[California Dream] Day 01/02 : Exploring the City of Los Angeles

Both Baby and I love visiting the United States, as we love the shopping, food, theme parks, and pop-art culture, but most importantly, there are less social pressures as we find it more liberal there with less restrictions in the states in managing our daily outings. Our last visit to the Los Angeles was 3 years ago, back in 2023!

This time, one of the main reasons on why we chose visiting Los Angeles again is to fulfil Hayboy’s California Dream! Baby didn’t do much preparation as we were pretty familiar with Los Angeles. We took a direct flight with Singapore Airlines.

We were delighted with the amenities that Premium Economy offered, which included priority boarding, comfortable leg room with a leg rest, a spacious seat with substantial allowance for back reclining, as well as Noise Cancellation Headphones. Apart from that, we had the option to 'Book the Cook' (BTC) prior to our departure from Business Class Food choices. We could also order champagne from the Business Class drink list.

We had 2 meals on board which adhered to the SG > US timing. We had dinner and lunch, and both my meals were under Book the Cook (BTC). I had Wanton Noodles as my supper and Nasi Goreng with Chicken Satay as lunch.

The entire journey to Los Angeles International Airport (LAX) was about 15+ hours and I literally felt that I was spending almost a whole day flying in the sky! A cool point to note, Singapore flights provided unlimited access to Wi-Fi on board, and I loved that they had a few USB ports available at every passenger's seat and this made it easier to charge our phones at the same time before leaving the aircraft. After what must have felt like an eternity, I was delighted to see that the seat-screen was showing that our destination was close!

We landed at LAX airport at around 9.30pm local time. Note, Los Angeles is about 16 hours behind us in Singapore, which means we literally earned a day in the States. Well sort of, as we still need to fly back at the end... but oh well.

After clearing US customs which is usually the most difficult part for us every time we come to the States, but it was a breeze this time with the boy with us. We headed straight to look for the car rental shuttle. Prior to our trip, we had pre-booked our car online, and we took the shuttle bus from the airport to the car rental company to register and to collect our car. We were all set for our trip after collecting our car!

Our Airbnb location was located within the East Hollywood area. Baby drove us there after a half an hour drive as he was trying to familiarize himself back with the left-hand drive.

We reached our Airbnb at almost midnight, and this lovely place was my ‘home’ for 7 days in Los Angeles. I can now confidently say that for longer stays, Airbnb is a better alternative to the usual hotels in the States. The location was good, and the neighbourhood seemed safe. It had really good Wi-Fi too!

Our Mandatory first meal in Los Angeles is always at the famous Pink's Hot Dogs in Hollywood which is located at La Brea. It was about a 8 to 10 minutes drive from our Airbnb, but we decided to have some supper to beat our jet-lag!

As usual, I had the ‘Lord of the Rings Dog’, and the dog is topped with bready onion rings which was slathered with generous zippy BBQ sauce. I enjoyed it very much.

Baby and I were glad that Hayboy loved it too!

We drove back to our Airbnb after our meal, and we rested a while before our shower. We headed straight to bed after our long flight, as we wanted to charge up on our energy levels in order to explore the lovely city of Los Angeles the very next day, but jet-lag is seriously no joke. We could not sleep until around 4am in the morning! The adjustment of the irregular sleeping hours took 2-3 days for us to get used to the US timings. OMG! How siaaaaaa, the return leg to SG was going to be dreadful.

Good morning, and we woke up at 7.30am to start our day. Oh wow, we spotted the ‘Hollywood Sign’ from our Airbnb!

We did a short drive to the popular eatery place at Sunset Blvd - Egg Tuck for brekkie. It is a delightful gem that specializes in Korean-inspired egg sandwiches served on freshly baked brioche bread.

We LOVE LOVE LOVE the fluffy and delicious egg sandwiches.

Eggtuck is Eggtastic! The only thing that wasn't perfect was that there was no seating area at the branch we visited, and we needed to eat them somewhere else.

We started our outing by driving ourselves to Melrose Ave to visit the famous Paul Smith Pink Wall. It is dubbed as the most Instagrammable spot in the city.

We drove to The Grove for some shopping and to have our lunch too.

The Grove is an outdoor shopping mall, with a layout of a small village. While the Baby and the Boy went over to the NIKE Store to check out hoop shoes, I came across an outdoor event - SALLY COLOR Fest. I joined in the fun by doing registration. I was handed a generous tote bag which contained many hair and nails products upon entering the premises.

We didn’t make an advance reservation for The Cheesecake Factory, so we waited like 10mins to be ushered to our table. It is known a popular restaurant chain in Los Angeles. It fills up quickly and often has a long line, so getting a reservation is recommended.