MY EXPERIENCES IN CALIFORNIA : Chapter 10

SPOILER ALERT: If you ever plan to visit Universal studios in the near future, you would be advised to skip reading this post because I have described a few of its rides. It would spoil the suspense if you knew about the rides before you embarked on them.

CHAPTER 10: UNIVERSAL STUDIOS

We were really tired after the last two grueling days, where we would’ve walked at least 15 miles in total, but then we were really excited to go to the parts of LA that everyone knows about- Hollywood. We breakfasted in the hotel and drove into LA in its heavy morning rush hour traffic, further compounded by the rain pouring down.

We got to Universal studios in an hour and entered inside. The weather was pretty gloomy and that cheerfulness of Disneyland wasn’t quite there in Universal studious but there was plenty to look forward to.

We first went to the horror house, which we realized we would find silly if we don’t act scared and get into it, which is the mistake we did in Disneyland and so found it lame. Sometimes, when you convince your mind something is going to be a particular way, then however it actually is, your mind would look at it from angles to make it appear the way you convinced yourself it would look. And this strategy worked, and we enjoyed it a lot as we found quite a few things scary. Mummies, and ghouls, and ghosts, and banshees, and Frankensteins and so many other creatures tried to scare us all and the way the five of us ran from them and pushed and jumped into each other, reminded me of Scooby doo and his pals.

Then we went to the Jurassic park ride. It was a rollercoaster through Jurassic with many dinosaurs popping up at the sides. They were quite realistic and their roars were quite scary. But nothing could have prepared us for the final part where the cart went to a height and we were going to plummet into water and as we were going down with full speed, a tyrannosaurus appeared out of the water and opened its mouth wide and we just went scraping the dinosaur. That was pretty thrilling.

Then we went to the Mummy ride, which was a 4D ride in some ways. It was again a rollercoaster ride, where we travelled through many a dark cave and seeing mummies and sphinxes popping up. Finally the cart stopped abruptly at one point and when our eyes got adjusted to the darkness, we saw that we were confronted by a cave wall in front. Then suddenly the wall opened and we could see a lot of rats scram out (a la Mummy movie). Just at the point where they should’ve been under our carts, we could suddenly get a ticklish feeling on our feet as if rats were really going past us. It was an eerie feeling, and being the reptile-phobic person that I am, I almost squealed and tried to force their legs upwards. Then suddenly the wall closed and our cart went backwards full speed, retracing the path it had taken to get there. That was really unique, as it was the first rollercoaster that I had been on which went backwards. After a lot of screaming, we got out of the cart dizzy.

Then we went to the ride, which when I think about still gives me the goose bumps. Those 5 minutes on that ride would undoubtedly be the best 5 minutes in my life. That was the Simpsons ride! I wasn’t looking to the ride as much because I was not exactly the biggest Simpsons fan around. That would be JB. He was a huge Simpsons freak, who has been following the series for over 10 years (I guess he started watching it when he was about 10 before which he used to watch only BAYWATCH as a kid… what an innocent kid!!!). He was as thrilled at seeing the ride as I would be if I were at Old Trafford watching Manchester United play. So we went in and sat on a small cart, which accommodated 8 people in two rows. Suddenly everything around us became dark and what happened after that cannot be described by words. You have to be there to know the feeling. I’ll try to put it into words though. Suddenly the world around us transformed into Krustyland. We could see tracks on which our cart stood and there were so many Simpsons characters around us in 3D. I was sure if I jumped out of the cart I could touch them but when I peeped out of the cart, I could see that the tracks our cart was on was high above the ground. I sat back into my seat securely, not knowing how long I would be plummeting if I fell. Suddenly the cart started moving, and it took us through Krustyland, where many characters like Bart, Homer, Apu interacted with us at different junctures. Suddenly Krusty came to the track ahead of us and blew up a part of it and our cart plummeted to the ground for a few seconds before another track caught us and we continued. It was so realistic that I really felt like a character in Krustyland. Our cart stopped and it became dark again and only when the lights were switched on, I realized we were actually on a ride in Universal studios.

I studied the surroundings and the cart and realization dawned upon us that we had actually been sitting on a stable cart which could just rotate 360 degrees. The walls, floor, ceiling were actually massive screens on which images of Krustyland would be projected. Tracks would be projected to the floor to make it appear to us as if our cart was on the track and the whole picture was moving backward to make it appear as if we are moving forward. When we plummeted down, our cart would have rotated 90 degrees towards the floor. The whole thing was so well coordinated that we totally fell for it. I knew about tears of joy and tears of sorrow but at that moment what tears of disbelief meant when it formed in my eyes. I was goose-pimpled from head to toe. It was such cutting-edge virtual reality that the name virtual reality is demeaning to describe it- it was REAL.

It took us a few minutes to recover from the shock of having experienced such a wonderful ride. We then went outside and posed for pictures with the whole Simpsons family. JB was almost in tears at the end of all this. I was quite overwhelmed too, not being a big follower of the show, so I don’t blame him.

Then we grabbed some lunch and went to the terminator 4D show. It was a reenactment of terminator scenes, with an Arnold-lookalike riding a huge bike and carrying guns and blowing up the bad guys et al. It was rather disappointing. Then we went to the Shrek 4D show, which was really cool. We were given 3D glasses and we followed the 3D Shrek and his comrades on their adventures on screen, only that when it rained on the screen, water fell on us etc. That’s why it was called 4D.

We also went for a guided tour of Universal studios where we were taken through lots of sets used in real Hollywood films. We were shown a real film simulation of car explosions, of artificial floods etc. It was a great experience.

Sets from the movie "Psycho"

A car used in the movie "Animal House" "Psycho" moving with his dagger

SETS FROM "THE FAST AND FURIOUS"

SIMULATION OF AN EXPLOSION IN THE MOVIE

SETS FROM "JAWS"

SIMULATION OF A RAIN AND A FLOOD

A BOEING CRASH SET

After that, JD and I got our caricatures made by a couple of artists there. It came out pretty well, though it wasn’t as exaggerated as a caricature should be. It was more of a portrait, but then I am not complaining as it was something to remember the place by. At about 4 o clock, we left Universal studios thoroughly satisfied. We had more places to visit that night.

We then drove along the streets of the part of LA that the whole world knows about- Beverly Hills and Hollywood. We drove to Sunset blvd, the LA traffic nicely negotiated by MS who had was driving with as much ease as a guy who would have been driving there for years and parked our car in the car park of a big shopping mall. We had to note down every detail of where we had parked it, lest we can’t locate where we put it amidst the thousands of cars parked there. We walked out of the mall, which was easily the largest I had been to, and it was one of the average sized malls there apparently. We walked onto the streets and it was drizzling.

We walked on the street for sometime before reaching sunset blvd, where we walked on the famous starred path, where the name of a celebrity was engraved on each star-shaped stone on the pavement. We saw the names of most of the famous Hollywood actors, actresses, producers, directors, and any other famous person in their tinsel town.

LMAO!!!!!!!!!! Of all the celebs!!!

There was also another thing we realized- how different and unrepresentative Davis was to the US cities. In Davis, pedestrians are given first priority and even if a car is speeding at 80 mph, if they see a pedestrian standing on a crossroad, they’ll brake to a halt and ask the pedestrian to cross. Only when the pedestrian is safely across the road, will the car take off. I guess the people who are in minority are often considered maybe even respected in any society and that was the case here as a guy in a car wouldn’t see and thereby have to stop for more than a few pedestrians every day, most of who would be Indian students like us, with a negative income (L), who couldn’t afford a car. It wasn’t like in India where most of the people are pedestrians and if cars stopped to let them cross, there would be no moving traffic at all at any crossroad. Having been this “elite” class of pedestrians the past 4 months in Davis, we were used to the respect and expecting that in LA too, we just tried to cross a road even when a car was speeding towards us in the distance expecting him to give us the respect and apply his brakes. But alas… he might have accelerated harder even but he never slowed down, and so we jumped back to the safety of the pavement as he sped past us at 60 mph, adding insult to injury by honking, thereby getting us dirty looks from our fellow pedestrians. We realized not to take things for granted from then on, as this was alien territory for us.

We then found the famous Hollywood wax museum and went in. There were many amazing wax statues of so many of our favorite Hollywood stars. After lots of pictures, including one with Marilyn Monroe in her most famous pose, revealing the mystery as to where the wind which blew her skirts came from (J), one with Hugh Hefner paying tribute to him for what he was, and many more with our favorites, we came out of there.

PROPOSING TO ANGELINA JEDI KARTHIK

It was already about 9 pm and we realized we had hardly had any food the whole day and being really far from our hotel, not knowing if we could find our way back through the complicated streets of LA, we started from there after getting some souvenirs, giving other places like Ripley’s believe it or not and Guinness records studios a skip. We found our car and made a couple of wrong turns on the streets and found ourselves lost a couple of times. It is not like India where you could stop our car on the main road and get down and ask some pedestrians how to go. There are basically 3 problems with that. One: you cannot simply pull over on the side of the main road as cars would be using all the lanes and if we pull over, someone is bound to ram into us at 60 mph, especially considering how rash LA drivers were. Two: even if you manage to pull over and get down and go to the pavement, you cannot ask pedestrians for the simple reason that there won’t be any. All the people who venture out have cars. You could drive for hours and you wouldn’t come across more than a handful of pedestrians if you were lucky. After all cars are dirt cheap there, why wouldn’t everyone have a car. A second hand good-condition Toyota corolla could be bought for about 5k $. Add to that the cheap gasoline rates. And the US transport system encourages you to have a car, because without one you simply can’t get anywhere as there aren’t too many buses or trains connecting places. Well…anyway… Third: even if you do miraculously manage to find a pedestrian, he would in all probability be an Indian tourist and he would be as lost as you. Even if it were someone who had lived in the city for long, he would run at the sight of a car pulling up by his side or he may even take a gun out of his jacket and gun you down, fearing attack as such sights are quite common in some parts of a rough city like LA. So logic told us not to pull up even if meant we had to drive for hours finding our way. Fortunately, thanks to the GPS we had, and the maps we had printed out and our cartography skills, we found our way after sometime and got back to the hotel and had dinner there and went to bed thoroughly satisfied with our trip of LA, knowing we would have to go the next day to San Diego. We were tired, really tired after 4 days of 6 hrs sleep a night and continuous touring. We decided to make the second leg of the trip a relaxed one.

(TO BE CONTINUED...)

MY EXPERIENCES IN CALIFORNIA : Chapter 9

NOTE: Sorry for posting this later than promised. Was just a little busy settling down in Davis... And also waiting for comments on my prev post from a couple of ppl, though it never came :(

SPOILER ALERT: If you ever plan to visit Disneyland in the near future, you would be advised to skip reading this post because I have described a few of its rides. It would spoil the suspense if you knew about the rides before you embarked on them.

CHAPTER 9- DISNEYLAND PART 2

Other than this, we went for some other memorable rides as well. The Splash Mountain was a really cool roller-coaster ride through an "artificial" mountain. I put artificial in quotes because it felt so realistic. There was this rather innovative concept of installing cameras at a couple of the most exciting points of the ride, which would photograph your expression as you went past it without inhibitions. The pictures would be displayed on monitors as you exit the ride and you can go up to the counter and buy the photograph for 10 $. Being the unembarrassed uninhibited innovative Indians that we were, we went up to the monitors with our digicams and clicked a photo of the photo. That earned us a few looks, some of amusement and some of disgust, but hey we didn’t give a damn as long as it saved us many a buck. We did this at every ride. :D .

Then, we went to the "Pirates of the Caribbean" ride, which was a boat ride, though some pirate villages with realistic characters like Jack Sparrow appearing every now and then.

We then went through the horror house, which was a lot of dark passages of "scary" ghosts and creatures, which was pretty lame. We found it quite kiddish and tried to scare a couple of the ghosts away. :D . The people around us, both young and old, surprisingly seemed pretty scared and excited though.

We then went for the jungle adventure ride, which was a boat ride through a jungle which had animals on the shores. JB met his match on that ride- a girl called Ashley who was the instructor of the ride whose PJs exasperated even JB, the Master of Mokkai (MoM). Then we went to a castle, which was built such that it was shaped like all the wonders of the world. It was a brilliant sight.

But the most majestic sight was the Disney castle, which was draped with decorations of hanging blue and red lights. It was quite a sight to take in.

We then had dinner there and went to the banks of the artificial lake, where a spectacle was awaiting us. That was "FANTASIMIC". Literally. The show is held on the nights of every weekend and that day being a Saturday, we got to witness the spectacle. It is a show where Mickey, as the protagonist, uses his imagination to conjure up objects that he desires. Laser light is beamed on shape changing fountains in the water to give is a feel of the objects. It was so realistic and so majestic. The show lasted a whole twenty minutes. It seems they spend close to 30k $ for that 20 minutes of entertainment each evening. Sheesh…. that’s more than what we would spend in an entire year of graduate study in the US. The wonderful calming music added to the brilliance of the show. To think it was just lights and water being adapted to form such realistic images was mind-blowing. We were so awed by it that it took us a minute to realize we had to tape this on our cams and start clicking. At the end of the show, we swore to come back again for it the next night and witness the spectacle again.

Disneyland is in a way like drug addiction (or how people say it is at least. I’ve no first-hand experience ppl). You want to come back to it every day. Ok bad comparison but hey it is addictive and never leaves you satisfied for sure. It was about 10 pm by the time the show ended.

We had walked at least 5 miles inside the place in those 4 hours and it was only then that we noted the tiredness felt by our legs. We trudged back reluctantly to board the train which would take us back to the car as the exhibits were closing behind us. But we were satisfied by how it had gone till then and couldn’t wait for the next day when we would be coming back to the place.

We drove back to the hotel and went back to our rooms, which is when we noticed that the suite we booked was the kids suite (That was the cheapest deal that we got). Everything, from the beds to the furniture was kid-sized. We felt like a giant dwelling in Liliputian land but then we had been transformed into kids after that night at Disneyland, so we were happy to be treated as kids by the hotel room too. We dived into our beds and didn’t know anything until 8 am the next morning when we woke up, looking ahead to the day.

We woke up and got dressed and stepped out of the house within an hour, which is an amazing achievement by five generally-nocturnal 20 year olds. Such was our enthusiasm to go back to Disneyland. We parked our car there and went into the California adventure park as per our plan. This is an annexure to Disneyland, but meant more for adults as it contained some amazing rides. We went inside and were greeted by the sight of big roller-coasters. We went for a couple of water rides initially, which felt nice in the warm southern Californian sun.

Then went into the Hollywood part of the adventure park, where there was a replica of the intersection of Sunset Blvd and Hollywood Blvd.

Then we went into Monsters 3D, which was a ride which took us through some caves, where Monsters Inc characters kept popping up. The hall of moving doors in that ride was pretty amazing.

Then we went into Muppetvision 4D, which was a show where we were given 3D glasses and we could view Sesame street characters a screen on stage in 3D, thanks to our glasses and say, whenever the characters sprayed water, real water would spray on us too from somewhere, thereby adding the 4th dimension to the show, making it totally realistic. It was the first such 4D show I had gone to in my life, and so I found it really exciting.

Then we went to Hollywood hotel. It was a massively tall building, which gave everyone the creeps. We were taken to an elevator and strapped to chairs there and we could guess what was coming up, but that didn’t prepare us for what lay ahead. The elevator climbed all the way to the top of the 100 odd metre tall building and suddenly stopped there. The door opened for us to see how high up we were. Suddenly, it plummeted down in freefall with every one of us screaming on top of our voice. Then the elevator was caught as it came down and it went up again all the way to the top and plummeted down again. This went on for the next couple of minutes in irregular patterns, which made it an exciting ride.

We climbed out of that gingerly and had some lunch. We noticed a restaurant "Ariel's grotto", which was supposed to be an underwater restaurant, where tables were in the middle of glass-enclosed water chambers from all directions where mermaids keep floating. We didn’t go there as it looked too expensive a place.

After food and some cotton candy (LOL...we were quite a sight with our hands and face all pink in its aftermath), we went to the most adrenaline-pumping rollercoaster ride.

It was a 3 minute rollercoaster, which contained a lot of freefalling, vertical climbing, extreme twists and curves, a couple of 360s and that too back to back. In all it was a really exciting ride as it was a very high speed one too. We were screaming on top of our voices the whole time. We were quite exhausted when we came out. But then, we didn’t feel queasy at all like we would after a ride at Kishkinta or MGM theme parks in India. And it was less of a thrill, because we had faith in its makers that they would’ve done everything possible to ensure it’s a safe ride. Unlike a ride in MGM where you may be wondering if you’re going to fly off the cart due to a loose seat belt or if the track itself would break making the cart crash headlong into the ground. Only after this ride, I realized what a rollercoaster ride was. Exciting, adrenaline-pumping but at the same time does not cause you unease physically and mentally.

We then went out of the California adventure park back into Disneyland. We first went into bug-land, where everything was made to make us feel we were as small as bugs. We looked up to see massive trees and on closer inspection, we found they were actually small plants, with the difference that it looked as huge to us as it would to a bug. It was a really nice concept.

Then we went into the Toy story ride, where while waiting in the queue JB gave up his claim of being the best mokkai (loosely translated in English as PJ cracker) in the world after watching Mr. Potato Head (an artificial character standing outside the ride entertaining people standing in the queue with his PJs) crack a few "jokes". Believe me, they were just of another level. An example- "Say D.... (pause) Say D...(pause) Say D... (pause) Now what do we have here? (pause) 3D. ". This was one of the many PJs he cracked which had people frantically hit their heads with their hands and pray that the queue moved on quicker so that they don’t have to stand this weirdo anymore. It was too much for poor JB to learn that there were two people we encountered in the last couple of days, who were better than him in cracking such jokes, Ashley and Potato head, and he was truly dejected after that :( .

Finally it was dark by the time we were done with all this. We learned that a special Pixar parade was going to take place in sometime where all Pixar characters, would parade on the corridors. We were really excited by this as it contained many of our favorite movie cartoon characters. We sat on the corridor, and witnessed an exciting parade, where characters from Finding Nemo, Toy story, Monsters inc and many more evergreen Pixar films came by and waved at us.

We also witnessed the Disney parade, where Disney characters like Mickey, Goofy, Donald etc walked the ramps.

Then we went to witness the "Fantasmic" show again, as we had planned the previous day. We were again awed by it. I guess one would be awed by it even if one watches it every day, such was the atmosphere. Then we went again to the "Indiana Jones" show, as we thought it was worth another visit.

With our hearts filled with contentment, we went back to the car park and went back to the hotel. On the way back, we stopped at an Indian restaurant that we saw and had food there. Though it was a touch expensive, we felt we deserved it and had good Indian food after months. We hit the hay as soon as we went back to our rooms, as we had another big day ahead of us the next day.

TO BE CONTINUED...