Doing Some Exploring

So today Claire and I drove to Burbank to sign up for Central Casting, a television and film extras agency. After filling out the 10 different pages necessary to sign up, we drove to Burbank and spent about 15 minutes just trying to find a place to park that wasn't in the red zone or a no-parking zone. When we finally found a parking space, we walked to Central Casting and were forced to stand in a line of about 80-90 people outside on the sidewalk waiting to get registered, just like us. This was truly the first time that I've ever seen "wannabes" in LA so that was a nice little surprise.

After waiting in line for a good half hour, they finally allow people to come inside and register. The line slowly begins to move towards the door when all of a sudden a woman says, "I'm sorry, but we have reached our capacity of 54 people for today. Please come back Wednesday to register." So I guess getting there a half an hour early wasn't good enough...

Because we were in Burbank and we didn't feel like going home just yet, Claire and I decided to drive to the mountains and overlook the city, which is something we haven't done yet since we have been here. We drove to Mulholland Drive in the Hollywood Hills and stopped at the Universal City Overlook. Looking out, I could see Universal Studios and   NBC Universal. Just while driving through Burbank we saw Walt Disney Studios, NBC Studios, ABC Studios, and Warner Bros Studios.

After looking upon downtown Burbank, we drove to the Hollywood Bowl Overlook and saw a close up of the Hollywood Sign, the Hollywood Bowl, and downtown Los Angeles and its surrounding cities. We even saw a glimpse of the ocean in the distance. It was a beautiful sight to see.

Today was definitely a busier day than usual. I officially begin my job at Abercrombie and Fitch on Thursday and I'm glad I'll have more income finally. Claire and I have a second interview tomorrow evening that is pretty flexible, so hopefully I'll have two jobs to keep me busy.

Well I think that is it for today. Thanks for reading!
Downtown LA pictures  

Burbank picture 

Living the LA Life

Well, I am going to begin blogging again. I was unable to blog for the past however many weeks because my apartment ended up not having wifi. So much has happened since I've been here, and I have no idea where to begin, so I guess I'll just work in chronological order.

As soon as we arrived in the LA area, San Bernardino to be exact, it started to get cloudy and it even rained for a little bit. And to top it all off, we got stuck in bumper to bumper traffic going about a mile every half hour. But once we passed the car accident that was holding everybody up, we were right on our way. I've never driven in LA before, however I quickly had to learn how to drive here. So after about another hour, we exited off the freeway and parked at our apartment. The first thing I noticed was that our apartment was on a very non-busy street and surrounded by trees.

After a few days of being moved in, we decided to try out the Metro and see where it can take us. We walked down to the Del Mar station, bought our TAP card after several tries, and finally boarded the train. Once we were on the train we had no idea where to get off at. We wanted to go to Hollywood and I knew that Union Station in Downtown Los Angeles would probably be our best shot at getting there. So we got off at Union Station and got on the Metro red line to North Hollywood. We got off at Hollywood/Vine and as soon as we walked out of the Metro we saw the big, bright buildings of Hollywood Boulevard. We walked the Walk of Fame sidewalks until night. We visited the Hollywood sign and the Chinese theatre.

About two nights later we decided to visit West Hollywood. The tricky part about this was that the Metro rail system doesn't go to West Hollywood, not yet anyway. So we were forced to take the Gold line to Union Station and then take a bus to West Hollywood. We just so happened to go on a night that the Dodgers were playing a game, so the bus got stuck in traffic for a good half hour. But after we visited West Hollywood and we were ready to go home, we got on the bus and tried to remember where we were supposed to get off to get back to Union Station. We guessed which stop to get off and ended up somehow walking the wrong way. And just so you know, we were walking around at midnight in downtown LA, with scary homeless people all around us. After walking around trying to find Union Station for about a half hour, we ended up calling a cab because at this point we just gave up. At about 1 or 2 AM, we finally made it back home to Pasadena.

More recently, however, we have been focused on applying for jobs. I applied at Abercrombie and Fitch on Colorado Blvd in Pasadena and got hired a few days ago. I'm a little excited about getting a job, making money, making friends, and actually doing something with my life, but I am also a little sad about not being able to do nothing all day.

Some more interesting facts about what has happened recently is that while in Target shopping for groceries, we were confronted by some man who offered us free tickets to a pre-screening of Reese Witherspoon's new movie The Good Lie. So last Wednesday we went to this pre-screening and at the end we were lucky enough to talk with people about how we felt about the movie. The whole point of pre-screenings is to get audience reactions so the makers of the movie can make it better. This was definitely a nice experience and we already have tickets for another pre-screening movie in the future.

The last bit of big news recently is that Claire and I applied for a site called Seatfillers to be seat fillers on an award show. Basically, a seat fillers job is to take a celebrities seat whenever they leave to use the bathroom or whatever. They are there to simply make the audience look full all the time. So we applied for this about 2 weeks ago and we both got an email today telling us that we got accepted for this show next Friday night. So we will be attending the Alma Awards next Friday night as seat fillers! I am even more excited about this because if I do good, then they will ask me to do other award shows, including the Grammys and the Oscars.

So thats whats been up. LA is definitely beginning to get a little more exciting and I am anxious to see what else it has in store for me.