We’re in Los Angeles!! Hooray!!
Last Friday we found ourselves back at Brisbane Airport, but Brisbane International this time. No one had really slept because the night before we decided we’d run out of money and couldn’t really afford to stay in our rehearsal room while we were away and not using it. So we spent a stack of time packing our room up. It was somewhat of a nostalgic moment really. We’d spent quite a while at that studio and there’s some serious history there. Anyway, after our recent awesome experiences with Virgin Blue we thought V Australia would be just as awesome when it came to excess baggage. Wrong! The girl on the counter was really nice and I swear she was going to let us through for free but she had to check with her supervisor and her supervisor was hating life that Friday morning. So we got burned with baggage charges. So we started budgeting and realised we had to cut down to two meals a day for a while.
I love planes and airports. Some people are just weird at airports though. And weird was out in force. You know how swine flu hit and everyone freaked out but then it turned out it wasn’t really that bad and while heaps of people were getting it it wasn’t actually much worse than normal flu. Well some people forgot that last part and were wearing those masks that make it look like the end of the world is nigh. I think we got them on film. The flight was good though. Except that Greg had two kids behind him who decided it would be fun to kick his chair all the time and hit him in the face with socks. Yeah socks!! And then we were in LA.
I’m not sure whether it’s just me but I expected California this time of year to be sunny and, you know, summer-like. We stepped out of the plane to weather that was pretty much identical to what we’d left in Brisbane in winter. Turns out we were experiencing what was known as “May Grey” which moved into something else called “June Gloom”. And apparently summer doesn’t actually start until June 21 which is pretty much when we leave. Anyway, I won’t complain. Los Angeles is somewhat of an epic city. It’s huge!! But the time difference is shit. We left Brisbane at 11am on Friday and after a 12 hour flight arrived in LA at 7am on Friday. Go figure. We then spent the rest of the day trying to stay awake in order to avoid jetlag which involved drinking about 6 coffees and going to meetings where people would ask “Are you guys alright?” Everything seemed to get a little delirious at some point there but we finally arrived at our accommodation at about 6pm. Get this, our landlady is an Aussie, her husband is a Brit and they’re both paparazzi photographers!! How good is that! So we had some beers with them and then decided to go to sleep but realised we’d moved out of the ridiculously tired stage to the “way too tired to go to sleep” stage. So no one slept. But then at 10am the next morning we got tired and accidentally fell asleep, woke up at 4pm and realised our plans to avoid jetlag were officially screwed. We explored LA a bit for the next couple of days. Well I’m using the word “day” a bit loosely here. It was more like evening by the time we woke up.
And then it was time to meet our producer and go into the studio.
