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.