Hollywood and Universal Studios

Today's game plan was to see the tourist sites at Hollywood and see Universal Studios. This day was jam packed; people said it would be tough to see everything, especially without a car. Before we even started the day we were running behind schedule. Stoop being the lazy guy he is couldn't get his ass out of bed on time, therefore we got out of the house 30 minutes after we had planned. After grabbing breakfast, we went to go buy our tickets for Universal on the UCLA campus because it was cheaper than at the park. The campus was massive and beautiful, but we saw more of it than we had hoped to. We got ridiculously lost, and somehow ended up wandering into a hospital. After eventually getting our tickets, our next destination was Hollywood via public transit. Finding a bus, yet alone the correct bus proved to be quite difficult. An hour and a half after we expected to be on our way to Hollywood, we finally got on a bus heading to Hollywood.

The bus ended up being a good choice because we passed a lot of famous landmarks as the bus drove down Santa Monica Blvd. The driver was nice enough to act as our tour guide for the bus ride and point out some of the sites. Once we got there, we had to rush through Hollywood as we were running behind schedule. We wandered up and down the street - saw the starts on the Walk of Fame. Once satisfied, we made our way to Universal Studios.

Somehow, we got to Universal Studios at 2 o'clock - the time we planned to get there. We went to the information booth, and they told us that we probably would not be able to see everything in 6 hours before the park closed, so we had to rush in order to try and see everything.. The first attraction we saw was a haunted house. It was pitch black, and there were people in there dressed up in scary costumes jumping out at you. It was quite scary; Stoop screamed like a girl, and after that I was laughing uncontrollably as he wanted to leave. Our next stop was the backlot tour, where they drive you through a number of sets from different movies. They also show you some cool special effects from different movies, and how they are done. They had sets from War of the Worlds, Psycho, Jaws, Fast and the Furious: Tokyo Drift, and Desperate Housewives - just to name a few.

wreckage from War of the Worlds

We then went to go on Jurassic Park - the ride, and The Mummy Returns. We got there, and the lineup was at least 45 minutes. We then realized there was probably no way we were going to be able to see the entire park. As we were walking through the line, we saw a sign for a different lineup for single riders. This line was much shorter; to keep a story short, we only waited about 10 minutes for each ride, which ended up saving the day for us. The Mummy returns was an awesome ride. It was an indoor roller coaster that went both forwards and backwards. In addition, it shot the car from zero to 100 km/hr in 1.6 seconds; that was freakin awesome! At the end of the day we ended up seeing everything we wanted to, but barely. We had to sprint across the park in order to see the last show - Water World, but we ended up making it.
We got back to the UCLA house and partied well into the night.