Exploring LA!

So, last week, I decided to take some time to explore the city. I started out by going to Santa Monica beach. I'd never been to the Pacific ocean before, but I was of the impression that it would generally be like the Atlantic Ocean. Actually, I haven't even been in the Atlantic that much, so 90% of my beach experience up to this point involved me frolicking in the warm, shallow waters of the Gulf Coast. So, when I visited the Pacific, I was surprised by a couple things.

First off, the water temperature was COLD! At the moment, the water off Santa Monica beach is a balmy 59 degrees. In addition, you can't walk out 50 feet and still be waist-deep here, but only a few feet from the water line you're knee-deep, and people were shark-fishing off the end of the pier (I didn't see anyone actually catch a shark, but they were using 10-inch-long fish as bait). Plus, there are lovely mountains along the coast.



Tuesday was the second Tuesday of the month, which means it was free admission day at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art! This is a fantastically large museum, consisting of multiple buildings, and it houses an impressive art collection. They also have a "Children's Gallery", which is really for people of all ages, and a room in the Children's gallery contains supplies for the general public to make their own drawing or painting. It was pretty awesome to see an 80-year-old man at one table painstakingly working on something while at another table a dad helped his toddler girl finger-paint. My favorite parts of any art museum, though, are the ancient art exhibitions. The LACMA was no different, as they had ancient art from all kinds of different cultures. My favorite piece was a calendar wheel - if I had to carve one of those, there's no way I would've made it go even as far as 2012!



Later that week, someone recommended that I look around the Echo Park neighborhood. This is an almost painfully trendy little area, but as I came out of a used-book store, I saw this next to it!



Yes, that does say "Echo Park Time Travel Mart". Yes, if you walk inside, it sells everything from medieval helmets to "dinosaur eggs" to posters encouraging proper robot self-maintenance, or would that be robot hygiene? But, things get even cooler: The "Time Travel Mart" is actually a source of funding for a non-profit tutoring center, which runs out of the spacious back part of the building.

Then, on Saturday, I took the bus up to the observatory. Since I've already been there, I decided to take a hike instead, and right off the parking lot was a sign for the Mount Hollywood trail. I walked along it for a little while, saw warning signs about rattlesnakes, mountain lions, and rattlesnakes again, but fortunately didn't encounter any of those animals. From that high, it was painfully obvious that there was a temperature inversion going on, literally blanketing LA in smog. Here's a photo of Griffith Observatory with the smoggy Los Angeles skyline behind it:



Last but not least, as I was waiting at the observatory for the bus back, I noticed a humminbird. Then, another, and another. It turns out that there were at least six of them hanging around the area. It was hard to get a clear shot of them flying, although my camera's ISO 3200 setting came in really handy here, but I got some beautiful shots of them resting on branches.



That's pretty much it. I have a volunteer position at an animal rescue as of now, so I've got something to do other than wander around town and take photos and post them on this blog. On another note, I wound up getting a tiny bit lost in Beverly Hills today, and wound up walking by City Hall and down Rodeo Drive - the amount of wealth on display was mind-boggling. For a second I thought "Hey, lots of stores in a small area, this would be a good place to job-hunt" but then I figured that I'd need to be wearing fancy clothes and heels just for them to give me a job application.

The Library is Not Disappointing.

As you may have noticed if you read the previous post, I had figured out that all the people who patronize my local library branch read about is teenage vampires, teenagers at prep schools, or teenage vampires at prep schools, and decided to go to the downtown library at the next opportunity.

Well, the opportunity came, because I discovered I had to run some errands that would take me in the general direction of downtown, and I decided to stop at the library last so I didn't have to haul my books around all day. Along the way, I ran into not one, but two film crews - both of them filming outdoors, complete with bundles of wires across the sidewalk, big tents and catering trucks set up in parking lots so everyone was trying to parallel-park on nearby streets (including some guys whom I saw attempting to parallel-park a cargo van), and so on. Sadly, since my phone camera sometimes needs an excessively long exposure time, I couldn't get any non-blurry photos. The first set wasn't bad, since it was easy to avoid, so I was mildly amused. However, the second time I had to avoid all kinds of wires and little plastic ramps over the wires on the sidewalk (wires which didn't go to any visible equipment) while carrying books under one arm and navigating to the nearest metro station with my phone, so I was significantly less amused.

However, let me get to the topic of the library. Oh, the library. I've been in the New York Public Library before, and I was impressed, but this still seemed like heaven to me. As I was walking through, I heard a tour guide - yes, people actually sign up for tours of this place, or something - mention that the library system had almost 2.5 million books. I wondered if that wasn't an exaggeration, but as I kept going to more and more levels, and going further and further in, I noticed signs on the shelves that said only about 50% of their books were actually in the stacks, and I started to believe that number.

Then there's the science fiction section. Although as I mentioned, the sci-fi section in the other library was smaller than the sci-fi section in my bedroom, this was not the case here. The science fiction section, which appeared not to include fantasy, had to be at least the size of the cow-town library that I mentioned in my previous post, and that's not even to mention what's called the "popular library". Apparently, in an attempt not to scare off the public by making them walk through miles and miles of shelving, they've dedicated a section on the first level to recent bestsellers, CD's, and DVD's. It's literally a "normal"-sized library within the more massive library, which is just SO COOL!

Anyways, that's it for this blog post, as I have books to read. Hooray!

The Library is Disappointing.

So, it's been a little more than two weeks in Los Angeles, and ever since I got cable TV and internet, I've settled into a routine of eating, sleeping, showering, and killing time online and watching TV. It was at some point during this that I decided that it is good to read books, and as such I decided I would go to the library.

So, I looked up where the nearest library was, and headed out. I finally got there (after experiencing my ever-present difficulty with maps and things being further than they looked) and walked inside. Although the building was at least as big as the public library near my college apartment, and bigger than the one in my hometown of 1000 people and 34890 cows, it seemed to have very few books. Thinking this was odd, I wandered around until I found the sci-fi section. This consisted of four or five shelves of books, about 3 feet wide. The sci-fi section (large closet) in the used bookstore (back room of the historical society) in my aforementioned hometown was larger than this! In fact, if you were to eliminate all the Star Wars expanded universe novels in the library, I have more sci-fi in my BEDROOM!

I wandered around, in vague hope that wasn't all of it. I was somewhat right, because they had shelved authors such as Tolkien, Bradbury, and more in with the regular fiction. However, even that wasn't encouraging, as half the "fiction" was young adult vampire novels (I counted no fewer than five copies of each of the first three books in the Twilight saga), and much of the rest was Nicholas Sparks romance novels or 4 copies of recent easy-to-read bestsellers.

So, if the books are any reflection of supply and demand at this branch, I can assume that the demographics of my neighborhood consist primarily of dumb people who want to keep up with trends and 12-year-old girls with distorted perceptions of relationships.

To make matters worse, when I did finally find something worth checking out, specifically a copy of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, I went to get a library card only to discover that I don't have any identification with my current address on it. Now, I've got to obtain a copy of my lease or utility bill or something, and I'm going to go to the main library downtown to see if it's better.

Also, the libraries are closed on mondays because of budget cuts. REALLY? In a city with 9.75% sales tax, and in a state that's essentially legalized marijuana, HOW are they still so broke?