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Published: September 30th 2006
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Santa Clara Station
Typical Mexican inspired architecture Hola mis amigos del Pueblo della Santa Maria la Reina de Los Angeles!
Who'd have thought that Jen and I would have come to Los Angeles and experienced nothing but intellectual pursuits. Okay, so that's not entirely true, but it's close.
We trained up from San Diego on Wednesday and it was a really pleasant ride. It was surprisingly quick and Amtrak trains are nice! Double decker cars make for excellent viewing. We arrived in LA to find it hotter than San Diego by a stretch, but the underground was nice and cool. We had a most interesting train trip out to Hollywood and Highland with a large black man who worked with troubled kids. Part of his teaching strategy was trivia it seems and he dared to challenge me! ME! The king of useless trivia. He seemed genuinely impressed when I knew that Aladdin and Sinbad were both in Arabian Nights!
The hostel turned out to be right across the road from the subway exit, next door to El Capitan and across from the Kodak Theatre. We are in Hollywood for real. Jen and I spent the afternoon plodding around the local area, just having a look
around. I have seen the Walk of Fame and it is naff. Boy is it naff. Hollywood is a run down part of town either side of the blocks we're staying on. Lots of low rent businesses (wig shops, adult shops and luggage shops for the most part) and places behind bars. Odd really. Mercifully, we discovered that the mall attached to the Kodak provided a wealth of eateries and sated Jen's and my desire to get some quality US diner food at Johnny Rocket's!
Thursday was intended to be culture day, with a trip to the Getty Centre and to the LA County Art Museum. It's a long bus ride to the Santa Monica foothills, which put paid to the LACMA idea real quick. However, we did get to ride through some of Bel Air and along Sorority and Fraternity Rows outside UCLA. Most amusing as this week is pledge week! Anyway, the Getty is a magnificent institution. Beatifully located about Westwood in the hills, it's a marble palace railing against everything LA stands for. The collections were incredible, and the name dropping room of Impressionists was indescribable. Monet, Renoir, Gauguin and more (and another El Greco elsewhere!)
LA
Hard to miss.... It was.....wow! There were also sizable collections of antiquarian art and sculpture as well as some pleasant modern works. All in all, a magnificent day out, and it took us the best part of six hours to see it all.
We decided to do LACMA today, along with the La Brea tarpits. Who'd have thought that a woolly mammoth could be 15 feet tall and weigh 12,000 pounds?! The tar pits illustrated a foul smelling really unpleasant natural phenomenon, but the fossil collection was beautifully preserved and displayed. The mammoths, sloths and saber-toothed CAT (not tiger - it's not a real big cat!) were just astonishing. We pottered around to LACMA next door to discover that it's free after 5pm so a free visit it was, along with some fantastic free jazz - the Herbie Hancock was bliss. Robertson - you would have loved it! LACMA is huge, and we had to hurry to get around it all in three hours. We admired some gorgeous Japanese scrolls and calligraphy, as well as a pleasant collection of largely unknown Renaissance, Impressionist and Neoclassical artists. The museum also had some nice glass and a small collection of antiquities, the highlight of
which were some bas reliefs from the side of an Assyrian temple. Marduk! Marduk! Marduk!
So, that was LA in brief. We're picking up the car first thing tomorrow for the drive up to San Francisco and back - turns out it's almost cheaper to have it for 5 days instead of 2 and dropping it off in LA. Weird. So we're going to pop out to the Huntingdon in Pasadena tomorrow morning to see the greenhouse of carnivorous plants and then hit Highway 5 for a 6 hour drive to San Fran. Tired I will be, but we will get to come into the city over the Oakland Bridge, which promises some stunning views.
Anyway, my time is running short and there's deathmatch Halo on ESPN behind me, so I'm off to watch some of that. Take care all, and still no photos. There is an incredible dearth of real internet cafes in the USA. Hoping San Fran will be more helpful!
Talk soon,
Al and Jen
PS - Just for Anika - Beaut Beaut Beaut! MWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!
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Mal and Bec
malandbec
Geeks!!!
;)