We spent four packed days in Los Angeles while on a budget.

When this post comes out, it’ll have been a year since my family received our invitations to attend my cousin’s wedding in Los Angeles. We live out in Maryland, but a good chunk of our family is in California, as many Iranian Americans, if you didn’t know, are concentrated around the West Coast in cities like Los Angeles and San Diego.

We usually go to California once a year, but because we now had to go to the wedding, it was the perfect excuse to extend our trip into the city and see what LA had to offer.

I’ll admit, I never had the thought I wanted to go to LA. I was never interested in the city, despite working as a film critic and being a major 1920s Hollywood history buff, but I never had the impulse to actually go there.

Neither did the rest of my family, and we honestly didn’t like Los Angeles much.

It’s not an ideal vacation spot because of how expensive it is to park, there’s a ton of traffic anywhere you go at any time, and, to be frank, it was quite underwhelming when it came to some of the tourist attractions.

We had a nonstop Southwest flight that I swore was the worst flight of my life—the flight attendants literally did not offer me a drink once on my entire six hour flight there.

We ended up having to ask for water, but when they had the drink cups at the midway point even, they didn’t stop or look to see if we wanted any.

Half of our group of six was also never given any sort of snack, which they usually do give on these kinds of flights. But at the end we picked up our bags at LAX, waited an hour to get our rental car from Alamo, then hit the ground running.

The Huntington Library and Botanical Gardens are stunning.

This was our second stop after getting out of the airport—our first stop was technically at a sandwich shop near the airport, after getting lost for a little bit. The Huntington Gardens were about forty minutes from LAX with traffic on this Wednesday, and we had quite the scenic drive when getting there as well.

We paid the $100 entry fee for four people, then realized we could literally spend the entire day in this garden. Plan for spending some more time here, as we skipped all of the museums and art on the property and just spent time looking at the gardens.

So the Huntington Gardens are split into different regions. We started with the cactus/desert region after wandering into the paid section of the property, then wandered our way around to everything.

We missed the Australia section, as you kind of need a map as there isn’t a ton of signage around and, again, you need an entire day to enjoy this place, but we didn’t miss it to be honest. There were so many incredible plants and it was so lovely to walk through the rose garden even and smell all of the roses as you wandered past.

All of this said, my personal favorites were the Japanese and Chinese gardens. I was squealing as I went through the Chinese garden because it looked exactly what I imagined a Chinese drama garden to be like.

Going to China is one of my many dreams, and on this day I got to get a piece of it through the gardens here. We wrapped up our tour here around 3:30 PM, as my mother didn’t feel well, then headed to our hotel in Santa Monica.

The Getty had some wonderful art and views.

We came to the Getty on our second day because I knew it was free to enter, minus the $20 parking fee at the bottom of the mountain.

You take a cute little tram up to the top of the mountain, and because we had the earliest time slot on a Thursday, we pretty much had the place to ourselves.

When we left around 12:30 to meet my friend for lunch, it started getting really crowded, so I’m glad we came at the earliest time because then the galleries would have some annoying elbowing involved while looking at the pieces.

So one of the great parts about the Getty here is that it overlooks Los Angeles. While we waited for the museum to open, as we arrived a little bit early, we walked around the property and had an excellent time looking at the views of the city in combination with the architecture of the building surrounding us.

We spent a good time looking through each of the galleries, including the William Blake exhibition going on, and I think my favorite room overall was the one that had the Van Gogh piece in it. Basic answer, but I’m simply not a fan of 1500s Italian and 1600s Dutch art as a whole.

One day was dedicated to the Santa Monica Pier, the Wheel of Fortune, and Westwood.

We were staying on a hotel on Santa Monica Boulevard, so it would be criminal to not check out the Santa Monica Pier during out time in Los Angeles.

After breakfast one morning, we dragged our jet lagged selves to the pier and walked around for about two hours. The Santa Monica Pier in itself would probably be better to go to at night, when there are more people around, and it’s not very big in general.

There are also a ton of homeless people scattered around the parks near it, so if you want to snag a bench around there, it might be difficult to get some peace.

We found a quiet part a little bit down and stared at the ocean for a bit, then returned back to the hotel to head to Westwood.

We wanted to go here to Westwood for Iranian food, and ended up eating at Shamshiri. We have this restaurant at home, but because my father likes name brands for some reason, we still ended up here. The ghormeh sabzi was really good, and I liked the fact that they pretty much had endless refills of the chai.

As a major tea drinker, I appreciate this a lot. We walked down the street to get ice cream at Saffron + Rose after, and we swore this was the best ice cream we’ve ever had. Later in the trip we came back just to get this ice cream—that’s how good it was.

After that, we piled into our van and headed into Culver City, as my eldest sister got us Wheel of Fortune tickets.

These are free, but we didn’t realize at all that we were going to be there for hours on end, as they tape three episodes in a row and include all of the commercial breaks throughout.

After one episode was done filming, we were ready to go, but we left after the second episode because we had to go to a wedding event—that was two hours into it. If they sit you in the front row though, they gave you a terrible seat with the bar blocking your view.

The Hollywood Walk of Fame is underwhelming, but the Griffith Observatory was gorgeous.

After getting lunch with my friend one day, we decided to head to the Hollywood Walk of Fame because that was the peak tourist thing to do. This was also massively underwhelming, but I’m glad we did it to be honest.

I didn’t care for the stars on the ground, although I was looking for Anna May Wong (I did not find her), and we made a pit stop at the Chinese Theatre, which I then learned that my hands and feet were literally the same exact size as Josh Hutcherson’s.

Another highlight for me on the strip was the gift shop literally called La La Land. We spent so much time in that store because it’s massive, and we were dodging Japanese students, as four tour bus full of them were dropped off while we were there.

We then headed to the Griffith to catch the sunset, and I’m so glad we did! Looking at Los Angeles from above was completely worth it in the end, as the lights twinkled so beautifully in the distance.

I wanted to catch one LA sunset while we were in town, and we managed to do so. No picture could ever do it justice in the end!

Driving around Beverly Hills and Rodeo Drive was full of some beautiful homes.

Before we headed off to LAX on our final day, we decided to drive around town and see what it had to offer in terms of fancy houses. We had a couple of hours, so we first headed to Rodeo Drive, which was decorated for Christmas when we were there.

My father was constantly talking about the Iranian designer Bijan’s store throughout the trip, so he took pictures in front of the store happily before we continued walking through this part of town.

My favorite section was the one that had an alleyway that looked a little like Europe—but I wouldn’t know, as of writing this I have never been to Europe!

We parked a bit of distance away in order to get free parking and walked there, and along the way there were such nice houses.

We took a little drive after the fact to see more of the neighborhood, including the Beverly Hills Hotel, and marveled at what kinds of homes the rich could afford to buy and maintain with their money. Not us!

We kept making jokes about how we were such commoners compared to these people.

Finally: we got to see our cousin get married!

Our main point of the trip was to go and see our cousin get married, and we did just that on the Saturday! He got married at a country club overlooking Los Angeles, and we spent the entire day at the ceremony and on the dance floor.

Our family rarely has the chance to get together like this, so it was so worth sitting with everyone, chatting, and hitting up the dance floor to Persian club music with our loved ones.

We also had the chance to stay in the same hotel as our relatives from San Diego, so it was so nice to sit at the same table as them and chat for hours at breakfast.

This was my Los Angeles trip though! Most of what we did was free, so most of our money went towards parking, lodging, and food. It was a nice trip, but I don’t know if I’d go back to LA.

It was really sad seeing all the homeless people, and on my second night I spotted a dead body being removed from a homeless camp by police. The spaced out nature of the city also doesn’t help it, and the traffic was a nightmare sometimes as visitors. I’m glad we came, though.

Follow me below on Instagram and Goodreads for more.