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.

I'm here at last!

That's right! A couple days ago, I officially moved into my new apartment in LA. It's a bit smaller than I remembered, but the closet is a bit bigger than I remembered, so I guess it evens out?

The upsides are that I LOVE the weather, I like the neighborhood, I got a full-sized mattress for relatively cheap, and it looks like I'll survive.

One of the downsides is how EXPENSIVE it is to buy everything! It's not just that LA is an expensive city, but also that California has 9.75% sales tax. Now, I thought NYS had high tax, with it going up to about 8.5% in some places, but that's ridiculous. Someone tell me HOW this state is still so broke?!?! Also, getting new furniture-like things, cleaning supplies, food, and random household items that I couldn't pack (or didn't own) can add up pretty fast. The related problem I'm having is that I need a job.

But the craziest part? Beverly Hills. Where do I start on this topic?

I guess I should start with the fact that it's not too hard to get a bus out there (really, for everyone who whines about LA's public transportation system, it's not as bad as they make it out to be. Unless by "bad" they really meant "the buses are full of people with different skin colors than I have!") and someone mentioned to me that there was a farmer's market. Now, when I think "farmers market", I think of a bunch of farmers driving cargo vans or small trucks into a parking lot, setting up a canopy thing, and selling out of the back of the truck. That is possibly the furthest possible thing from what I found.

What I found was something that can only be compared to the interior food buildings at the NY State Fair, only it was all open-air with cloth over the walkways, and the little shops were permanent. Also, there were actual names on the shops (not like "Rolling Hills Farm, Nowhere, NY") and bars and souvenir stores and even a Starbucks. This is next to an outdoor mall, which seems to consist exclusively of designer clothing stores, fancy restaurants, and a movie theater.

This brings me to another point - well, actually another mall, which at first I got mixed up with CBS studios (another amusing story for another time). This mall was ridiculously large, where you had to go up something like five escalators just to get to the stores. Unfortunately, this mall also seemed to consist of nothing but designer clothing/jewelry/fragance/etc stores, with the exception of a food court, a Ferrari store (no kidding), and a completely incongrous Claire's.

The last, but perhaps the most fun thing, in Beverly Hills is the secondhand stores. Want a full-length leather trenchcoat? Five identical TV's? A set of brand-new glass tumblers from Ikea? Stuff with the labels still on it? It's a gold-mine of cheaply priced awesome stuff in excellent condition. I got a fully functional 20" CRT TV from there for $25 with the remote, and that's awesome because you can't even buy cheap CRT TV's from Walmart any more.

Oh, Walmart: That is my last topic for this post. Since Walmarts are as common (and sometimes as unwanted) as weeds in upstate NY, and also really cheap, I figured that would be the place to go. So, I found a super-Walmart, and went to it at 7 AM. Only, what did I find out? That this location opened at 8 AM. SERIOUSLY? I haven't seen nor heard of a Walmart that closed on a regular basis, ie, not only before Black Friday, since I was approximately 10 years old. For almost all of my life, you could just go to a Walmart at any hour of day or night, and the only thing that might be closed would be the 1-hour photo department. And, not only did this Walmart CLOSE, but it didn't open at 6 AM or any other time that would enable people to stop in before work or something like that. Ridiculous.