Southern California II

Dear friends and family: I’m very sorry about the extremely delayed posts. We’ve been pretty busy and often far from reliable internet, but mostly I’ve just slacked on it over the past few weeks. To make it more this all more manageable to read and to post, I’ve broken the time since our last post into three segments. This is the first, with the rest of Southern California. The posts on Arizona and Utah will be following over the next few days. We miss you all and hope all is well!

Sunday (this is a few Sundays ago – 10/22), after our aforementioned day of visiting Beverly Hills, went back to Leah’s where we were all set up to enjoy an extremely Cali type evening: dinner from In N Out Burger and a viewing of Terminator III, featuring the Governator himself. The next morning Leah left early but, being unemployed, we slept in way past commuting hours and took out time getting stuff together. Once we had packed everything up we met Leah during her lunch break at an Armenian café. We got delicious paninis and ate them on the stairs behind Leah’s office before saying our goodbyes to her. Then we got on the freeway and speedblazed our way to Venice Beach. We had a great afternoon walking up and down Venice’s bustling boardwalk, enjoying the weather, the water, the window shopping, and most of all, the eclectic group of characters the neighborhood seems to attract. My favorites included the self-proclaimed “World’s Best Wino” and the guy with the fake but convincing cobras who actually did scare me and Alina. We spent a few hours there people watching and strolling, and then took a break to talk to our families in a little park where kids were spray painting graffiti all around us. After we got off the phone we had just enough time to walk to the water to enjoy the sunset over the Pacific. Feeling like we got a fair tasting of the Venice funk, we drove to neighboring Santa Monica to see if we could do something about dinner. After a walk around the carnival-like pier, we found ourselves in a little burrito joint on the Third Street promenade, where we enjoyed some cheap Mexican food before enjoying some spectacular gelato at a little place down the street. Full and happy, we drove up to Studio City, where we were to stay with Alina’s Uncle Rod and his girlfriend June, who greeted us with warm conversation and an open bottle of wine. After a bit of hanging around with them everyone agreed it was bedtime so we hit the sack.

The boardwalk of Venice Beach

They graffiti everything here, even palm trees.

Mom, I called you from here.

Seagulls at sunset

So incredibly California

Tuesday we decided to visit the South Bay area, which I was particularly excited to see because when I was a kid my family spent a lot of time visiting my grandparents there. We drove down to Hermosa Beach and enjoyed some time reading in the sun and eating a picnic lunch. It got a bit overcast so we decided to go for a long walk. We strolled down the boardwalk all the way across Hermosa and Redondo Beaches down to Palos Verdes. The walk was beautiful and took up the larger part of our afternoon. By the time we returned to the car it was about time to head back to Rod and June’s so that we could clean up before dinner with them and Alina’s cousin Rory.

The Redondo Beach pier

That afternoon we got our first real taste of the truly crushing power of LA traffic. The drive from Hermosa to Studio City took almost three hours, most of which was spent in one place on the 101. Luckily Rory was running late as well and we weren’t being waited on when we arrived at 8:30 for dinner (previous ETA: 6:15). We had a lot of fun that night sitting around and talking and perhaps consuming far too many calories and alcohol units. It was great for Alina to catch up with her family and me to get to know them because they are extremely fun and interesting. They both work in the entertainment industry. Rod works for a new company that’s making comic book adventure type movies (think X-men and Hulk) and June is VP for human resources at Universal Studios, so we got to hear a lot of interesting stuff about “the industry.”

Speaking of the entertainment industry, after over a week in LA we decided that it was finally time to tackle Hollywood. I dressed in what Leah called my “producer look,” t-shirt, baseball cap, and sunglasses, and we cruised over the millionaire-infested hills that separate Studio City from Hollywood and arrived to do some walking around. We made our way up and down Hollywood Blvd, keeping our eyes out for the sidewalk stars of our favorite celebrities. We were surprised how many of the names on the walk of fame we had never heard of, but then again we’re hardly insiders. We stopped by the famous Graumann’s Chinese Theater to view the celebrity impersonators and see the handprints of some of the biggest names in showbiz, including Marilyn Monroe, Frank Sinatra, Steven Spielberg, and many more. After much trial and error, I finally found the celebrity with the same type of hands as me, Richard Gere. Hopefully I won’t go grey as early as he did. At any rate, after Graumann’s we got lunch at a nearby Thai place, but as Leah had warned us, the Thai food in LA wasn’t very great. Right across the street from the restaurant was a Scientology outreach center and I really wanted to go chat with them as kind of a joke, but since Leah had been so right about Thai food, I decided to heed her advice about Scientologists in LA: stay away.

After our fill of Hollywood we drove down Sunset Boulevard to Westwood to check out UCLA, a potential graduate school. The campus is absolutely gorgeous, all set in Spanish Colonial architecture. The student body also seemed very diverse and engaged, so UCLA won a lot of points for both Alina and me. While on campus we got in touch with Leah and decided to get together with her before we were to leave the city in the next couple of days. We decided to meet her at her apartment later that evening when she got off work and take a walk around Burbank with her. We drove back to Rod and June’s, cleaned up, and had a bite to eat. Then we drove back to Burbank and had a really great evening walking around the Burbank Town Center with her. When we were saying our final goodbyes she said that if we were around the next evening we could hang out more since Thursdays are the beginning of her weekend (she works four ten hour days). As soon as we left her apartment building Alina pitched the idea of skipping Joshua Tree National Park to stay with Leah for another weekend, which sounded like a great idea to me. Though I really wanted to see Joshua Tree, we figured that we had found a place that we really enjoy and had a great friend to stay with so it just seemed like the right thing to do. Having traveled for two and half months by this point, staying in the same place for more than a few days was getting extremely enjoyable.

Graumann's Chinese Theater

And so, having added four days to our LA itinerary, we decided we could take the next day and spend it relaxing and not being tourists. We lounged around and watched the Food Network pretty much all day. At one point we did take a nice long walk down Ventura Blvd through Studio City, as well as a trip to Trader Joe’s down the street, but mostly it was a day on the couch. It felt great to take a day off of sightseeing. It sounds strange to say that we needed a bit of a rest from all the roadtripping, because the concept of needing to rest during vacation sounds a bit whiny, but still it’s true. After our spectacular day with the couch, Paula Dean, and Rachel Ray, we decided to cook Rod and June dinner as a small thanks for their hospitality. Alina prepared a delicious stir fry and we had a nice dinner and a long conversation that lasted right up until bedtime.

The next morning we said goodbye to Rod and June and got everything packed up before making our way back to Leah’s. We stopped at the store on our way because we intended to prepare Leah, a single woman in the big city who seems to make a habit of tiny meals to save money, a huge dinner that would involve lots of leftovers. The dish of choice was lasagna. When we arrived at Leah’s we spent some time hanging out before deciding to drive out to Pasadena to walk around and see one of Southern California’s oldest communities, which is now home to pretty much every high end-store imaginable. Leah and Alina were both simply aching for some time in an H&M, so that was our first stop. After that we sat down for coffee and very delicious dark chocolate at a little café, and then as we were getting up to leave Leah recognized a couple of her best friends walking by. So we spent the rest of the afternoon walking around with her friends Travis and Christine, two very fun and interesting characters. They also both work in “the industry,” Christine as an illustrator for a new show at the Cartoon Network, and Travis, well, we’ll just say his work involves a more mature crowd. They wanted to find a place to get a few drinks so after a long walk around Pasadena looking for a bar that turned out to not serve liquor (the horror!) we made our way back to the cleverly named Bar Celona tapas bar which is where I’d wanted to be the whole time (to Alina’s horror, a punny name practically guarantees my patronage). We hung around there for a few hours and then made our way back to Leah’s for a very late lasagna dinner. After dinner we watched Four Weddings and a Funeral, which both the ladies were shocked and appalled I had never seen. The movie was funny and afterwards we stayed up way, way past our bedtimes talking about all sorts of things and getting into a debate about pharmaceutical advertising of all things. Finally we petered off and fell asleep not too long before the sun was due to make its appearance.

The late bedtime translated into some serious sleeping in the next day, and we didn’t really start moving until noon. After a breakfast of reheated lasagna we drove down to Long Beach, which was new to Leah as well as to us. Right as we were arriving I got an exciting call from a group of friends who had reunited in Williamsburg for homecoming weekend. They passed the phone around and Alina and I got to chat with a few people we hadn’t been in great touch with over the last few months, which was really great. We were sad at being so far away from everybody, but the pain was dulled by comparing that sunny, beautiful, warm day in the breeze from the Pacific to nippy Williamsburg in late autumn. We walked around for a very long time along the beach, down the boardwalk, and around Long Beach’s more commercial area. Along the way we stopped to enjoy tea and gelato at a little café. The Long Beach area, perhaps the busiest port in the country, is a surprisingly nice neighborhood, and our day there was very enjoyable. That evening we drove back up to Burbank and ordered cheap and delicious pizza from Leah’s local place, a tiny joint named Pizza Man He Delivers. We ate pizza and hung around all evening before retiring considerably earlier than we had the night before.

Chasing gulls because we're mature


Leah and Alina

The next day we got an extra hour of sleep courtesy of daylight savings time, which was appreciated. We had a relaxing morning bumming around Leah’s place and taking a nice long walk through the neighborhood before finally facing the fact that it was time to be on with our trip and leave LA and Leah, one of our favorite stops of the trip. Both Alina and I have surprised many of the people we’ve talked with because of how much we really like the LA area. I can’t really speak for Alina (though I think that the weather may be the main factor attracting her) but I really appreciated the areas vastness and variety, so I was sad to leave and left LA feeling like I have so many times this trip, like there was so much we didn’t have time to see. Leaving people is always even harder than leaving places. Though the people we’ve met have been almost certainly the best part of the trip, leaving new and old friends never gets easier even though we have to do it so often. We said goodbye to Leah for good this time, fueled up, and sped down the freeway towards San Diego. Though leaving is sad, being back on the road always feels nice

The battle continues

We ate at a Greek diner on the road and arrived in San Diego that evening. We stayed with my friend Scott’s aunt and uncle, Marianne and Gary. Scott and I had stayed with them last summer in London when they were working there for a year, and when I was telling Scott about this trip he recommended that we stay with them now that they were back in the states. So we arrived at their house to find them as welcoming and kind as they had been to me last year in London. They were in the middle of Halloween festivities, their house fully decked out with spooky festive decorations and having just come from a neighborhood Halloween party. We spent the rest of the evening chatting with them until we all watched Prime, a new Uma Thurman and Meryl Streep romantic comedy which I think I might have been the only one present to actually like. I suppose I can’t expect everyone to have the same (perfect) taste as me.

The next day we tackled the world-famous San Diego zoo. We were there for nearly all of their operating hours that day, from ten in the morning to nearly five that afternoon. The zoo deserves its prestige. The place is enormous and has a huge number of different animals, even a few that Alina and I had never even heard of. I thought that they had a particularly great collection of reptiles and primates, two of my favorites. We were also lucky enough to catch a seal show, though as Alina pointed out, they become much less impressive once you’re old enough to pay attention to the ridiculous number of fish they have to feed those seals to get them to jump and bark. In addition to a great collection of cool animals, the San Diego zoo is special in how beautiful the grounds are. We had a really great day walking around and enjoying the lushness of the zoo. After our share of wild animals we walked around Balboa Park, which surrounds the zoo and is home to a huge number of museums. It’s a very pretty place, and most of the buildings are in that Spanish Missionary style that characterizes so much of Southern California’s architecture. Unfortunately all of the museums were closed by the time we made it there, and because we’d fallen behind schedule in LA we were leaving the next day, so we just made a note of how interesting they looked so that we can remember to go there the next time we’re in the area. By the time our walk was over it was nearing dinner time, so we drove into downtown San Diego and walked around the trendy Gas Lamp neighborhood until we found the one place there that seemed to be within our price range, a mediocre Mexican restaurant that was made great by their cheap margarita special and the fact that it was Alina’s day to drive.

We got back to Marianne and Gary’s late in the evening and spent a little time talking to them. Gary and the kids were busy carving some of the most enormous pumpkins that I have ever seen. Alina did some piano playing on Marianne’s baby grand, which she was extremely happy to do. Around bedtime we fell asleep to the third season of our favorite show, Arrested Development. The next morning we got up early to say goodbye to our generous hosts and then went to a nearby car repair shop to get an oil change before embarking upon the long journey to Phoenix. I also asked them to inspect the brakes, which they did and reported that they looked good though the front pads are getting on the low side and might need replacing after a little while. We were just happy to have the car go all the way down the Pacific Coast without a major problem. The hatchback no longer opens, which makes getting anything out of the back of the car a struggle, but that’s definitely something that we can work around. After we were done at the auto shop we pointed Speedy east for the first leg of our long trip back to the East Coast. First stop: Phoenix.

Love,

Paul