N.E.mation: Load and Lock

And so I got to tag along with the champions of N.E.mation 6, 2012 to the USA aka Hungry Monsters from Dunman High! Here they are with their teacher in charge. We departed from Changi airport, terminal 3 on 2 June and that’s when our journey started.

Our destination was to Los Angeles so the students brought along their homework for this trip and did it on the plane. It’ll be school term and exams time when they get back to Singapore at the end of it all! Hence, they totally needed to bring it with them.

Meanwhile, we had a very short stop over at Narita airport so some of them had ramen before our plane was ready for boarding.

While they did that, I watched My Little Pony and some other artsy movies like Albert Nobbs. Points to you if you figured out which episode of MLP this was from.

The first day, we just spent the afternoon unpacking, resting and then eating dinner at Kenny Rogers (I had the fish something).

The weather is wonderful though, it’s refreshing since the sunshine is like in Singapore BUT it had a breeze like we had aircon blowing at us.

Anywho, the second day we headed down to Downtown Disney… to pick up our rental car. NO, NO DISNEY YET. We just passed by the shops and the huge Lego store. Click the thumbnails to look at the details! They’re all made of Lego!

CAR GET! We then headed to the LA county museum of natural history! Hurray, dinosaurs!

They do not have any live animals there like the zoos we have in Singapore. Instead, you have models of them, so accurate you’d think they were real, only if they’d move.

It’s like entering another dimension if you could hope over into their own environments! Of course you couldn’t since you’re not allowed to.

They have interactive bits for children or… us to play with. The bones here attach to a frame where you can complete a whole dinosaur. It’s nice how the museum trusts the visitors not to make their way with one of the bones or break them. Though I suppose, security would be there watching somehow anyway.

And these are the ones not for playing. Real dinosaur fossils! They have a lab there where the curators or experts clean and do work on the dinosaurs they dug up.

We then checked out the science center behind the museum. It’s pretty much like how our science center is like! But with more spaceships or replicas of them.

Aaaaaand then it’s off to Santa Monica bay. It’s breezy! Not that cold but a lovely temperature and ok, you really need your sunglasses cause it’s quite bright.

So typical of a beach. The water is probably freezing but there’s so many swimmers there.

We could explore the area on our own and while I didn’t get on the ferris wheel or ride on the roller coaster there…

I used the Zoltar machine! THE ZOLTAR MACHINE. Points to you guys who recognize what movie this machine featured in. Bought a bunch of postcards and there are a lot of souvenir shops and buskers in this stretch of Santa Monica.

A lot Some weird people too, like a man screaming out “AGH! AGH!” with each step as he jogged down the pier.

Apparently from what the psychic palm reader exclaimed as he passed by, he does it every day for 4 miles up and down and then crawls on his knees at the end of it.

Yeaaah.

EDUCATIONAL WISE, we were also at the end of Route 66 aka the mother road of the USA hence plenty of souvenirs with “Route 66” on it.

We shopped a bit at promenade street which is across from the pier and then ending up again for dinner at the pier to… BUBBA GUMP! More fish for me cause I like seafood and well, this is a seafood place.

Their portions are woah. We shared key lime pie and a cookie sundae too. SOUR AND SWEET, it was beautiful.

That’s it for day 1 and 2.

My next post will be on Wednesday! We have a few more parts till we get to the ending of this adventure, heh. For those interested what I ate on the plane and over there, I’ll have a separate food post at the end of it all since I have a lot of curious readers on this.