The museum is in the lower level of the shopping mall and look out for discount vouchers in the tourist brochures. There are not actually many displays to look at by yourself. When I visited there was a 'Smoking in the Movies' exhibition and the 'Greta Garbo' display.

The musuem is worth visiting for the guided tours. The main tour and the best one takes you behind the scenes, showing you familiar props, costumes, and designs from a number of famous movies.

The highlights of the museum are the Star Trek and the Cheers set. Its cheesey but still a bit of a thrill to sit in the Captain's chair or around the bar at Cheers. And if you're in town on a Monday night, you can go catch a game and have a pint at the original Cheers bar.

The musuem also does an interactive special effects tour. You get to see how some of the special effects in movies are created and also have a go at providing some sound effects.

V and I thought we were going to see some interestingly weird things when we decided to go to Ripley's Believe it or Not, Guinness World of Records, and the Hollywood Wax Museum. I think we knew, going in, that this was going to be the most difficult part of the day.

We had just gone to Greyhound to get our tickets for the trip from Santa Barbara to San Francisco, and after a hearty chicken lunch at Popeye's, we headed to the area.

Ripley's was our first stop since we thought it would be the weirdest, but you can only see so many people with foreign objects through various parts of their bodies before it gets old. The torture chamber was interesting, and there was this room with a video of a guy swallowing things and then burping them back up. He's a real talent, that one.

Anyway, we then went to the wax museum and learned that there was a two for one discount to Guinness. Since we had nothing better to do that day we went to both. The wax museum was a joke. Body hair seemed to be applied with a burnt piece of wood and none of the figures looked like their real counterparts (maybe a few, but it's been a while and it still was bad).

The Guinness World Records Exhibit was a toned down version of Ripley's. We saw a lot of the same things, but minus the two headed calf. There was a lot of text to read on each item which made me wonder if I should just have splurged and bought the $5 book instead of going here.

Visiting these three museums made me wish we had decided to not do touristy things at all. None of it was what we were expecting and I think this was the most expensive part of our stay in LA because of the ticket prices.

There was one fun thing that happened. I've forgotten whether it was in Ripley's or the Wax Museum. We were walking into the chamber of horrors and this dummy was rigged to fall down from the top of a door. We, the excitable girls that we are, jumped and then argued over who was going to go first. I won and got to watch V lead the way through. Still very skittish, we reached the end, but there was this big monster head at the exit. I thought it was going to spew smoke or something equally startling when we passed. Again, there was a discussion, which ended with V throwing her bag full of postcards at it. Nothing happened so we walked on. I'm a little embarrassed to be sharing this story, but it was the best part of the whole day.