Hollywood Dreams | Los Angeles VLOG

Ok, so this is one of those backlog of images taken from our America trip that I thought I already shared with ya'll but actually haven't. I seriously can't count how much photos Pierre and I took during that whole month so much so that I have forgotten what we have. But here I found these and I wanted to recall what we did essentially on our very first day in LA. This was the day we went to Hollywood Boulevard.

For us living half way across the globe and only see Hollywood in the movies, our expectations of the place tend to be really high. It is, after all, romanticised as this glamorous place swarming with celebrities. Well, I hate to break it down to you but that's actually not the case. If you don't want me to spoilt the image of Hollywood then stop reading right now. You've been warned.

Hollywood is, in fact, old and dirty. Given it's the length of its, I guess that shouldn't be surprising. What I did find surprising though is that nothing in this place seems to be real. Everything is designed to please the eyes of curious tourists who all came with the same expectation based out of the movies. But this is not saying that we didn't enjoy our day strolling along the long avenue. I love anything that's theatrical, colourful, and surrounded by neon lights, and the whole strip is nothing short of them all. 

In the boulevard is where you'll find the typical attractions from the usual Madame Tussaud's Wax Museum and Ripley's Believe it or Not Museum to the more unusual and daring Escape Panic Rooms. Then there are the iconic, functioning theatres like the TCL Chinese Theatre and Dolby Theatre where you can watch movie screenings and the occasional premieres. And then of course, there's the Walk of Fame where. It's easy to trip walking around the boulevard when nearly everyone is looking down as they go, distracted by the names they see on the stars that they are walking on.

Though it's very unlikely you'll encounter an actual star or celebrity in this area flocked by nosy tourists and vendors selling day tours, souvenirs, and whatnot; you'll definitely see plenty of interesting-looking people, and by interesting I mean that in a broad spectrum of weirdos from the good, the bad, and the ugly. I don't want to be mean so let's just leave it at that. But I did have an awkward encounter involving a homeless person while I was vlogging so if you want to see that bit, scroll down to the end of this post to watch my vlog on this particular day.

Pierre and I rarely ever do tours or museums and the same goes for this trip. What we did all day was pretty much just walk around, window-shop, and eat in between. It's nice to just take in the whole area without doing so much as to entertaining ourselves. The only time I ever went crazy was when we came across this huge footlocker (the biggest one I've been to so far) right at the heard of the boulevard, and it's crazy seeing all the shoes that I can never find in Macau on display with full sizes in store for retail prices. It made me regret spending so much on make up and food earlier on when I could have spent all of my money on dope ass kicks. But then again, I didn't have enough luggage space (and room space so to speak) to take on some more pairs of shoes.

We also explored Sunset Boulevard which is adjacent to Hollywood Boulevard - it's where the most crowded In-n-Out burger branch is located, as well as Guitar Center. If you must know, wherever there's a music store at any city we go to, it's a must visit. And so we checked it out and the other music stores next to it. 

I tried to record as much as I could to share with ya'll in this video below so watch if you will and hope you enjoy. For now, let me get back to prepping for the next trip this weekend!

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Photos by Pierre Elma