Dancing with the Stars!

After taking a pic in front of the Chan family grocery store, we began Sunday at Venice Beach, where Casey and Greer touched the Pacific Ocean for the first time. Rachael was dying to find someone on roller blades being pulled by dogs, and sure enough her dream came true (twice). We walked down the boardwalk, looking into all of the shops and spotting some very interesting people along the way. We stopped to watch the weightlifters (men and women) at Muscle beach for a little while; their veins looked ready to jump out of their skin. Our favorites, of course, were the old wrinkly ones in American flag speedos and no teeth. These people work out here for the pure joy of showing off their muscles to onlookers, and one enormous weightlifter was very eager to explain to us how detrimental our failure to take Latin or Greek in college would be for our future. According to him, we had not received a complete liberal arts education. He continued to feed us a lot of baloney about the definition of university until we finally got bored and walked away. Thank you, kind man who spends every day practically naked doing push ups in front of a lot of teenage girls. Thank you for teaching us college graduates the true definition of education.

We ate lunch at the famous In-and-out-burger. We’ve learned from our Californian hosts that there is a secret menu for this place so we ordered off it, feeling very proud to have access to this undisclosed information. If anyone just HAS to know the secrets, you can pay us a substantial amount of money and we’ll let you in.

Alex drove us around Beverly Hills, where we followed a tour bus around for a while, stopping each time the bus did in front of what we assumed was a famous person’s house and then making up our own stories for who must live there. We also drove through Santa Monica Boulevard (blaring the Sheryl Crow song in honor of Casey’s dad), Rodeo drive, and the Hollywood area where we parked and walked around for a bit. We saw all the characters dressed up as famous people, the cement blocks where actors have signed their names in front of the Chinese Theatre, and Star shapes with names of actors written in them. Some cartoon characters like Snow White and Kermit the frog get to be on a star, but Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen have to share one. This area was PACKED. Alex has a special behind the scenes book of walking tours of LA, and with this he led us up stairs and steep neighborhood streets lined with pretty houses so we could get as close to the Hollywood sign as possible. It was nice to toughen up our calves a bit… our lifestyle makes exercise close to impossible.

The Marilyn Monroe square above has quite an interesting story. First, notice that her shoe prints only have a small hole. This is because she wore heels when she made her footprints. Also, you may notice a little something different above the "i" in Marilyn. Originally, she wanted her "i" to be dotted with a diamond. After she was told this would not be allowed, she opted to take out her rhinestone earring and stick it into the concrete. Of course, part of it was stolen and it is now filled in with a clear, concrete substance. Oh, Marilyn Monroe. She was a character!

We went back to Alex’s to pack up our stuff, and then drove to the Hunt home (Caroline’s family friends) where we would spend the night. We had a jaw-dropping experience as we walked into the gate surrounding their house. We’re just gonna be blunt and say it was bigger and nicer than any house any of us had ever been to in our lives. Our evening there was like staying at a 5 star hotel; they had several friends over and Chelsea, who is a master chef, cooked and entertained us all night long. All of our courses added up to about 4 dinners, and we wrapped up the night in the hot tub/pool out back.

Funny story: A few days before, the family had woken up to find a bear sitting in this exact hot tub. After finding the bear, Mrs. Hunt gave her parents (who live in a little house behind the pool) an air horn incase they ever found another bear or mountain lion in the backyard. Her father misunderstood, however, and thought he was supposed to blow the horn every morning before he let the dogs out, just incase. So the Hunt family woke up one morning at 5:30 am to the deafening sound. Mrs. Hunt began screaming, shaking Mr. Hunt, exclaiming that there was a bear in the backyard. Mr. Hunt grabbed his golf clubs and they ran outside in their pajamas to attack! Wish we could have seen THAT.