Hollyweird, I mean Hollywood
Woman in the Middle | January 14, 2013Please don’t judge me, but for my birthday I wanted to go on the TMZ tour. For those of you who don’t know, TMZ is a TV show that specializes in celebrity gossip. They also have a website/blog with the same information. I don’t usually watch the TV show but I am addicted to the website and check it most days, well, sometimes many times a day.
My birthday was back in November, but the tour was postponed until Christmas break otherwise the girls wouldn’t have been able to go along. We don’t live that far, as the crow flies, from Hollywood, or anywhere in Los Angeles, but when you factor in the traffic, the unknown problem of car accidents blocking the freeway (we dealt with two on our little trip) it makes Hollywood seem like it is very far away from my home in inland So Cal.
Just driving to Hollywood is a trip through the world of TV and movies. We drove past Melrose Avenue, past the iconic buildings of downtown LA, Sunset Avenue, and the amazing Capitol Records building. Who would have thought to build a building that looks like a stack of records? Once we were in Hollywood it was its normal Hollyweird self with tourists galore and loads of street performers.
The tour itself was a lot of fun. We were loaded into a bus that only had nine rows and seated about 20 people. The bus included two video screens that played some well-known scenes of recent and semi-recent mishaps stars have had while in the Hollywood and Beverly Hills areas. This is not your typical Hollywood tour. Houses of the stars are not on the agenda. Instead we were shown various clubs, restaurants, hotels, and even street intersections where the famous hang out and/or got into some trouble. Our tour guide was a cutie named Alex who has a college degree and admitted that his mother wants to know when he is going to stop being a tour guide and get a real job. I wondered that myself, but have to admit if I was young and single, getting to be a TMZ tour guide and getting to appear on TMZ on occasion (as all of their tour guides get to do) would sound like a fun fun fun job!
As we drove around Alex pointed out the famous hotels and restaurants to us. What struck the whole family is how normal and even mundane those famous places look in the light of day. But there, on the screen in front of us was someone like Paris Hilton, Kim Kardashian, or Britney Spears coming out or going into the place, lightbulbs flashing! Throw a crowd of paparazzi around a place, and have some famous person getting out of a car, and it really glams up a place!
Fun fact: The fire hydrants in Beverly Hills aren’t boring old hard-to-miss-yellow, they are painted silver!
The TMZ tour was about 2 hours and was a little on the pricey side at $50 a person. But it was for my birthday and a fun time was had by all. Oh, I also won a t-shirt by answering a trivia question. Whoo hoo!
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