God bless America!

Los Angeles is a city with many different personalities – all of them dysfunctional. Downtown is a muddle of shabby and chic. There are boarded up old theatres, run down hotels (including ours) and discount stores but then in amongst that are trendy loft apartments, artisan bakeries and expensive restaurants. Vagrants, beggars and loonies roam, stagger and limp the grubby streets but then so do trendy media types and go-getting executives in power suits. We found ourselves dodging incoherent appeals for money one minute and overhearing a beyond-pretentious analysis of a $500 pop-up book the next. The backdrop to this part of the city is a brilliant jigsaw of old buildings adorned with vintage painted adverts and funky contemporary murals, while the soundtrack is a near-constant cacophony of sirens and helicopters. If nothing else, it feels edgy and exciting.

Then there's Hollywood, a word that conjures up glamour and fame. Hollywood, in reality, has an air of cheapness and desperation. Hollywood Boulevard is home to the famous "Walk Of Fame", a series of stars set into the pavement carrying the names of celebrities past and present. I'm not sure what the criteria is to receive a star but everyone seems to have one – even fictitious characters like Kermit The Frog, Tinkerbell and Shrek. It even turns out that I have one – though that could possibly belong to my namesake who founded 20th Century Fox. The street is also home to a wide variety of oddballs desperately trying to earn a buck in anyway they can, whether it be dressing as Yoda for a photo opportunity or sitting in a litter bin begging. We also visited the Hollywood Forever Cemetery, hoping to see some of the final resting places of the rich and famous – but we could only find one of The Ramones and the dog from The Wizard Of Oz.

If Hollywood is where people go to try to 'make it' then Beverly Hills is where people go once they have made it. It's a place to go when you have a bank balance that by far outweighs any sense of taste and logic you may have. We saw sunglasses REDUCED to $600, we saw the most appalling fashion available to man and we saw the world's most expensive road car with the world's worst paint job. We saw the Beverly Wilshire, a hotel that prides itself on being a prestige establishment, but that was happy to be featured in Pretty Woman as the location in which Richard Gere seduces a prostitute.

LA's dichotomy continues elsewhere too. While the streets are full of people begging for food, pampered dogs are provided with iced water outside posh boutiques and get to choose their own treats from a specialist dog bakery. Los Angeles is supposedly the home of movies, we saw filming taking place everywhere, and yet it was really difficult to find a cinema where we could actually watch a film.

Confused and bemused by the city, we took ourselves off to the seaside and Manhattan Beach. This was much calmer. This was an area full of art galleries, trendy housing and healthy living. In fact for the first time since being in the States we saw people actually jogging, cycling and rollerskating. There were people playing volleyball on the beach and surfing in the sea. It's like all the big unhealthy people in the middle of the country had driven all the smaller, fitter people to the coast. It was a nice relaxing place to spend our last couple of days before catching our flight home. And so our adventure ends. Before we came to America, I had preconceptions. I thought the friendliness would be fake and irritating but actually I've enjoyed meeting people who, on the whole, have been generous, genuinely helpful and genuinely nice. I was worried that, as a country, it would be very 'samey' and lack the diversity which we've seen in Europe and Asia but it's actually been the most dramatic and I leave wishing that I'd been able to see more of it. Everything IS bigger over there – the people, the cars, the landscapes, the portions – but now so is my fondness for it. God bless America!

BURGER OF THE WEEK
As this will be my last American burger I thought I'd make it a good one. It was from a bar called Five O Four on Hollywood Boulevard – right next to the William Fox star! How about that for serendipity?! A half pound Angus beef burger topped with lobster, lobster bisque, red onion and ginger orange cream cheese, all served on a sweet Hawaiian bun. D-E-L-I-C-I-O-U-S-!