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Day 7: Monday 23rd April 
After a lovely 11 hours sleep and breakfast at Swingers, I called my parents to let them know all was well and tell them about the wedding. Heather phoned her parents only to find out that Ashley still wasn't back and had had to spend the night in Chicago. This done, we walked about half a mile down the road to a shop called Kinkos where we could check our e-mail account and mail all our friends to let them know we were now a happily married couple. Directly opposite Kinkos was a new shopping mall, the Beverly Centre, so we thought we'd have a look around it. Unfortunately it was a bit up-market for what we were looking for, although Heather did buy some things from the Body Shop that are unavailable in the U.K., so it wasn't a complete waste of time. It was really hot in L.A., but our desire to shop still had to be sated, so we told the hotel manager what we were after (clothes for Heather, CDs for me) and he suggested Melrose Place which was a few minutes walk away. This was definitely what we wanted, loads of clothes shops and second-hand CD shops. The first shop we entered was a record shop and we had never seen anything like it, the owner claimed to have a stock of half a million L.P.s in the shop, with a further quarter of a million in his garage/lockup at his home. The records were all jazz, blues, classical, and swing (not really my sort of thing), but we spent 20 minutes in there looking at old Glen Miller records for Heather's dad. 
For the rest of the afternoon we cruised up and down Melrose, popping in and out of shops, trying things on, and spending money. If you have ever been to Camden Market on a weekend you will have some kind of idea of the shops on Melrose, skate shops, record shops, places to eat, and shops selling L.A. rock gear. We had some food at a burger franchise called Johnny Rockets that served an excellent burger and fries and a delicious vanilla milk shake that Heather became instantly addicted to. We had some interesting conversations with people in shops, especially one guy in a record shop who was totally mad about British music. He religiously read the N.M.E. every week for news about bands in the U.K. and tried to see them whenever they visited Los Angeles where they would play small clubs as opposed to the large venues they would play in Britain. All the shops were closing so we headed back to the hotel clutching our purchases, stopping off at a bakery to get some pastries for breakfast. The rest of the evening was taken up with a film we caught on television, a re-make of Village of the Damned which is based on the book Midwich Cuckoos by John Wyndham, one of our favourite authors. |
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