Visiting the City of Angels

September 25, 2015 12:23 AM

I'm looking for suggestions for places to visit in LA (difficulty level: generally getting around, day spas, costumes, barre, crafting and outlet malls).

A friend and I are planning to attend next year's Costume College (July 28th - 1st August), which is held at the Warner Center Marriott, Woodland Hills, California. Since it's a long trip from Australia, we're going to spend a bit of extra time (maybe two weeks total) in the general area and are looking for some suggestions for things to do and recommendations for particular places.

A list of stuff we're interested in, with expansion below:
- San Diego Comic Con (on the off chance we can get tickets)
- Day spa and/or retreats
- Costuming
- Disneyland
- Outlet malls
- Crafting (sewing, hand stitching, colouring, anything cool and unusual that can be done by hand)
- Tours: walking/biking (segway tour?)
- Live shows (including filming of TV shows)

Re the day spa - I'm thinking of something like the fancy place I went to in Vegas once, where they had a bunch of extras like heated couches and sauna/pool areas that you could just use for as long as you liked once you'd had your appointment. A retreat of some sort for a day or two might be another option, one where the food is provided and you have the choice to go to meditation/yoga/pilates/walking sessions or just spend time relaxing in a hammock.

It would be awesome to see costumes used in movies and we're going to do some sort of Hollywood 'stuff'. Just not sure what yet! I did really enjoy Harry Potter World in the UK, is there anything similar in LA? Perhaps the Hollywood Museum is what we need here?

Disneyland is a definite - I'm a Disneyworld veteran and I can sort dining reservations and navigate the ticket/hotel purchases with comfort.

We definitely would like to replenish our wardrobes at US prices, so outlet malls are good. Oh, and we love fitness wear (I heart lululemon)! Brands to check out that aren't readily available here would be great. Oooh, and we're big on barre classes (or anything unusual fitness-wise) so finding 'the place to go' for barre would be neat.

Crafting and associated activities - the fabric district is on the list, since acquisitions for future sewing and costuming endeavors would be awesome. Are there any particular places there we shouldn't miss or other areas we need to visit? We're not just interested in fabric - notions, wool, thread or anything unusual (for example, I'm interested in getting my hands on some wooden bobbins for lace making).

Perhaps it would be cool though to see how some of the fancy people live, so maybe a tour of some kind? Walking or biking would be nice, although bus tours work as well. I'd really like to try a segway one day too. Recommendations for interesting areas to walk/bike (self guided is ok) are welcome.

Live shows are always fantastic. I have no idea how the filming of TV shows works, or how to get tickets to see something like Big Bang Theory (or even whether they'll be filming at that time of the year?).

Things we probably aren't really interested in:
- star spotting
- cheesy museums
- beaches
- super expensive window shopping
- nightclubs

At this point we haven't decided how we're going to be getting around. I think we're both a bit nervous about driving on the opposite side of the road, so I guess if it's feasible we'd prefer to public transport or cab around. Any suggestions on whether this is a good idea or not? The aim I think would be to pick a particular thing to do on one day (e.g barre at fabulous studio) and then build the rest of the day around that area.

posted by eloeth-starr to Travel & Transportation around Los Angeles, CA (10 answers total)

How long were you thinking of coming for?

Your Costume College thing is 4 days, on top of which you'd need to add a travel day on each end. Do you need another day to get over jet lag and general travel exhaustion?

Comic-Con will end up eating most of a week, as it runs Wednesday through Sunday. San Diego is a 3+ hour drive or a shortish train trip from Los Angeles, so again, factor in travel time there as well. (Not to mention, be sure that SDCC is even workable, as they don't announce the dates until quite close to the event itself, and it's not always on the same weekend each year.)

Disneyland is an absolutely jam packed full day, and it might be easier to make it an overnight if you're relying on public transit. Disneyland is not in Los Angeles itself but in Anaheim, which is a couple hours' drive away.

One thing to understand is that Southern California is a HUGE place. I know that distances in Australia can also be far, but the way your question is phrased and some activities you are interested in (Segway tour? LOL) imply that you are thinking of the geography as more like Prague or something and less like the entire Czech Republic (which is actually slightly smaller than SoCal). Once you've squared away your two major activities you want to do (Costume College and SDCC), travel and acclimation time, etc. you'll probably also want to have several more days to do even a little of what you mention here.

Woodland Hills is not really close to anything of tourist interest, not a super walkable area, and not a place that tourists usually visit. This isn't to say you shouldn't do this trip, but you may want to spend a few nights in an area like Hollywood or Downtown (or maybe an AirBnB in Silverlake for access to crafty stuff?), especially if you aren't planning to drive. Uber and Lyft (crowd-sourced "ride share" services) should be pretty affordable from any of those three neighborhoods to most of the touristy parts of town, especially if you're not looking to visit the beach.

Day Spa: If you want to go really plush, there's Burke Williams, which is the fancy go-to and probably what you're thinking of if you're comparing it to someplace swank in Vegas. I haven't been, though, and can't weigh in. If you want something a little more approachable, you might want to check out one of the Korean spas around town. Burke Williams is probably going to take a whole day, but on the other hand, it's Downtown, which is reasonably OK without a car, at least. Most of the Korean spas are in Koreatown, which is also relatively walkable and reachable by public transit.

Outlet Mall: Add another day to your itinerary for this, too. Weirdly, I live close to one that I'd recommend, the Citadel in Montebello. However, you will probably be able to find something closer to Woodland Hills.

Tours: There aren't a ton of walking tours of the major Los Angeles sights, because as I said, Los Angeles is HUGE. If you want to take a walking tour of something, though, I wouldn't be surprised to find out about neighborhood walking tours. Venice and Little Tokyo are the two areas that come to mind, for me, as relatively compact and with enough local history and culture to make a walking tour worthwhile. Googling Los Angeles Walking Tour will probably help. Your better bet for tours in general is going to be some species of bus or van tour.

TV Show Taping: This is something else that is going to eat a lot of a day, especially if you factor in getting there from Woodland Hills.
posted by Sara C. at 7:05 AM on September 25, 2015

Any suggestions on whether this is a good idea or not?

Pretty much the universal opinion is no, unless you're willing to pretty severely limit where you go and what you do.

I will say that if you are a regular driver at home and so are generally confident behind the wheel, LA is not actually so bad because you rarely actually go fast - you're either on surface streets with a light every 2-4 blocks, or...well, welcome to our freeways, make sure you have lots of podcasts and audiobooks on your phone. (Sometimes you get to sit almost completely unmoving on surface streets, too, especially at rush hour.) Left turns on surface streets are kind of a nightmare, but you can always make three rights instead, usually.

Even if you don't want to drive a ton, it might be worth it to have a car for the stuff you really have to have a car for, plus you can use it to get to major transportation hubs closer to you and then take the train or bus the rest of the way in some cases.

And you'll need a car to go to the best day spa in the area, Glen Ivy Hot Springs. There are really no good (actually sort of none at all) all-day-hang-out spas in LA, they tend to be either very service-oriented, or they are Korean-style but not necessarily with all the services you'd find in Korea, it's mostly just the dip pools/hot floor/ajummas scrubbing the top layer of your skin off part.

For Glen Ivy you want to go on a weekday, leave LA at like 6am before traffic gets real bad, stop for a leisurely breakfast once you get out of LA proper/close to Corona, and be in line to get in before 9:00 (there will be other people waiting to do the same, even on a weekday). Stay until at least mid-afternoon splitting your time between their 17 pools and the mud grotto and get one or two services (I have a friend who really likes getting facials there, I've had a mani-pedi that was okay and a chair massage that was great and I am mostly not a massage person), and there's a nice locker room where you can get properly showered and dressed back up like normal people. Go shopping at the mall a few miles up the freeway ("Crossings at Corona" is the one I'm thinking of, and there's also "Shops at Dos Lagos" which is probably a little fancier), have dinner, go to a movie, kill time until 7 or 8 at the earliest before you try to come back into LA.

I am assuming you won't be remaining in Woodland Hills and will be getting an airbnb or similar in something more properly LA. It will make things easier if you do. Tip: the entire west side of the city is a) real expensive b) real crowded, and your Australian sensibilities are going to say "but that's where we should stay" but probably don't. Hollywood, Glendale, maybe Burbank or Studio City, Silverlake, maybe Downtown - look at LA on a map, then look approximately east of center.

Really, you need to spend a good week of googling to get a sense of both size and feasibility. It's the 12th largest urban area on the planet. Everything is possible, but you'll have to decide if it's feasible, affordable, and worth it. Yes it probably has a world-class barre class taught by the descendant of the first person to bolt a piece of wood to a wall, and you can probably choose between several options like hot-barre, underwater-barre, and a combo colonic and barre but it'll be in Manhattan Beach at 4pm on a Friday so that'll be pretty much your entire day getting across town. There's definitely a costume museum somewhere, probably dozens, and some of them may be in some weird dude's basement so also heavily employ Yelp because Angelenos love to rate things and they mostly hate everything, so if they like something it's probably great.

I will say that even the totally standard tourist things here are pretty damn good. LACMA's a pretty great museum (and it's right next to the Tar Pits, which nobody told me for like a year and I didn't notice, it's a solid satisfying half-day to do the two - and there at least used to be a food truck afternoon beside the LACMA lightposts on Sundays, keep an eye on that for next summer). The Hollywood Bowl's a pretty great place to see a show, any show. The Getty is lovely. There are movies and concerts inside the Hollywood Forever cemetery, and that's a thing you can't do anywhere else. Our hiking is amazing hiking, but you really do have to do your googling there because we have extremely hard hikes right in the middle of the city and people get in trouble thinking they're going for a stroll.

Obviously there's not much on the schedules yet for next summer, but starting around Feb-April all the event calendars will start filling up.

As far as SDCC, basically everyone I know who still goes is mostly doing it out of nostalgia. Unless they change the room-clearing policies, you either will not see most panels or you will see one or two big panels and that is all you will do the entire time. And there is zero guarantee you will get in, and it will take a day of travel in each direction (for a trip that should be ~3 hours) because of the volume of travelers. If you do win a slot at the convention, book your Amtrak tickets immediately because the trains are packed to the gills for those days.

If you want to go see a show taping, google it and get instructions. Most shows are on hiatus in the summer except for late-night and game shows, and even those might be on break in August. There are shows pretty much every night of the week, and cheap, at both UCBs - the newer one on Sunset is nicer, but the one on Franklin is kind of iconic AND across the street from the Scientology Celebrity Center, which is really enjoyable for boggling at for 20 minutes while you wait in line to get in to your UCB show. And there's also Groundlings and IO, plus dozens of little theaters with comedy, plays, readings, lectures, etc.

There are plenty of walking tours in LA (human-guided, app-driven, and written), they just tend to be focused on one very specific thing. Google stuff you like and "tour" to see both walking and other modes of transportation to see what's going on and what you might like. There's also a bunch of segway tours, and I would recommend just going all-in an choosing the most ridiculous one like Beverly Hills or the Santa Monica/Venice one.

LA is very into outdoor movie screenings in the summer (and several websites will compile lists of all the showings that should be published in May at the latest), and some of them are very "only in LA" kind of locations - Hollywood Forever, the old abandoned zoo in Griffith Park, the Celebrity Center, etc - and I would strongly recommend doing that if you can fit it in. You might need to buy a pair of cheap folding lawn chairs from RiteAid/CVS/Walgreens.

Another thing that you might really dig is one of the area's big swap meets (sometimes called "flea market"y, I don't know if there's anything like it in Australia). It's just people selling stuff, except here at the biggest ones its hundreds of people selling stuff from random crap to art to car parts to fabric and clothing and other components you might be particularly looking for. The swap meet at the Rose Bowl in Pasadena is the most legendary, but there are several others here that are a little more central.

You may want to read all the other LA threads here, as this question gets asked quite a bit.
posted by Lyn Never at 7:58 AM on September 25, 2015 [1 favorite]

For barre/exotic fitness classes, there are many, many studios, and some of them have multiple locations throughout LA so you could easily visit them according to how convenient they are to your location. A lot of them will also allow you to attend a class for free if it is your first time. I recommend Pop Physique ; I've only been to the Silver Lake and Santa Monica locations, of which Silver Lake is far superior (Santa Monica has a small, stuffy studio).

There's also Pure Barre, Cardio Barre, the Bar Method, and Physique57 - all with several locations throughout LA. You can use an app like Classpass to get into classes most of these, along with other places, although if you're only going once and it's your first time, they will usually let you try it out no strings attached (except you'll probably have to fill out a health waiver before you go in).

For other LA fitness trends, there's YAS (yoga and spinning, in sequence), and about a million varieties of Pilates and Yoga on every corner. You could also possibly get free trials at some of the fancy gyms, because they usually have a variety of these types of classes. In fact, memail me if you ladies want a guest pass to the downtown Equinox; there's a variety of barre type classes offered every day.
posted by Aubergine at 9:06 AM on September 25, 2015

Oh and for spas, Burke Williams actually has a lot of locations so if you're set on going there you can pick the one closest to where you're staying. I haven't been either but I think it caters to a bit of an older crowd.
posted by Aubergine at 9:08 AM on September 25, 2015

I for one vote for a MeFi meetup at Disneyland, so schedule one of those when you have your dates all set. (Disneyland + California Adventure is two days right there.)
posted by th3ph17 at 9:46 AM on September 25, 2015

There are hop-on hop-off bus tours which would be a good way to see a lot of the area.

Downtown has the Fashion District and the Fashion Institute of Design and Merchandising is close by. FIDM has exhibitions of Oscar-nominated costumes (usually January-April) and Emmy-nominated costumes, and their scholarship store has fabrics and notions for crazy low prices. Also in the area is the Bronzed Aussie for all your meat pie cravings. There are several different barre studios downtown as well, including Pure Barre, Cardio Barre, and The Main Barre.

There are food trucks outside of LACMA every day now, not just on Sundays.

The Wizarding World of Harry Potter will be coming to Universal Studios Hollywood as of next spring.
posted by mogget at 10:16 AM on September 25, 2015

Keep an eye on the FIDM Museum for costume-related exhibitions and displays. Unfortunately, the Academy Museum is still in progress, but you could also see whether they're working with anyone to host exhibitions during that time. There are a lot of great (and quirky) art et al. museums in LA, many of them accessible by public transit. LACMA has an A+++ selection of food trucks. It not that far to CBS's television studios, if you wanted to check out their options for watching a filming. The Craft and Folk Art Museum has a rotating schedule of exhibitions (but no permanent collection), so keep an eye out for their exhibition schedule to be posted.

Is there a particular focus or kind of walking tour you would be into? LA really is quite big, but there are Secret Tours and Stair Tours and all kinds of things, so it might be easier to suggest things when you have more of a schedule and location sorted out.
posted by jetlagaddict at 10:30 AM on September 25, 2015

A native Angeleno here. The drive to San Diego is beautiful (Mission San Juan Capistrano is an interesting place to take a driving break, and is certainly topical at the moment), but long, and gets longer if you hit traffic. You can do it in one day, but most people want to stay the night, at least. You'll also want to take into account how long it takes to drive places even in the LA area--for example, Woodland Hills to Anaheim, where Disneyland is, will be a major timesink even without traffic (and there will be traffic).

Seriously, just assume that you're going to be stuck on the freeway.

The thing about walking through LA is that the city doesn't have a center in the way that many other major cities (London, Chicago, NYC...) do. My English cousins were really puzzled the first time they visited--you couldn't just "go downtown" and see lots of things concentrated in one place. In some places, LA is positively anti-pedestrian, which doesn't help. There are absolutely areas with many interesting things clustered together, but you need to plan--for example, Wilshire Blvd, where the LA County Museum of Art is, has several (non-cheesy!) museums in one spot. Lyn Never is right that walking tours will be very focused, usually neighborhood-driven.

Outlet malls: seconding the Citadel, which is housed in a former factory designed to resemble a Assyrian temple (!!!). (It's so out-of-place as to be sublime, really.) In terms of your scheduling, it's worth noting that the Citadel operates a shuttle to and from the major hotels around Disneyland.
posted by thomas j wise at 11:23 AM on September 25, 2015

Howdy! Lyn Never hit 80% of the things I would mention and the FIDM mentions above covered another 10%. Here's my final bit.

Regarding what Lyn Never said about the market at the Rose Bowl - I see you're from Adelaide, but have you been to the Glebe Market in Sydney? Imagine that times eleventy, and that's the Rose Bowl market. There's also the one on Fairfax, which will BLOW your MIND.

The outlets at the Citadel are closer, but if you'll be at Woodland Hills you'll be near the outlets in Camarillo. Much larger and way more choice than the Citadel.

Regarding crafting: LA has the Fashion District, which has entire BLOCKS dedicated to fabric and further BLOCKS dedicated to jewelry findings. I assure you, you can't conceive of how much stuff is there. Pretty much any crafty thing you could ever want exists there, with supplies at dirt-cheap prices.

Another thing to note, fashion-wise: the fashion showrooms at the California Market Center, the New Mart and the Cooper Design Space (and others) all have sample sales on the last Friday of the month. This is the sort of sample sale where you can pick up $200 shirts for $10. The California Market Center takes up an entire city block and is 11 stories high so it gives you an idea of how many showrooms you're looking at. Bring cash, wear sneakers and be prepared to try stuff on in the middle of a showroom. (Wear things that you can try clothes on over.) This is professional-level shopping and it will take up your entire day.
posted by rednikki at 10:42 PM on September 25, 2015 [2 favorites]

Response by poster: This is fantastic everyone, thanks! Just what we were looking for. So many good responses, I don't know how to mark best answer.

We're definitely planning to shift our accommodation based on what it is we want to do - so we'll stay at the designated hotel for Costume Collage and probably at Disney for a night or two. I have no real hope of getting to SDCC - we've registered but really, the odds of getting tickets aren't great. So I'm viewing that as a 'nice to have'. Where else we stay will depend on where we want to go.

Burke Williams sounds lovely, and amazingly enough, they're about to open a place in Westfield Topanga, which is just down the road from Costume College! So that would be convenient. However Glen Ivy also sounds wonderful and I'll definitely be looking into the logistics.

It sounds like a show taping might be more trouble than it's worth, so thanks for the heads up on that, much appreciated.

Griffith Park was on my radar as a possibility and is going up the list at the moment - the abandoned zoo and open air movies are a winning combination.

Thanks to Aubergine for the tip about ClassPass and the offer of a guest pass to Equinox - we may take you up on that!

Also adding MeFi meetup to the list of fun things to do...

The fashion district and FIDM sound wonderful and the sample sales could have been a dream come true but we'll miss the last friday of the month (*sigh*) - can't do everything I guess!

I'll be googline secret tours and stair tours - I am intrigued. I may come back and ask more after I've done some looking around. And thanks for the heads up about the lack of city centre - that wasn't something I had grasped because here most cities do have a centre and that's were everything is!

Citadel is sounding good for an outlet mall - thanks for the votes there. Especially with a shuttle around the Disneyland area, that sounds like an efficient way to do things.
posted by eloeth-starr at 4:59 PM on September 26, 2015