Thursday 5 (12/08/10)

My last day in LA, and my last blog. I’ve had an amazing time here, as you can read in the previous entries. I spent the day nearby the hotel and USC, and although I didn’t venture back onto campus, I did feel as though it rounded off my stay.

Josh and I went to a very nice cafe just next to Smart and Final, which was the very first supermarket I shopped at. And we also revisited the rose garden. The Air and Space Gallery and the Science Center provided a couple of hours amusement, including an unadvertised aquarium which was great.

I'm writing this from the business lounge at the airport. It’s too early to reflect on my trip to any extent. But I certainly got what I came for, and much more. Now I’m looking forward to getting back home, but without any regrets about my stay here in LA.

Wednesday 5 (11/08/10)

Today was my last full day here. I packed up my things this morning, and took the kitchen stuff to the charity shop around the corner. I had tacos for lunch, which I’ve known about for 15 years but have never had. They’re basically a crisp, thin tortilla with a meat and salad filling of your choice. Not at all bad – I’m quite surprised they aren’t more common in Britain. But then, we do already have a startling variety of lunchtime snacks.

Joshua and I went to Santa Monica this afternoon. It was his idea, and I didn’t know what to expect, but it’s a really great place. As well as the pier, pictured, which has a lovely restaurant at the end of it where we ate dinner, there is also a pedestrianised shopping street (yes, I finally found one!) with a variety of busking performers.

Santa Monica also seems to be a great place to show off. On the pier there’s a trapeze training area, where you can pay to learn how to swing by your feet with a small crowd gathered to watch. And on the beach itself there are a number of sets of regular swings, and also a set of eight or ten gymnastic rings. We saw someone working their way along from one to the next, all the way and back without touching the ground. It’s certainly the place for showing off physical prowess.

Tuesday 5 (11/08/10)

Today was my last at the library. I’ve seen 33 scores, which is roughly 20% of the collection. I felt quite strange as I left, almost as though I should have something more official to do – sign out, hand in my USCard, that sort of thing. But then, I wasn’t really here officially, it was just a private visit.

This afternoon I went to the Beverly Center, which has the reputation for being an interesting shopping experience. It wasn’t particularly. It was quite small for a shopping centre, because although the building is huge, five floors were taken up by car-parking. There were some shops one wouldn’t expect to see in your average mall, such as Burberry and Gucci, but there was not a single book, DVD or music shop.

I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised that the centre itself was nothing special. Shopping centres are the same everywhere. If anything, it just made me wish I was at one closer to home.

Monday 5 (09/08/10)

The campus is decidedly busier than it was last week. There’s a certain expectant feeling in the air, no doubt caused by term being just around the corner. There’s also quite a lot of showing off going on. I saw some sportsman today making two others do press-ups on the lawn in the middle of the campus. No idea what – besides attracting attention – any of the three were trying to accomplish.

The University Village, where I’ve been shopping during my stay, is also showing more signs of life. One of the armed forces recruiting stations (yes, they have two) was open with a sandwich board outside advertising “150 reasons to join”. Presumably the number of reasons has to be greater than the space on the board, otherwise they would have to list them.

It felt quite strange to go back to the village now that I’m no longer living across the road from it. I certainly feel less connected to the University now that I’m not living in student accommodation. Being at Vagabond is much nicer, although I would only want to go without a kitchen for a short time. This is the view from my window, which isn’t a bad one, really.

Sunday 5 (08/08/10)

I went to Mass in the local church this morning, St Vincent de Paul (pictured). It's a very beautiful and Italianate church inside and out. It was a very nice service, helped by the fact that their hymnbooks all have the melodies printed in them, but I suspect the single Mass in English was less well-attended than the Spanish-language Masses, of which there are four. In fact, communion took such a short time considering the number of attendees that I wonder if some had already been to Mass earlier that morning.

I went for a walk later in the afternoon, and found myself on a street full of Frat houses (Fraternities being somewhat like student unions, but membership is by invitation only). Each one is identified by a different set of Ancient Greek characters, and the shop on the corner at the end of the street was called “Greek Escape”, which I found quite funny.

Yesterday I asked Joshua if he knew which of the many eateries near Vagabond was good, to which he replied scathingly “None of them”. After a while, he relented and said that the Viztango café was actually very nice. So I decided to try it for lunch, and took away a very nice smoked salmon salad (although the salmon was, of course, not up to comparison with Scottish). I went back for dinner and ate there, and I think I shall continue. It certainly has a varied enough menu for my remaining three nights.
And no, I can’t believe it’s only three to go either.

Saturday 5 (07/08/10)

I went to Universal Studios with Josh today. It was so much fun. I think this picture highlights an important part of the experience – juxtaposition. It is the Bates Motel in the foreground (which, if I heard correctly, was built for Psycho 2) with the set for How The Grinch Stole Christmas towering over the back of it.

The most impressive aspect of the studio is possibly how much they’ve done with so little acreage. The rides are arranged as tightly as the back-lot sets. There’s no room for sprawling rollercoasters, but the inventiveness and unusualness of the rides make up for their lack of size. There are no particularly big physical feats here – none claim to be the tallest, longest or fastest – but the rides definitely make the best use of audio and visual effects I have ever had the pleasure to experience.

By sheer luck, we chose the best time of day to go. When we arrived around lunch time the park was heaving, and by about 5.30 we had still only been on two of the attractions, but as those with children started to leave, the park became quieter and the queues much shorter, and we ended up seeing everything we had wanted to see. We even went on the last ride twice (The Mummy – the park’s only true rollercoaster. It was so short, I’m glad we had only queued 1/2 an hour for it – any longer and I would have felt cheated. But the second time, we got almost straight on, so twice through felt like long enough!). I think if we’d arrived any earlier, we would have been tempted to leave before the crowds cleared.

Perhaps the most impressive attraction is the Terminator experience, simply because it has aged so well. The effects are not as huge as the more recent attractions that have been based on the same technology (a mixture of three-dimensional film and moving theatre seats) but the execution is flawless, and it’s hard to believe the show's nearly 15 years old.

Friday 4 (06/08/10)

I went back to Olvera St today, supposedly the oldest part of Los Angeles. Much of what is there was actually constructed in the 1930s to be a historic street, so it isn’t quite as authentic as it might be. But it does have Los Angeles’s oldest house, The Avila Adobe, built in 1818. It is also right next to the city’s oldest church, founded in 1781, Nuestra Señora Reina De Los Angeles (Our Lady, Queen of Angels, pictured) after which the city is named.

Olvera St is towards the North-East of Downtown, so to get there I took the bus to Macy’s, then the underground train round to Union Station. So now I can say I’ve been on underground trains in 5 different cities, and have actually arrived at Union Station.

On the way back, when I was waiting for the bus, I caught sight of the Bonaventure hotel again, which has glass elevators on the outside of the building. I decided to wander there and see if I could go up one, and it turned out to have a shopping centre on the lower floors. So nobody minded if some tourist decided to take the lift all the way to the top of the building (although I thought I could sense a sort of “us and them” attitude from the residents). The pictures I got were nothing special, but it was a fun ride.

Thursday 4 (05/08/10)

The move to the Vagabond Inn went very smoothly today. Despite check-in officially starting at 2pm, I was given a room before 10am, which was great because it meant I could have a shower before going into town.

I got the bus out to La Brea, which is middle to West of the city, but it took 50 mins because the route went East into Downtown first. I had my lunch in Pan Pacific park, which is a fairly nice place, and then made my way to the Institute of the American Musical. What an amazing place! The director is an absolute fount of knowledge, and he has met everyone who ever worked in musical theatre, and many more besides.

The collection spans far too much for me to write about it here, but I had a wonderful time being shown the vast expanse of records, films (actual celluloid in some cases), programmes, posters and books. And genuine Edison wax cylinders, played on the machine shown here. A truly wonderful experience.

Wednesday 4 (04/08/10)

Well, I’m finally packed. The room looks as barren as it did when I arrived. It’s funny to think I’ve been here nearly 4 weeks, and even funnier to think I’ll be going through all this again in a week’s time.

I’m moving across to the Vagabond Inn, just a block away, because the university accommodation is only available during the summer, and it’s nearly the start of the new semester. The hardest thing to pack was all the kitchenware I’ve accumulated. But there’s no point getting rid of any of it until I’ve found out if I can use any of it at the hotel. I doubt I’ll be able to cook, but there will probably be a fridge, so there’s the possibility of buying stuff to eat cold.

The most amazing thing is that I have only 8 nights left including tonight. I wonder whether moving will make the time go quicker or slower...Probably both. Most likely it will drag, and then when the week’s over it will only seem like a day.

Tuesday 4 (03/08/10)

Again today I did nothing but work and sit around. So this is a photo I took on Friday when I went shopping to Downtown. I have to say that the amount of public art in Los Angeles is very impressive. You can hardly go a block without seeing a sculpture or a fountain. Apparently, all private commercial developments around the city must contribute a certain amount towards public art. I’m not sure if that’s counted in funds, square footage, or both, but you see many buildings that have a sculpture just outside their door.

I don’t know whether this clock tower was funded by private development. It seems to be on the corner of a park (I didn’t investigate further because I knew I had quite a long way to walk, and it was very hot) which would suggest it’s public. All the more impressive if the state still funds public art even though private companies have to.

Monday 4 (02/08/10)

Today I was looking at scores for Scott Bradley’s concert music. There were four or five orchestral pieces, and I’ve never heard any of them. It certainly put my score reading skills to the test! I found myself looking forward to getting back to my flat all day. It ALMOST feels like home now, but that’s probably because I’m having to think about moving to the hotel on Thursday.

I took this picture yesterday. This huge crane is in the carpark outside the Science Centre. The arm is long enough that two small children can lift a very big car. An entirely pointless exercise, but I can imagine one way in which the machine is useful: it gives parents a way to shepherd their children back towards the car on their way out of the museum.

Sunday 4 (01/08/10)

I was so tired after yesterday that I did almost nothing today. I went for a walk this evening, through the rose garden, and found Exposition Park to the immediate South. I had intended to go to the sculpture park, but had underestimated the distance. But I did stumble upon this, the Memorial Coliseum, which has among other things hosted the 1932 Olympic Games, and was used for some events of the 1984 Olympics as well, including the opening and closing ceremonies. The urn sitting on top of the archway is actually the Olympic Cauldron, where the flaming torch came to the end of its journey.

Saturday 4 (31/07/10)

Today Josh took me for a VERY long drive through the mountains in the Angeles National Forest. We left before twelve and didn’t get back until nearly 11. We must have spent at least 8 hours on the road. I took lots of pictures of the mountains, but I’ve already posted several landscapes, so I chose this instead.

The first lot of countryside we drove through was full of blackened tree trunks from the fire about 18 months ago. A lot of the scrub was growing back, and the sticks of charcoal were quite dramatic against the green hillside.

Further on, where the fire hadn’t reached, the hillside was covered with pines of various sorts. It made me realise why the locals we had met had said how sad the burnt areas were to look at. But the absence of trees meant the underlying shape of the landscape was much clearer – the path of every rivulet laid bare.

Even further on, I got a sight of quite a different sort of countryside. Big Bear Lake and the surrounding ski resorts are very alpine, and in the summer very Scottish, like Loch Lomond writ large.

This hummingbird feeder is hung under the eaves of the Cosmic Cafe at the top of Mount Wilson. It’s quite a luxury to be able to get to the top of a mountain without having to climb on foot, and something to eat without having to carry it all the way. I’m not sure the locals realise that.

Friday 3 (30/07/10)

This has definitely felt like the longest week so far, although now it’s over it doesn’t seem a week since last Friday. I went into Downtown again today, but this time managed to find the real shopping areas. I started off at “LA Live”, which is a new development on the South edge of Downtown, not far at all from the campus. But it turns out it’s not a shopping centre, just a series of restaurants, bars, hotels and entertainment venues. So I wandered further North and Eastwards, hoping to stumble upon the shopping streets Josh and I had driven past the week before. And I did manage to find them.

It has always made me laugh that in American movies people generally know what direction things are in, and seem to use the points of the compass for most of their navigation. But it really is the simplest way to understand where you are in a city that’s based on a grid. Most of the streets in LA run approximately North-South or East-West, and the buses and trains can generally be categorised that way as well. The surprising thing is that it actually works, because in most UK cities you can quickly become disorientated by the curving roads.

So this area is, as I think I described last Saturday, quite downmarket. It’s all cut-price electronics, jewellery, clothes and accessories. And theatres - there seems to be an old Vaudeville theatre on every street. Josh tells me that because of building regulations, people generally find it worth their while only to let the ground floor of the old buildings. Renovating the upper floors to the required level would involve too much investment. It’s incredible to think that it isn’t worth turning any of these buildings into clubs or bars, given how quickly this happens in the UK. But then, in a city that’s practically closed over the weekend, I suppose the usual rules don’t apply. I saw a sign outside a bar in LA Live that said “Count down to the weekend with our Happy Hour specials” – presumably there’s no point having a weekend special, so they have it during the week.

Thursday 3 (29/07/10)

I took this photograph from the top of Los Angeles City Hall. When it was built, it was the tallest in the area, but now the financial district is filled with banks and hotels that tower over this. It is possibly the tallest building I have ever been to the top of - the observation platform is on level 26.

The building in this picture is Union Station, called the last great railroad station because after this there was a distinct decline in architectural quality. The external architecture of Union Station is unlike any I’ve come across. It looks like a modern copy of a Franciscan Mission, which makes its Art Deco interior somewhat of a surprise. The entrance hall is very spacious, with only one or two concessions – it’s very different from the shopping-centre style of modern stations. It also has a restaurant, which Josh tells me is excellent. Some of its tables are actually set out inside the main hall of the station, which makes you feel that you’re walking into an enormous hotel lobby. It also means the commuter rush mentality is not as pervasive.

From Union Station you can get a train to New Orleans, or to Chicago, and then on to New York, which takes 3 1/2 days. And that’s with only a 3 hour gap between trains in Chicago. As always when abroad, I feel a reckless desire to hop on one and see where I end up. Being away from home always fills me with Wanderlust. But I’m sure once I get home I’ll never want to leave again.

Wednesday 3 (28/07/10)

I must have walked past this tree about every other day since I got here, but I only noticed it today. At first I thought it was some kind of parasitic cactus attached to another tree, but a closer look shows that it is entirely cactus. I’ve no idea what kind it is, but it’s amazing the way it has turned to bark at the bottom of the trunk.

I finally found proper chocolate today – I had run out of things for lunch so instead of taking some with me, as usual, I went into a shop on the campus. It was a cafe, I suppose, but the kind that only makes its coffee fresh – everything else was pre-prepared. On their shelves was some Galaxy – it’s called ‘Dove’ here, but it’s the same stuff. I was glad, because I’d begun to think no-one here ate chocolate on its own. The Americans seem to prefer chocolate biscuits and so on.

I’m looking forward to getting back to the UK. Only two weeks to go now, which seems amazing.

Tuesday 3 (27/07/10)

It’s just as well we’ve never had these in England. I doubt even the Timelords would be able to fit inside one of these, and there’s no room for the coffee machine. I assume they are for contacting the campus police, rather than the LAPD directly. I haven’t noticed these boxes outside the campus.

The USC librarian gave me a present today – an original blank timing sheet from MGM studios. My very own piece of Hollywood history to take home. I’ve already promised not to go into details about my work, but I’m going to anyway. The timing sheet was the cartoon composer’s starting point. It is a printed chart with space at the top for descriptions of the action, a line or two in the middle to mark where sound effects are going to fall, and three empty staves for the composer to write the music on. The composer and director would mark out the action beat by beat, second by second. Very few timing sheets survive, because they weren’t considered worth keeping. I am really quite thrilled to have my own.

It’s amazing how exciting a blank piece of paper can be.

Monday 3 (26/07/10)

It has been unseasonably cold today. The sun didn’t really come out until mid afternoon. In fact, for the first time, it was colder outside than it was in the air-conditioned library. I felt a bit silly sitting outside at lunchtime with my shorts on feeling cold, but usually I have the opposite problem.

So far, my research has been entirely musical, looking at Scott Bradley’s cartoon scores. But today I started looking at the archive of his personal papers. Included among them were things like his mother’s last letters to her children, his great-grandmother’s handkerchief, and a relative’s letter to Scott’s widow dated a month after his death. I felt as though I shouldn’t be reading them. There were, of course, plenty of things that will aid my research – plenty of reasons why I should look through them. I won’t go into details, but there were one or two unpublished pieces of music that tie in to his cartoons.

I took this photo a while ago. It’s not the cartoon cat I’m looking for, but it’s interesting that a character from a century ago can still be such an icon. I don’t doubt that Tom will last just as long as Felix.

Sunday 3 (25/07/10)

This is the tallest building in Los Angeles. Actually, it’s the tallest US building West of the Mississippi. I took this yesterday. Joshua, who is a wonderful tour guide, took me to a place where you can stand right next to this building and look straight up at it. I took a photo or two from that angle, but I think the height is better showcased in this shot. If you count the windows, there are more than 50 stories in this photo, which doesn’t reach the ground. I don’t think I’ve ever been inside a building that tall.

Downtown Los Angeles is a strange place. For some reason, the locals don’t tend to congregate in the centre at the weekend, preferring either the beaches or the peripheral areas where they live. It’s very strange to find any city centre quieter on a Saturday than on a weekday, and Josh assures me that LA is odd among American cities in that respect. It is also lacking in eateries. Within the last five years, a new shopping and entertainment centre opened just on the edge of Downtown, and in so doing doubled the number of restaurants in the area. I don’t know quite how large “LA Live” is (although it’s now on my list of places to visit) but even if it is the size of Bluewater, it’s still incredible that the original restaurants could have been so few.

Perhaps, given what I just wrote, you won’t find it surprising how small Downtown is. It is incredibly small, given the comparative size of LA. This impression is no doubt influenced by the fact that there are no pedestrianised streets, nowhere designed for people to congregate on foot, but it’s also because, compared with the height of the buildings, or the width of the roads, the central shopping streets are very short. Not to scale, you might say.

I can’t help feeling that much of LA’s uniqueness in these respects is down to the vastness of the economic divide between rich and poor. After all, when there is a whole community of super-rich, the shopping areas are going to split between extremes. Which means that you end up with Beverly Hills’s $50 000 handbags on the one hand, and Downtown’s $10 dresses on the other. You can’t really imagine these businesses, nor their clientele, sharing the same geographic space, and you can also imagine the separate areas becoming gradually more and more, or less and less, expensive.

Saturday 3 (24/07/10)

I went out for a tour of Downtown with Joshua today. I may blog a picture of that tomorrow, but this is from the drive we took afterwards. We started on the Pacific Coast Highway again, but cut inland across the mountains and back several times, enjoying the dramatic scenery and winding roads. For once I feel I have too many photos to choose from.

This view across the valley away from the coast is possibly the most spectacular in the area. It’s difficult to believe that Los Angeles is less than an hour’s drive away. I suppose Glasgow and its neighbouring countryside are like LA in miniature, in that respect.

I feel I should have more to say about it, but really the scenery speaks for itself.

Friday 2 (23/07/10)

I went into town today for the first time (unless you include Hollywood). Since it was the first time, I kept it simple so I wouldn’t get lost. I finally managed to find the bus route online that goes from outside USC (basic as the transport is in LA, their websites about it are even less sophisticated, and there seems to be no collated information about the various buses). The bus I got is called the DASH and it’s much cheaper than the regular buses – only 25C a ride!

I came across a variety of familiar and unfamiliar foods today. A BLT, a kitkat (the closest thing to British chocolate I’ve come across here) and a Mountain Dew – a coca-cola product similar to Sprite which used to be a favourite of mine when they briefly sold it in the UK. It didn’t quite live up to my memory of it – perhaps things never do. Later in the supermarket I came across edible cactus, which I might try – apparently it’s similar to green beans. I wasn’t quite brave enough to get it without coming back to google it first!

As I ate my lunch in a gloomy basement foodcourt under Macy’s, it occurred to me that it was the kind of place that would gain a reputation for being better avoided. But quite undeservedly, really – it seemed to be just another victim of 60s/70s architecture. It was all fluorescent lighting – no planning to allow daylight in. It reminded me of the Savoy Centre in Glasgow, or the St John’s centre in Liverpool. Mind you, I must be a very long way from home to be nostalgic about those particular places. Even so, I wouldn’t hesitate to go to any of them for fear of personal safety. Ditto the bus – considering its reputation, I was expecting something that felt run-down. But Merseyrail used to be much worse (and the Glasgow subway isn’t up to much, when you think about it). The only thing I was worried about was missing my stop and getting lost (which is difficult, once you figure out that all the East-West streets are numbered in order, and considering how big and unmissable the USC campus is when you return). I think if you’re comfortable using inner-city facilities, whatever they may be, it doesn’t make much difference which city you are in. They’re all dangerous. They’re all safe.

Thursday 2 (22/07/10)

I decided to take today off, in order to do mundane tasks such as my laundry, wash my hair, repair a small hole appearing in my rucksack... Ah, the glamour of life in LA. I took a walk around the neighbourhood in a direction I haven’t been so far. It’s quite liberating just to get one’s bearings and become more familiar with the immediate area. I came across the Shrine Auditorium (pictured) close-up for the first time. I have seen it from a distance before, but I didn’t realise how impressive it was.

The Arabic-derived architecture is down to this being the headquarters of the local temple of the Ancient Arabic Order of the Nobles of the Mystic Shrine (affiliated to Freemasonry) which, like all things ancient here in the US, was established in 1870. More famous is its some-time use as a venue for the Oscars, Emmys, Grammys, SAG awards and so on. It also houses the home court of the Trojans basketball team.

It is also where, in 1984, Michael Jackson had his hair set on fire.

The size of this building really doesn't come across in photographs. Something to do with the classical proportions (the masons probably used the Golden Mean for every single aspect of the design) means that it really could be of any size. But if you look at the pavement in front of the building, and follow it to where it disappears under the archway next to the palm trees, you see that the very bottom panes of glass in those front "windows" are actually 9 or 10ft high double-doors.

Wednesday 2 (21/07/10)

I’m now a third of the way through my trip, which is hard to believe. Just when I thought I’d run out of things to take photos of around campus, a great blimp loomed into view. I’m probably too old to get as excited as I do at seeing a balloon in the sky, but it was such a novelty that I followed it down the street taking pictures as I went. I got one shot of it over the trees on campus that was possibly a better shot than this, but I haven’t posted any street views yet, and this is just as typical a sight as the leafy ivy-covered buildings.

Crossing at traffic lights here is an entertaining experience. When the pedestrian light goes green (or white, rather) you are ushered across by a “cuckoo” noise or a sort of “Pew, pew”. It’s not the only place I’ve been to that has bird noises for its traffic lights, Adelaide crossings have the sound of a whip bird (has to be heard to be appreciated). You are allowed to cross diagonally, and there are separate lights for each direction. Once the cuckoo has sounded, the light switches to an orange hand (as you can see in the photo) and has a counting-down clock next to it to tell you how many seconds you have to finish crossing. You have to be quick, too, at some of them. Then, of course, there’s the fun rule that cars turning right (hugging the pavement, as it were) are allowed to go when the light’s red. Pedestrians have right of way, but you have two chances on each crossing of being hit if someone doesn’t pay attention. Add to that the cyclists, who all seem to travel along pavements and use the crossings as pedestrians, and an English person’s suicidal instinct to step to the left of someone approaching, and things can get interesting.

In any European country I’ve been to, these rules would be a total disaster. But whether it’s because everyone is used to traffic jams here, or because everyone’s terrified of being sued, or maybe because USC is not in the city centre, the drivers all come across as laid back. They may honk the horn a bit, but they seem to accelerate slowly and brake often, and even at rush hour you don’t get the feeling that they’re competing with each other to get to the front.

[If anyone's interested in finding this place on Google Streetview, search "denny's west jefferson boulevard" on google maps, and zoom in. Denny's is on the corner just out of shot on the left.]

Tuesday 2 (20/07/10)

A little sparrow hopped past my chair today as I was eating my lunch. It was too quick for me, though. Shame you can’t just download images straight from memory.

Instead, I took photos of various buildings around campus – any whose names struck me as interesting. The Music faculty’s ‘Jeanette MacDonald Recital Hall’ had me wondering all day where I knew Jeanette MacDonald from, since as far as I know I’ve never seen any of her films. The ‘Juliette “Julie” Kohl Trojan Band Center’ made me ponder over the necessity of both shortened and long versions of the same name, and also what a Trojan band would sound like. (I’m being silly, of course – Trojans is the nickname of all USC’s teams.) On similar lines, I saw a “Trojan hospitality” lorry, and wondered whether they specialised in stables, whether they would be particularly accommodating towards a girl called Helen, whether they provide faces to help launch local ships...

This building beat the “Donald P. and Katherine B. Loker Hydrocarbon Research Center” (how specific a research center can one feasibly endow, I wonder?) and the “Department of Astronautical Engineering” (above Aeronautics any day...) to become today’s blog photo. I just love the sheer audacity of having an engineering building on stilts. Hope they don’t have a wave tank in that thing.

Monday 2 (19/07/10)

I’m starting to run out of things to talk about (and take photos of) around campus. I’ll have to start doing more interesting things. Of course, I find my work fascinating, but I don’t expect anyone else to be riveted by my description of it.

On Saturday, before we went to the Hollywood Bowl, me and my new friend Josh went for a drive along the pacific coast highway. It’s pretty scenery, with the mountains so close to the coast. On a clear day, you can also see the Channel Islands to the Southwest of the road, although on Saturday they were just vague shapes in the haze. It was certainly the full cliché experience, since Josh has just himself a manual red convertible (Mazda Miata). It’s his first car, and he’s extremely chuffed with it. I took this photo pointing backwards over the rear of the car, because the setting sun was ahead of us.

It’s amazing how quickly the sun sets here. There’s no real twilight, which is quite disconcerting, especially when driving because the cars suddenly need their headlights. Joshua’s just as unused to that as I am, being from New Jersey.