Breaking up the trip on the way home to New Zealand for Christmas, we stopped off in LA for four days making the most of the hospitality offered by Jade and Nick.

I was quite impressed with Air New Zealand's recent plane upgrade giving us all our own movie screens and selectable menus with all the latest movies. Aaron was just commenting on how lucky we were not to be sitting next to screaming kids when a lady was moved next to us and spent the next 15 minutes complaining that this was her third move in the plane and how outrageously badly you were treated when travelling by yourself - oh well, them's the breaks and the headphones blocked her out quite nicely.

Neither of us had been to the states before and the first impression on walking out of the airport was how big everything was - the cars, trucks, roads, etc and this was further enforced when we opened Nick and Jade's fridge to find everything from mayonnaise to ketchup in jumbo size.

We saw a few of the sights, though only being there for 4 days meant that we had to forgo Disneyland in favour of Universal Studios, but I'm sure we'll be back that way sometime (or there is always Euro Disney in Paris). Nick and Jade took us to Venice Beach and Santa Monica, where all the freaks hang out - ask Aaron - I'm sure he'd describe it better than I would.

We also visited Hollywood, but apart from the stars on the footpath and the sign on the hill, there wasn't much to see and in actual fact, it was a bit of a dump.

Universal Studios was great fun and we filled in the whole day there. Arriving shortly after it opened on a Monday in winter (still >20 degrees though), it was really quiet and we didn't really have to queue for anything.

Spent a bit of time with Nick and Jade hanging out and got to go on a tour of Caltech University (a la Nick style) which was very picturesque especially compared to Canterbury. All pretty quiet as it was holiday time, but still nice to see what Nick does when he's pretending to be hard at work.