{"id":9996,"date":"2013-01-15T15:29:56","date_gmt":"2013-01-15T05:29:56","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/?p=9996"},"modified":"2016-08-28T09:35:32","modified_gmt":"2016-08-27T23:35:32","slug":"los-angeles","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/?p=9996","title":{"rendered":"Blogs From America – Los Angeles"},"content":{"rendered":"

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Los Angeles<\/strong><\/h1>\n

Flying into Los Angeles from Brisbane is basically embarking on the longest day of your life.\u00a0 We flew out of Brisbane Airport at 10am, sat on the plane for 14 hours, then landed in LAX on the same day<\/em> at 7am.\u00a0 If you don’t get some sleep on the plane, you’ve got a seriously long day ahead of you.<\/p>\n

We didn’t have time for sleeping in or feeling jet lagged.\u00a0 Los Angeles was the first stop of our three week holiday in America.\u00a0 We only had one day in Los Angeles so we tried to make the most of it.\u00a0 Unlike the other cities, we didn’t really plan anything for L.A.\u00a0 We were just going to do the touristy stuff and spend 24 hours to take in the whole ‘being in America’ experience.<\/p>\n

Tipping and Minimum Wage<\/strong><\/p>\n

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Arriving at the hotel from the airport gave me a first taste for tipping.\u00a0 You’re supposed to tip 10% to the taxi driver.\u00a0 So a forty dollar ride to Downtown Los Angeles means you’re handing over $44.\u00a0 The bell boy at the hotel takes your bags.\u00a0 You check in.\u00a0 When you get to the room, you tip a-dollar-a-bag to the porter who brings the bags to your room.\u00a0 Then make sure you have another couple of bucks set aside because you’re supposed to tip the cleaning service too.<\/p>\n

You get used to this system but I find the whole thing pretty stupid really.\u00a0 America is a country with a criminally low minimum wage – $2.13 per hour if you work a ‘tippable job’, $7.25 if you’re not<\/strong> – and basically you, the customer, are subsidizing a gigantic portion of the salary of the staff in low income jobs.\u00a0 In the case of tipping staff, you’re literally paying them more than 70% of their income<\/em>.\u00a0 In the non-tipping Western world, employee salaries comprise one of the biggest operational costs for a business.\u00a0 In America, your front line staff are paid almost nothing because cultural conditioning means that customers pay them for you.<\/p>\n

Which explains why the country has a ton of millionaires (the famous ‘One Percenters’) but 52% of household incomes\u00a0 in America earn less than $50,000.\u00a0 The average income for a male in Australia ($52,000) is greater than the combined household income of over half of America<\/em>.<\/p>\n

If you ever want to read about what its like living off a minimum wage income in America, I recommend Nickel and Dimed<\/a>, in which a Washington Post<\/em> journalist spends a year trying to live off minimum wage jobs.<\/p>\n

Needless to say, I was rather sad when I saw people working minimum wage jobs.\u00a0 Unlike Australia where service industry jobs and fast food restaurants are typically staffed by students, backpackers and teenagers, there were plenty of middle aged people and Mexican immigrants working these jobs in America.\u00a0 The thought of a grown man or woman slugging their guts out in a diner for seven bucks an hour bummed me out.<\/p>\n

Downtown Los Angeles<\/strong><\/p>\n

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A $7 breakfast at The Pantry<\/p><\/div>\n

Our first stop was getting some breakfast at a diner.\u00a0 The hotel concierge recommended The Pantry<\/em> and he was right on the money.\u00a0 The Pantry<\/a> is a well established eatery in Downtown, running 24 hours a day since 1924.\u00a0 It is exactly the type of experienced I wanted as a first taste of America.<\/p>\n

Even at 7am, there was a queue to get in, such is the venue’s popularity.\u00a0 Actually, maybe its an American thing.\u00a0 We queued for just about everything.\u00a0 Lining up in front of me were three middle aged men.\u00a0 Well, there were two of them and they anxiously awaited the arrival of a third who turned up late.\u00a0 They bantered back and forth about work, about one guy’s bad knee and about the news that some NFL player had committed a murder-homicide<\/a> over the weekend.\u00a0 After a while, I picked up on their names.\u00a0 Slick Rick, Spanky and Dale.\u00a0 I was delighted.\u00a0 What wonderfully American names!\u00a0 They were more or less how I imagined the American working class to be – overweight, carrying medical ailments and with infectiously cheery dispositions.<\/p>\n

Diner food is cheap.\u00a0 An order of magnitude cheaper than an Aussie breakfast.\u00a0 Five bucks gets you several rashers of bacon, a couple of eggs, practically an entire loaf of bread (buttered) and for a couple of bucks more, you get a ‘steak’ that has the texture and consistency of a shoe.\u00a0 Coffee is percolated and 50 cents, with unlimited refills.\u00a0 And I don’t mean you can go to the counter and ask for more.\u00a0 Your server will continually walk past and top you up.\u00a0 I think I had about four cups of coffee at that place.\u00a0 Day One Enthusiasm meant I had a good go at eating the steak but it was too big and chewy for me to finish.\u00a0 Still, I loved the whole experience.\u00a0 The service was fast, efficient and friendly.\u00a0 After breakfast, we went for a stroll.\u00a0 It was time to go exploring.<\/p>\n

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The Pantry Cafe – operating since 1924. It seems to permanently have a line of customers out the door<\/p><\/div>\n

We made a mistake not getting a car.\u00a0 We should’ve done our homework and I even had a friend advise against visiting Los Angeles if you don’t have one.\u00a0 L.A is a giant sprawling city and its pretty hard to get around without hiring a car.\u00a0 Our hotel was in Downtown L.A so we tried exploring and didn’t get very far.\u00a0 There are non-descript buildings that run for miles in every direction and although we would occasionally walk past a famous landmark like the Staples Center, its not particularly interesting in the middle of the day.<\/p>\n

Downtown also has some pretty creepy people wandering around, even at 7am.\u00a0 We walked past plenty of unsavoury people like hobos, drug dealers and a random crazy person swearing at the top of their voice.\u00a0 Not really what we wanted first thing in the morning.\u00a0 We decided the best way to see the city on short notice was to get on one of those ubiquitous Hop On Hop Off bus tours.<\/p>\n

Beverly Hills, Santa Monica Boulevard, Hollywood…zzzzzzz….
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The Hop On Hop Off bus tour is a pretty cheap and hassle free way to see the best that Los Angeles has to offer.\u00a0 Unfortunately for me, I didn’t find Los Angeles all that interesting.\u00a0 Our bus tour took us to the Chinese Theatre, the Hollywood Walk of Fame, the luxury shops in Burbank, the Sunset Strip where famous Hollywood parties occur and…uh, yeah.\u00a0 I think I’m not the target demographic for the typical Hollywood tour at all<\/em>.\u00a0 It would probably be the dream tour for a regular subscriber to Womens Weekly<\/em> or for someone who reads TMZ<\/em>.\u00a0 The tour guide excitedly points out locations like where Tom Hanks was seen having coffee or where Kim Kardashian shops for evening wear.\u00a0 I’m pretty sure it wasn’t the jet lag that was making me fall asleep.\u00a0 Worst still, the tour had a rather dubious and salacious nature about it when it drove to ‘landmarks’ like the Viper Pit where you can take a photo of the gutter where River Phoenix OD’ed and died.\u00a0 Er, no thanks.<\/p>\n

An observation about getting around in Los Angeles:\u00a0 it pretty much has the worst set of roads in the world.\u00a0 There is frequently horrible trafffic jams where even multi-lane freeways get backed up for miles.\u00a0 And if you’re lucky enough to be out on the open road, then you get the pleasure of bouncing around some of the crappiest streets I’ve seen since Jalan Kota Batu in the Eighties.\u00a0 All the roads have massive cracks, pot holes and several different shades of tarmac coated on top of one another.\u00a0 I don’t understand how a city that is home to a billion dollar industry like Hollywood apparently lacks the infrastructure to have roads that don’t look like they came from the stone age.<\/p>\n

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Roads in LA – not all they’re cracked up to be<\/p><\/div>\n

In the end we spent the afternoon stocking up on winter clothing at a department store on Santa Monica pier and then spent three hours getting back to our hotel.\u00a0 It took two hour on the Hop On Hop Off tour bus and then we got waylaid by a dodgy cab driver who deliberately took us through traffic to get us back to the hotel.<\/p>\n

All in all, I didn’t really care much for Los Angeles.\u00a0 It’s sprawling, falling apart at the seams and lacking in character.\u00a0 The American holiday started on a slightly dour note but it picked up rapidly after the first day.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Los Angeles Flying into Los Angeles from Brisbane is basically embarking on the longest day of your life.\u00a0 We flew out of Brisbane Airport at 10am, sat on the plane for 14 hours, then landed in LAX on the same day at 7am.\u00a0 If you don’t get some sleep on the plane, you’ve got a …<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":6,"featured_media":14589,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[15,1804],"tags":[1475,1488,1489],"class_list":["post-9996","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-blog","category-travel-blog","tag-blogs-from-america","tag-los-angeles","tag-tipping"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9996","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/6"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=9996"}],"version-history":[{"count":15,"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9996\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":20282,"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/9996\/revisions\/20282"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/14589"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=9996"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=9996"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.thefatwebsite.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=9996"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}