Shoes

After we'd sorted out the tax, S went to meet her pal, and go to an exhibition of Magritte paintings, while the boys and I went shopping for shoes. We dropped S off, and tried to find the shoe shop. The map lady is normally quite good at finding shops by name, but this time she let us down. (Actually, last time she let us down too - S couldn't find the bike shop.) I tried to remember the address, but I wasn't 100% sure, and so I didn't want to risk it.

(Knowing the road is no use, because many roads go on for an awful long time - Sunset Boulevard, is 22 miles long, and the streets will restart numbering when you go to different cities. It's like a bizarre version of the effect you get in England - when you are driving, you get to a road near where you live, and you feel like you're almost home. When you approach Derby from the East, you know you're nearly home when you reach the A38, but if you go West, you can be in Bristol and see the A38 - "Ooh," you think, "The A38, I'm almost home". And then you realise you're not. It's the same here, except it's streets - We can get on a freeway, drive 15 miles, and then get off on Sepulveda. Our local supermarket is on Sepulveda, so we feel like we're almost home.)

Shoe shops in the US are a bit different to shoe shops in the UK. In the US, you suggest that you might like to buy your darling offspring some shoes, and they point to the shop and say "Whole shop full." Whereas in England, we often didn't get out of a shoe shop for an hour. (Because D and A have strange shaped feet, and their shoes have to match - that is, be the same, or if different sizes, be different colours, but the same style. And they have to fit the right width, and the shop has to have that combination in stock. So I asked around at work (there's an email list for parents, called 'parents'), and there was agreement that we should go to this shop called Harry Harris.

Anyway, the map lady couldn't find the shop I wanted, but it could find another branch (there are three) in Beverly Hills. We were near Beverly Hills, so we headed that way. But first we had to eat.

We passed a slightly seedy pizza place, but it had tables, and pizza, so we stopped. For $9 (including tax, plus tip) you got a pizza, a salad, and a drink, so I had one and the boys had one. There was a chap who was folding leaflets sat on another table who insisted that we chat - he did promotions for the World Cup when it was in the USA, and now he did promotions for this pizza shop (and drank beer from a can in a brown bag). I ate D and A's salad, unsurprisingly, and then we left.

We got to the shop, in a swanky bit of Beverly Hills - we were surrounded by Lexus SUVs and BMWs and Priuses, and bought some shoes - they were very swift, but pretty efficient (it was Saturday afternoon, so we couldn't really expect leisurely service). It only took two trips to the back of the shop (each time getting 4 pairs of shoes) before we got a satisfactory combination. However, when it came time to pay, I didn't have my card, which was dull. And I'd paid with it at the pizza place. I had no idea where the pizza place was, or what it was called, and there was no way I was going to find it again, so I had visions of all kinds of bills for beer and brown paper bags being racked up on my card before I got home to cancel it.

Anyway we got back to the car under an hour - which meant that we didn't have to pay (first hour was free at the car park). The car park was so full by this time, that you had to leave your keys with someone, who then spent time shuffling cars about. I drove home, and cancelled my card.

S feels like it's not fair that we never see celebrities, as there are supposed to be so many living around here. (She found out yesterday that Pierce Brosnan lives nearby - in fact, we'll drive almost past his house tomorrow.) The problem is that we probably wouldn't recognise any. Anyway, if celebrities live in Beverly Hills (and only the tacky ones like David Beckham do - the others live in Malibu) then they'd buy shoes from Harry Harris. There was someone there who might have been a celebrity. She had a baby called Franky (Frankie? Phranckee?) who was 11 months old (they asked her age in the shop), but I didn't know who she was.

After we'd got home and cancelled my card, I listened to the answering machine message from S, that said she hadn't got a lift home, and could we go back (almost all the way) to Beverly Hills to pick her up. In those few minutes, A had taken off his new shoes and put on his scummy old sandals from Asda.

But S found a German book shop, which she was excited about, and asked someone what perfume she was wearing (the askee, not S, it wasn't like one of my exciting quizzes). Now we have to try to buy some from Amazon. Except we can't, because I've cancelled my card.