Dodgy car dealings and palm trees

  Los Angeles, California
Thursday, December 10, 2009

(0 miles)



nadya: Meet our newest travel companion: Rojo!! (the 'j' pronounced like an afrikaans 'g'), means 'red' in spanish (otherwise known as Rocko, since he's an americanised latino...)


Took us longer than expected to get a car organised, what with LA being such a huge, sprawling intimidating mass...! But after trawling a couple of 2nd hand car dealerships and seeing a few different vehicles, we settled on this lovely spacious SUV - aka the 'gas guzzler'... it was the dealer's own car, dodgy dude cos he went back on the price we'd settled on previously - i guess 2nd-hand car salesmen have a reputation for a reason!! (still a good deal for us tho, at $2400).

specs:
1995 toyota 4runner
2 wheel-drive (lets hope that's enough!)
automatic (difficult to get anything else in the states)
155 000 miles

We've been staying with my mexican friend, Guillermo, who has been a real honey, showing us around LA when we've not been missioning, and introducing us to a lot of potential contacts in the rest of latin america, and generally advising us... without him I'm sure we would've taken a lot longer to orientate, and not had nearly as much fun!

pengs: We have been even lamer than usual. Our jetlag meant that we were passing out at 6pm most nights, but Guillermo still managed to drag us out for a taste of LA's night life. One highlight was a "Mash-up" party last Friday night. Each song played is a mixture of at least 2 songs (sometimes 3, 4 or 5!). Imagine gun and roses mixed with the jackson 5. Or how about traditional hebrew music with cypress hill...! We boogied all night long. For more check out: www.bootiela.com (you can download their albums from the site for free).

We also went to a Hustler anniversary party in West Hollywood where we met porn stars and tried to sneak some pics of Larry Flynt.

Next mission: our surfboards :)