13 May:
Worst plane trip ever! Air NZ is one of the worst airlines I’ve ever flown. Not to mention the baby that cried the entire 11 and ½ hour flight. Although I did think Air NZ redeemed themselves a little by actually having earplugs upon request. However even though they were good earplugs, they just weren’t enough to drown out the 11 hour tantrum baby.

Customs in LA surprisingly took only 30 mins. Not as easy as arriving in Amsterdam, but I don’t see what the fuss is about. I tried looking for a rental car company but you have to get on this shuttle of the specific company to go there and there was no way I was getting lost in LA before the trip has even started!

I was meeting Ms. X at the airport and 5 hours after my plane landed, hers landed and we met up and went to this hotel called the “Airport Park View” or something in Inglewood. At dusk it seemed OK, but at night, it really did get dodgy. If the chicken bones in the elevator...

...and the number falling off the door, and the curtain falling off the bent rail didn’t give us a clue about the area, we definitely got the idea when we walked to the nearby Food Mart. The dodgyness was definitely confirmed when a large middle-aged Asian man beckoned to us from the roadside. He then came under our window (we were on the 2nd floor) and started talking to us! We didn’t understand WTF he was saying but we did understand that he wanted our room number! To put it bluntly, fuck that. And the worst part was we couldn’t shut the curtains because they were broken!

Luckily we devised an excellent plan on how to shut the curtains. We tied them with a hair tie:



If this doesn’t sound nightmarish enough for you, there is more. We passed an empty lot on the way to Food Mart that smelt funky. We believed a dead body was concealed there given the surroundings, the smell was that bad! Upon our arrival back to the hotel we tried to use the payphone as our room phone was cut off (they wanted a deposit) but no, the payphone wasn’t working either. On the way back to our room we got harassed buy some wasted guy who wanted us to party with him. Hell no. We decided that one last trip to make the phone deposit was necessary, then barricaded ourselves in the room until dawn with no sleep. We couldn’t get through to any of our US team mates to come and rescue us!