August 2009 - Los Angeles

In summer 2009 I once again headed out into the wide world where nice people are. This time I planned to stay with my girlfriend Laine in Los Angeles for three weeks. Unlike the year before tourism only played a minor role. This time the main purpose was to spend some time with my girlfriend. You don't get to do that very often in a distance relationship.
Meanwhile Laine had rented an apartment in Long Beach, close to her university campus. Thus I didn't need a hotel room this time. Luckily, since I couldn't have afforded to for that long.

This time, I had booked my flight with Continental Airlines, a codeshare flight served by Virgin Atlantic Airways from London-Heathrow to LAX. The flight from Hamburg to London was a flight of Contintal's partner airline British Midland, another codeshare, served by Lufthansa. This freaky construction enabled me to get pretty cheap flights in the main season, but it also caused some confusion. I had to call Lufthansa to ask whether my baggage would be checked through to Los Angeles. Luckily, it was. But anyway I had to re-check in in London. Spoiler alert: that was when I found out that the seat reservations with Virgin are mere requests, and one and a half hours before departure my seat had been assigned to someone else. All I could get was an aisle seat right above the wings, which meant being blind for eleven hours. I didn't really like that.

Thursday, August 6, 2009

Flight Hamburg - London - Los Angeles

I had the first flight to London that morning, one and a half short hours. The good weather and the excitement raised my mood quite high. Therefore I didn't even bother as much with Heathrow's horrible architecture and layout as I claim to have done afterwards. Endless walkways, triangular stuffed rooms, signs that confused rather than they helped, no windows - all that didn't bother me that much since I was going to spend three weeks in one of the world's most beautiful and vivid cities with my girlfriend.

As mentioned above, the flight just sucked. Although service, personnell, entertainment and - surprising for a British airline - even the food were excellent, I really had a problem with the fact that the window was more than two meters away and all I could see through it was the grey surface of the wing. When the entertainment system and including that also the map were turned off for landing, I was practically blind. We learn: check in online for Virgin Atlantic flights or somebody else will get your view!

Los Angeles! Finally, the metropolis, the capital of fast-paced lifestyle, eternal sunshine, where the girls are pretty and just as friendly. There is just one thing they don't have - Prussian punctuality. At least my girl didn't. To save money for parking fees, Laine had decided not to be there when my plane arrived but when I had cleared immigration, gotten my bag and gotten out of there. We agreed that this would be around 3:30pm. And I walked through the doors at 3:30 sharp - but the cute face smiling at my sight could not be spotted anywhere in the relatively small terminal 2. I waited outside the terminal for a while, walked back in and just when I had exchanged money into quarters so I could call her from the public phone (European cellphones don't work in America - oh well) Laine walked in. She had gotten lost on the way to the airport.
After the happy reunion we didn't lose time and set off to Long Beach. In the passenger seat I had no problem enjoying the feeling of creeping through the Rush Hour traffic on one of these ridiculously oversized freeways, in bright sunshine under a blue sky. We spent the rest of the day easy, first stop was a Wendy's (as Laine knew I loved that place), and then we went to her place.

As I said there isn't even much to write about the following weeks as we weren't on tourism tour. Sometimes we spent days not even leaving the house but watching movies on DVD, cooking and so on. So I save you from detailing every single day. Instead I am going to present a show of pictures I took on the days we actually went outside, wherever necessary paired with a short description.

Saturday, August 8, 2009

Santa Monica

Saturday, August 15, 2009

Getty Villa, Malibu

Getty Villa is a complete model of an ancient Roman villa, including park and garden. It is mainly modelled after the Villa di Papiri close to Naples, Italy. Since the original hasn't completely been excavated yet Getty Villa is no accurate model.
Being here only weeks after visiting the sites of Pompeii and Herculaneum I was especially fascinated by this museum. The originals are mere ruins and when you're there you can barely imagine the beauty and monstrosity of former days. This is why the Getty Villa is so great. Here everyone can not only imagine but see how a Roman villa looked. And frankly - I would move in in a hearbeat.

Admission is free and it's worth a visit in any case, not only for those interested in history.

Thursday, August 20, 2009

Aquarium of the Bay, Long Beach

Although we had been there the previous year, Laine and I agreed on going again. We both like the aquarium and we got a combined ticket which contains admission to both the Aquarium of the Bay and LA Zoo. Other than that, the aquarium was in walking distance to Laine's apartment, just as downtown Long Beach and the yacht harbor. And so we spent an afternoon at the aquarium.

Friday, August 21, 2009

Los Angeles Zoo

We used the second part of our ticket the next day. We spent all day in the huge and interesting zoo. If you are a friend of zoos and animals I can only advise you to pay a visit to LA zoo when you're in Los Angeles.

Griffith Observatory

This is a must for every visitor of LA. The observatory lies on a hill close to the Hollywood-sign. We had been there the year before but hadn't enjoyed the whole beauty, so we had decided to go again and see the sunset and night scenery from there.
The observatory itself is an educational institution where you can learn a lot about astrophysics and other space stuff. Admission is free, but it's hard to find a parking spot.
The main attraction of the place is not the observatory, though, but the view you get from there. Right below the building lies Hollywood, behind that downtown LA, and in the background an endless sea of houses and streets. Needless to say that this undisturbed panorama of the Los Angeles basin is especially beautiful at night. The view fascinates and amazes the village-person, but I think even a city-person would be in awe of this beauty. As a replacement for the invisible stars in the sky you have an endless sea of light at your feet, and when the smog clears after sunset it twinkles just like the night sky.

Monday, August 24, 2009

Venice Beach

In the vicinity of Santa Monica Pier lies another famous LA beach: Venice Beach, famous for being a hotspot for alternative lifestyle.
And indeed, the flair of the promenade walk has a certain charme. Neo-hippies, New-Age-artists and skaters form a colorful crowd underneath the tall palm trees. We decided to spend an afternoon there to experience this flair.
A shocking fact but that day the weather in Los Angeles wasn't much better than in Germany at that time of the year. Clouds, a fresh wind, rough sea. We gave up our plans of swimming in the Pacific Ocean but spent a few hours relaxing in the white sand.

Wednesday, August 26, 2009

Hollywood and Chinatown

We headed straight into an urban adventure: riding the train in Los Angeles. A few days earlier we had done the same thing, and the ride from Long Beach to Pasadena, where we went to a movie theater, had taken two and a half hours. That is because the Blue Line train from Long Beach to LA is more a streetcar than a metropolitan commuter train. But it's worth the adventure (and riding the train in LA definitely is one) was worth it and so our short visits to Hollywood and Chinatown took a full day.

Thursday, August 27, 2009

La Brea Tar Pits

On my last full day in California we paid a visit to another, less known attraction. The authors of tourist guides must have never heard of La Brea, otherwise they would add it to their top things to see in LA. Because right here, in the middle of one of the world's biggest cities, right on Wilshire Boulevard, earth history becomes alive.
The place got its name from the little pits where liquid tar bubbles to the surface. This alone would be attraction enough - liquid tar flowing to the surface, you don't see that every day. But it gets even better: the tar has been bubbling up for tens of thousands of years, and when the LA basin still was wilderness, lots of animals got trapped in it, died, and were conserved.
And so the tar pits contain a huge amount of skeletons from former times, long-extinct species like mammoths, sabertooth cats (sabertooth tiger is wrong, as I learned in the museum at the site), bears, sloths, birds and many more. The museum that is right at the site displays the excavated skeletons. You can even watch scientists and volunteers prepair and catalog the bones right in the museum. And a few hundred meters away you can watch them dig in the tar and excavate the mortal remains of animals that died a painful death at this place long before mankind invented the shovel.