awesome! such a great place to visit. I love LA if you can get around before or after traffic hours 430-6p. Fridays after 3p-630p are a disaster in all of southern Cali like many other places. In LA Hollywood is cool to drive through, if you're younger Hollywood Hills on Sunset strip for all the clubs. Beverly hills aint my thing but if you wanna see insane home just drive through and Bel Air too. Since you'll be among a lot of Persians might as well stop by westwood Blvd and get some Persian food. Shamshiri grill is the shit. San Monica has amazing restaurants but naturally expensive. If you stay on the westside you can check out the UCLA campus and there is great food that's a little cheaper like Berkley in Frisco. Korea Town and China town are awesome if you know where to eat. If you wanna check out great beaches you could do Hermosa Beach or Venice beach, awesome people watching and good food again. If you want to drive through Topanga Canyong it's a nice view down and if you wanna be a baller have dinner at Inn of the Seventh Ray, if it's raining even better because it's built into the hilltops and has these cool plastic covers.
Orange County, Newport Beach I guess but I dunno, people love it but I don't get it. Irvine is dead, and Santa Ana, I don't think much to do there. San Diego, now that's awesome. Beaches are sweet for California (crappy compared to other countries). Surfing is great, standup paddling at La Jolla shores. San Diego will have car2go in the downtown area. Downtown is neat, not the crappy barf-streets like the gaslamp that everyone goes to, nothing there, promise you, tourist traps. go to East Village, the Marina (don't eat there $$$). In downtown area check out Evolution Fastfood for great vegan foods like burgers chilli cheese fries etc. A beautiful cozy restaurant that's a tiny house turned into a restaurant is Wet Stone, beautiful and reasonable. Has a lot of South American wines and the owner is usually there and he is a peach, Christian. You could check out Balboa Park, it's ai'ght. La Jolla has some nice walking around that you can do at night but very sheeshy for my taste. Relayrides is really popular in SD and OC, dunno about LA but I'm sure. Super easy and really great way to save a lot on car rental, peer to peer renting you know.
enjoy, have a blast. hope others here can give you more specifics.