Visiting Tinseltown

On Friday I went to a conference at a hotel in West Hollywood. West Hollywood is a weird place - it's a city in it's own right, and it's completely surrounded by Los Angeles city. (It's next to Beverly Hills, which also surrounded by Los Angeles).

It's not as weird as North Hollywood. North London is the bit of London that's North of the rest of London. Northern England is the top half of England. North Hollywood decided to be called North Hollywood, because Hollywood was kind of cool, and it wanted to be cool too, even though it's not even attached to the rest of Hollywood (and isn't even part of Hollywood). You can see North Hollywood on this map, and you can see it's not really near to Hollywood.

I'm in America now, so I drove to the hotel. I drove into the entrance, thinking that there would be a car park. I stopped and a man gestured for me to get out of the car, and asked me for the keys. Oh no! This was going to be my first experience of valet parking.

He gave me a bit of yellow paper, and drove my car away. At the end of the day, I asked T (who also works at CoCE) if this piece of paper now was effectively my car. If someone stole this piece of paper, they could have my car? T said that that was theoretically correct, but given that every other car in the car park was a Porsche, a Mercedes, or (if they were slumming it) a Lexus, that it was unlikely anyone would be interested in mine.