know it's easy, actually quite convenient and I had such a great time. I just have to figure out the backpack thing.