Always carry your camera in LA.

As luck would have it, my final exams all fell on the first two days of finals week, leaving me with nearly two weeks of lovely 70+ degree weather and sunshine and nothing to do but explore LA.

The first day was Wednesday. This was the day that my brother had convinced me to download Minecraft, since I had recently needed to replace my laptop and the wonderful person at the Apple store forgot to tell me that Civilization V wouldn't run on their laptops when I bought it, so I needed a game, and Minecraft was only $20...

Let me say, it's some of the best $20 I've ever spent. That game is addicting. You've got a world made out of blocks of various types - ie, wood, dirt, store, various ores, trees, and a few animals - and you can take these blocks and build anything your heart desires. It got even better when I started playing on my brother's server, which had the misfortune of having snow and ice everywhere, and he eventually gave me "op privileges", which means I can give myself anything I want instead of having to go out and spend days collecting it. I didn't get anything spectacular done this first week, but here's one of my recent endeavours:



Yes, that's the TARDIS. I'm not going to bore you with the game details (unless you want them) but yes, it does contain a swimming pool and a library inside. For a sense of scale, a single minecraft "block" is the equivalent of 1 cubic meter in the game world.

The next day, it was St. Patrick's Day, which meant that the Young Dubliners were having a free concert in Pershing Square. I invited my friend Alex and his girlfriend Laura, who were visiting in town, and we sat on a blanket and drank Coke from glass bottles and generally enjoyed ourselves.

Oh, and the stage was made of palm trees.



Afterwards, there was a free exhibition of costumes from the "oustanding filsm of 2010" at FIDM, which was only blocks away. Since we were all movie fans, we headed there, and got to see costumes from films including Clash of the Titans, Alice in Wonderland, Inception, Burlesque, The Young Victoria, Voyage of the Dawn Treader, and more. Unfortunately, photography wasn't allowed, so I have no amazing photos to illustrate this with.

Then, that weekend, I went to Long Beach to whale watch and visit The Aquarium of the Pacific. Whale-watching was a resounding success, as we saw at least six whales, including a mother and a calf, and a pair that was apparently mating, not to mention hundreds of dolphins, some seals, and a bunch of sea lions, all with adorable babies.

Here are some sea lions sitting on a bouy:



There were many interesting things in the aquarium, which I couldn't all mention here so I will put them on Facebook instead, but among them was a giant fish, the ironically named "BP Sea Otter Habitat", some truly unusual-looking sharks, a tank full of clownfish and blue tang that was being monopolized by some asshole couple who had no idea of the difference between "professional studio for baby pictures" and "public aquarium on a Saturday afternoon", and many tanks full of brightly colored fish. I didn't look at the photos until now, and am quite surprised at how well they came out, given I basically own a glorified point-and-shoot digital camera.



At some point after that, I was just around the corner from my house when I saw some people filming a driving scene. Fortunately, I had my camera in my backpack, so if you've ever wondered about this but were too lazy to watch the DVD extras, here it is:



Later that week, I went to the natural history museum, saw a lama which I photographed for Jocelyn and tried to guess if the bones in the anthropology section were real or replicas before looking at the placards, went to the science center (the air and space part was disappointingly closed down for their not-so-disappointing arrival of the space shuttle Endeavour at some time in the future!), I saw a memorial to Liz Taylor on her star on Hollywood blvd, saw a huge pro-union (mostly, there were also people demonstrating for education reform, immigrant's rights, for both sides of action or inaction in Libya, and even protesting against SB 1070 from Arizona) that included a group of Native Americans dancing at the back - and it was awesome to see how different they were from the Iroquois where I grew up.

Then it was the weekend again. I went looking for showtimes for Sucker Punch on Google, and saw that Star Trek IV, more popularly known as "the one with the whales" or "The one where Spock tries to blend in in the 80's", was playing at a theater in Hollywood, and decided that I'd go since a student ticket was only $9.

Then, as the lights were about to go down, people were talking and it was all "blah blah blah thank this person and that organization and this person and Walter Koenig who will be joining us..." and at that point it was all I could to do not scream "WHAT?!?!" in the theater. Sure enough, Walter Koenig, aka Mr. Pavel Chekov, was there, taking audience questions and telling us funny stories. Things we learned include:

-He's actually got a perfect American accent, and "Nuclear Wessels" was from his father's Russian accent.
-There was supposed to be a scene in that movie where Sulu meets his great-great-grandfather as a child, but the child actor refused to cooperate.
-That he approves of the 2009 reboot.
-The casting directors weren't satisfied with his original, intense serious audition, but loved the more surprised, puzzled/clueless persona he did on his final attempt.
-That Leonard Nimoy does not give good feedback as a director
-On TV and film sets, actors are given a point to look at, so they're all delivering their lines in the same direction, ie, to the viewer (especially in TV). He holds that his best acting moment came when someone had taped a Playboy centerfold there, and his line was "Captain, I have no idea what that is!"
-The character of Chekov was not intended to foster Russian-American unity, but to attract viewers ages 8-14 with the Beatles haircut.

Also, he's really old now. Unfortunately, my photos didn't come out too well, but I had my camera with me at least.

And that was my spring break, and that's also why you should always carry a camera in this town.

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.