Steve Haas Travel

Tag: Glendale

  • Day 5, Dec 27: Long Beach and the Palos Verdes Peninsula

    Day 5, Dec 27: Long Beach and the Palos Verdes Peninsula

    Last day of this fun little jaunt over Christmas. Dan flies out of LAX tomorrow morning and I will drive home after dropping him at the airport. It’s been a very relaxing trip and we finished it in a similarly relaxing way – not a lot planned beyond walking through pretty scenery.

    We went down for breakfast at 6am then back up to the room around 7am to finish packing. Dan had to get his prints secure in a box he will check into the plane. We left the hotel around 8am and stopped up the road at Porto’s bakery in Glendale to pick up some items for lunch later.

    We had walked by this Christmas Eve morning and it was a madhouse – completely packed inside and lines down the street. This was much more reasonable. This bakery has a huge selection of savory and sweet things and is clearly very popular. Also very cheap – we picked up 7 things total and it was under $9.

    Above is the whole thing as you walk in, with close-ups of some of the display cases below.

     

     

    From there we headed to Long Beach. It took us over an hour to get 38 miles on 4 different freeways – and that’s making good time in LA! Traffic was moderate, we didn’t have any major slowdowns. We first went to CSU Long Beach to check out a Japanese Tea Garden, but it was closed for winter break and they were doing maintenance. Darn. So we went on to downtown Long Beach to see what there was to see there.

    Long Beach has a population of almost half a million and is the 7th largest city in CA, 36th in the US. It’s primarily industrial and is a huge harbor town, with lots of trucks hauling cargo off of ships. Its downtown area is definitely not a top tourist attraction, but it was worth spending a couple of hours, which is all we did.

    The harbor is pretty, with a little bit of downtown in the background.

     

    Long Beach is a decent place to come if you plan on taking a harbor cruise, a whale watching cruise, or a cruise to Catalina Island, some of which we’d discussed heavily, all of which we ruled out for well thought out reasons when we were planning this trip; ditto the Queen Mary, which you’ll see below. So after a couple of hours we were done, we mostly just wanted to check it out.
     The trip to the lighthouse at the end of the harbor was worth it to get a closer shot of the Queen Mary below.

     

    The Queen Mary has been permanently docked here since 1967. We had a long discussion last month about whether or not we would do this and decided not too for a variety of reasons. But it’s pretty from a distance, too bad there was so much haze (smog!) today.

    From Long Beach we drove through San Pedro, another industrial town, on our way to the Palos Verdes Peninsula where we would spend the rest of the day.

    The Palos Verdes Peninsula is that little part of LA county that juts out into the Pacific Ocean, as indicated in the map above. There are four little towns on it, also indicated above. We weren’t interested in the towns so much as we were in just the drive and the views. And this drive would lead us directly into Torrance, as indicated at the top of the map, where we would be staying at night.

    Our first stop was Wayfarers Chapel. Above is a fountain in front of it as you enter from the parking lot. Below is the view you have of the Pacific just before you enter it.

     

    The Wayfarers Chapel was built in 1951 by Lloyd Wright, son of the famous architect Frank Lloyd Wright. he conceived it as a tree chapel. It is one of the foremost examples of organic architecture and is listed in the National Register of Historic Places. [Don’t know who the kid is, just didn’t feel like waiting for him to move…]

    Emanuel Swedenborg was born in Sweden in 1688. He became a highly regarded scientist in many disciplines. One of his inventions, a small aircraft, hangs in the Smithsonian Institute. In his mid-50’s, his desire for scientific knowledge found a craving for religious understanding. He studied the Bible in its original languages and wrote volumes on numerous portions of it and other subjects of Christian theology. He examined the relationships between body and soul in an attempt to discover the nature of the spiritual being residing within the human personality. After his passing in 1772, a small group of his followers formed a reading group. The first Swedenborgian Church was established in London in 1787. The Swedenborgian Church of North America was established in Baltimore Maryland in 1792. Wayfarers Chapel is sponsored by the Swedenborgian Church.

     

     

     

     The carillon tower, above and below.

    From there we went literally across the street to Abalone Cove Shoreline Park. We brought out our baked goods we got from Porto’s in the morning and had lunch at a picnic table by the ocean. Kinda nice.

     

    Two meat pies, two chicken croquets (not shown – already gone!), an almond croissant, a guava cheese strudel, and an almond sponge cake with chocolate. Not exactly the most balanced lunch but it sure tasted good. To help a little with balance, Dan had an orange and I had a banana which we’d lifted from the breakfast buffet at the hotel the other day but hadn’t eaten yet. So there.

    We went for a beach hike after. This is the beginning of our walk just past where we were sitting. See the area where that tip of land meets the ocean and some rocks in front of it? That’s where we ended up, which you’ll see in the photos below.

     

     These are at the point I referenced in the earlier photo.

     

     

     Dan was playing with the sea life in the tide pools, terrorizing hermit crabs.

     

    Next stop was Point Vicente Lighthouse. Built in 1926, it is still a functioning lighthouse operated by the US Coast Guard. It is closed to the public except for tours provided one Saturday a month. The closest I could get was through a fence, which was how I got the shot below. 

     

    There is also a little whale watching center there, with some exhibits on local marine life. You can borrow binoculars, which you can see in the photo below some have. There were 4 whale sightings today at the time I took the photo about 2pm. There are roughly 3200 whale sightings a year in this area.

     

    We’d walked along the bluffs for awhile then decided we were done and it was time to check into the hotel. One last shot of the lighthouse as we left.
    We made it to the hotel about 3pm probably. We are staying at the Doubletree in Torrance where we stayed the last 5 nights of December, 2016. Well, I stayed 5 nights anyway; Dan flew out that last night and I drove home the next day, which was New Year’s Day 2017. So we’re ending this year in a very similar way. We are even returning to the same Japanese restaurant we had dinner at last New Year’s Eve for dinner tonight. It’s about 5:30pm now so we should be leaving for that in a little while.

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    It’s now approaching 8:30pm, we are back from dinner. It was as good as we remembered it from last year. It’s called Irifune, and is a funny little shopping center with even odder parking. Luckily, just about 2 miles from the hotel.

     

    The meal started with a simple salad, and this little egg dish that Dan really enjoyed last year, and it was just as good tonight. It’s a warm egg custard soup sort of thing, and will leave it at that. Tasty and comforting.

     We shared a roll with yellow tail (Hamachi).

    Dan had the black cod, above; I got teriyaki chicken and tempura, below. Side dishes were slightly different but nothing worth going into a lot of detail over :) But it was an excellent meal all around.

     

    And that’s it for us this round. Dan will be coming to San Diego later in January for a conference and will head up to Sacramento for a long weekend after that, much as he’s been doing all year. He made it to Sac about once a month in 2017. It’s hard to make plans past that given the limbo of his work. My boss has offered to let me experiment with working from Raleigh a week a month to see how that goes, so we may look for a time to play with that in first quarter. We will return to Europe sometime this summer we hope, just can’t plan anything just yet. I’m thinking something Alps like – maybe Zurich, Munich, Salzburg. Would provide some great hiking! We’ll see. Regardless of where we end up, we’ll be back here. Thanks for coming along and Happy New Year!

     

  • Day 4, Dec 26: Warner Bros. Studios; Pasadena, Part 2

    Day 4, Dec 26: Warner Bros. Studios; Pasadena, Part 2

    Breakfast in the hotel returned to its 6am weekday schedule on Tuesday so we went down when it opened. After we relaxed in front of the fire in the open area outside of the restaurant. Vacation, right? It’s allowed.

    The big activity of the day was Warner Bros. Studios. This was definitely one of my things. I‘d looked at all of the studios that had tours and this seemed to be the one that was most focused on behind the scenes stuff, as opposed to say Universal which is an amusement park, and that’s what I was most interested in.

     

     

     

    We got there a little after 9am. It took a bit to get processed through the ticket area. There was a short video first, with Ellen DeGeneres as host, quickly reviewing Warner’s 100 years of movie making and TV history. The audience was then split into different tour groups and you went out into the tour carts with your guide. The first thing you see as you enter the backlot is the iconic water tower above. Monix, below, was our guide for the morning.

    She wasn’t the best guide we’ve had on things like this but definitely not the worst and she took a liking to us, maybe because we were the only ones really asking any questions, and we sat up in the front row of the cart with her. This was on Hennessy Street, named in honor of an Oscar winning set designer, which has been used countless times in movies and TV for exterior shots. The street you’re looking at has been used for movies as diverse as Annie and Minority Report. With another tour group who joined us briefly, we watched a video clip inside one of the sets of how many different times you will see the X in the fire escape below, although the only one we could remember this morning was The Last Samurai. She told us later the story of filming Tobey Maguire and Kirsten Dunst filming his upside down kiss seen in fake rain on this fire escape in Spider-Man.

     

    A street on Anytown USA, used for things like East of Eden and The Waltons and a list of other things she rattled off I can’t remember now. The house above was the Sievers residence in Growing Pains. There was the Midwest neighborhood, and there was another that was the city neighborhood, that had a brownstone street as well as a courthouse, cafes, etc, used for everything from Gotham City to Gilmore Girls. Most of this stuff is facades used for exterior shots, and interior sets are all in the studio. Only a few of these were “practical sets” where you could also film inside.

    There was a Harry Potter exhibit that I enjoyed. Marauder’s Map above, Dobby below. I’d just re-watched all 7 movies again a month or so ago; Dobby’s death still gets me every time!

     

     

    Me under the Sorting Hat. Ravenclaw. Boring. Was secretly hoping for Slytherin.
    The golden egg and Tri Wizard Cup from Goblet of Fire, and the Golden Snitch.

     

    The fireplace from the first movie with the envelopes streaming in.
    Brownstone street.

     

    A sound stage, with a “best of” list of the things filmed here, currently home of The Big Bang Theory. Some examples since it’s hard to read: Dark Victory and Now, Voyager for other Bette Davis fans. Giant, Blade Runner, and several Batman movies. We did go in and saw the BBT stage and got a little info on how all that works with a studio audience, sitting where they do, but weren’t allowed to take photos.

    This little stretch of land doubles as Central Park and any other park you’ve probably seen on TV. I will admit I was disturbed to learn that Friends never left this lot, including the entirety of the exterior shots in this little scene which were filmed right in this spot.

    A war memorial of Warner employees and actors who served in the military, including names like Ronald Reagan and Jimmy Stewart.

    There was also a Batman exhibit that had every bat-mobile type vehicle ever used in film or TV, all of which are fully operable and licensed to be driven on the street.
    Coffee, anyone? The last section we went through had some of the Friends set as well as a lots of other costumes and paraphernalia from many other shows and movies.

     

    This was a technique called forced perspective, where the set is designed to create 3-D imaging, especially depth,  that the camera can’t see as easily as the human eye. This is an example of how they made Hobbits so short, as an example.

    Dan holding an Academy Award. He said it was really heavy!
    Crucifix from the Exorcist.

     

    CJ Cregg’s fishbowl and the “Bartlett for America” napkin from The West Wing.

    We were at Warner Bros in total about 2.5 hours. Since we were already in Burbank, we went back to the downtown area we’d been in the day before, it was literally just up the street from where we were parked. In our quest to eat as much Asian food as we can, we went to a Thai food place this time. It was just OK, too Americanized and sweet for Dan’s taste for sure.

    Dan got the green curry, above, I had cashew chicken.

     

    A cute little place though.

     

    We went back to the hotel to change into shorts. Next on the list was some hiking, an almost 3 mile round trip trail on the north edge of Pasadena called Eaton Canyon.

    We were surprised to see a decent-sized and almost-full parking lot on a random Tuesday afternoon, so weren’t surprised to keep seeing a fair number of people on the trail with us.
    This was a stream bed at some point.

     

     

    A little falls at the end of the trail. It was a nice walk, took us about an hour.

     

    Most of you know Dan’s love of architecture, and Arts and Crafts homes are some of his favorite. Pasadena is known for having a great collection of these houses, and even have an entire neighborhood of them listed in the National Register of Historic Places and considered one of the “10 great places in America.” This is Bungalow Heaven, and most of these houses were built between 1900-1920. Just a sampling below.

     

     

     

     

     

     

     

    Before the hike, we’d stopped by the book/antique shop we were at on Sunday and Dan struck a deal with the owner for the prints he wanted. We went back after this to pick them up, and stopped at a box store a block away to get packing materials. After that we went down Colorado Blvd again, where we seem to have spent much of our time this trip, or at least crossed it a bunch, to a dim sum place that had decent ratings on Yelp. We were pleased to see lots of Asians in it, always a good sign. We’ve typically done dim sum for brunch, so having it for dinner was a nice change.

    Definitely better than what we can get in Sacramento (and nowhere to be found in Raleigh), the food here was on par with the quality of Bay Area Chinese food. This was an “order off the menu” place, not “pick from the cart” which we like better. Everything was fresh, hot, and paced well. We ordered 7 things and everything came out one at a time, taking over and hour for dinner. It was very relaxing and gave you time to really enjoy it and not feel rushed.

     

    We ordered mostly things we get in Sac when we do this, to be able to easily compare, and right from the start it was bigger and better, much higher quality of ingredients and interesting techniques. This is a fried sticky rice ball with meat inside as seen below. The outside was really crispy and the mixture inside had a great flavor. Home run right off the bat.

     

    A simple green bean and minced pork dish that had incredible flavor, it was actually one of my favorites. The green beans were very fresh and perfectly cooked.
    Typically my favorite in dim sum, shumai, and this was excellent. Dan is typically “whatever” about shumai but he really liked this version.

     

    We ordered this for me – a scallop dumpling because I love scallops – but this had a surprise shrimp in it and I could hardly taste the scallop. Dan really liked it though.
    Pork spareribs in a very light black bean sauce. This was one of Dan’s favorites, the quality of the meat was excellent and it was cooked well.

     

    This is a sticky rice dish with meat inside steamed in a lotus leaf. It tasted just like it was supposed to and was very filling.

    This was the most amazing bite of the night. A fried carrot ball off of the dessert menu, we ordered it because we had no idea what it was but it sounded interesting. Similar to the item we started with, it was served warm and the outside was nice and crispy. The inside was a sticky carrot something with a custard in the very middle.

     

    Extremely rich, very satisfying.

     

    We’d parked right by Pasadena City Hall so got a shot of it at night as we headed back to the hotel.
    Below are the prints Dan bought, which will go in the living room of his condo in Raleigh. They are very him and turned out great.

     

     

     

    Writing this Wednesday morning, this is our last breakfast in this hotel in Glendale. Since we knew we were spending the day in the south area, it didn’t make sense to come all the way back here, only to go south again in the morning to take Dan to LAX. So we’re staying in Torrance tonight, at the same Hilton we were at around New Year’s last year.

     

  • Day 3, Dec 25: LA Neighborhoods

    Day 3, Dec 25: LA Neighborhoods

    We had a light schedule on Christmas Day, which we knew we would and were looking forward to a relaxing day. We took our time with breakfast in the morning and didn’t leave the hotel until about 10:30am. We went to Burbank to see “Star Wars: The Last Jedi.” We’re both pretty big SW fans and were amused at the outrage we were hearing about this movie. There was even a short-lived petition to get it removed from the canon on Star Wars films. I’d read so much about how SW had lost it’s way with this film, I was sort of disappointed Luke didn’t turn to the dark side and kill Leia. That’s kinda what I was suspecting after some of the stuff I’d read. So, sorry if this is a spoiler, but nothing even close to that happened. And we enjoyed the movie, in fact Dan thinks it might now be his favorite, surpassing Rogue One which became his favorite after that came out. And for him, he likes them because they’re so different from the other movies. The Force Awakens is one of his least favorite because it was so much like IV, where I enjoyed a lot as sort of an homage.

    Enough about all that. For the rest of the day, we just went neighborhood hopping, starting with Burbank where we had lunch. The movie was in the big mall there, Town Center, and downtown butts right up against it. It’s pretty and quaint but doesn’t photograph all that well, I just grabbed a couple below so I would remember it’s what we did next.

    The alley behind the Christmas Tree below serves as an entrance to the mall, which is huge. We found a pho place for lunch and it was good (forgot photos). There were actually quite a few people milling about and many of the restaurants were open, including Starbucks which was packed. We were a little surprised at that.

     

     

    From there we went by Dan’s elementary school, which is on N New Hampshire off of Hollywood Blvd. right after it begins from Vermont Ave a block east. Across Hollywood Blvd is Barnsdall Park, someplace Dan had never been despite having lived right by it for years. We took the shot of the school below from there. It’s essentially a hill with some decent views of the city, and there’s a theater up there as well.

     

    You can see the Hollywood sign in the hills on the left, and Griffith Observatory on the right.
    The top of the hill.

    Next we went to Olvera Street, a Mexican outdoor market downtown that’s considered to be the birthplace of Los Angeles. It was the first street established in 1781. We were really surprised how many people were out and about here. It was lively and colorful for sure.

     

     

    This is Avila Adobe, the oldest existing house in Los Angeles, built about 1818. Had we gotten there 15 minutes earlier we could have gone in; it’s free, but closed at 4pm.

     

     

    I’d been keeping my eye out for bougainvillea the whole trip and finally found some! It’s my favorite flower, but it’s too cold in Sacramento for it to do well. This was a nice display of it on the roof behind the tree.

     

    As we worked our way out of the market and over to Union Square, we got a nice shot of City Hall as a the sun was setting.

     

    A tribute to a Mexican-American singer/actor named Antonio Aguilar, who was 88 when he died in 2007. He recorded 160 albums and made over 100 movies.

     

    Built in 1939, Los Angeles Union Station is the largest railroad passenger terminal in the Western US and widely regarded as “the last of the great train stations.”

     

     

    The outside courtyard – a Christmas tree framed by palm trees. Where else but LA?

    From there we drove less than 1/2 mile and parked again over in Chinatown and walked around a bit. There were even more people out, and just about all the restaurants were open and packed, where several had lots of waiting folks hanging out on the sidewalk. Chinese are primarily Buddhist so you can generally rely on Chinese restaurants being open on Christmas! We know families who’ve made their own traditions based on that reliance.

     

    Suits him, don’tchyathink?

     

    From there we headed to Koreatown, and drove through downtown. This was our 3rd time driving through downtown on this trip and I decided to see if I could grab a few shots. It is really pretty all lit up, and I can’t recall another downtown we’ve been in where a freeway runs right through it with tall buildings so close on either side.

     

     

    Koreatown was also packed, as always, and after a bit of driving around we found a place to park, and decided on Korean BBQ, always a favorite of mine. Dan was hoping to find soondae (Korean blood sausage) but the place we went last year – him twice – wasn’t open.

     

    They brought a nice little salad first, then the flood of side dishes, which Dan liked better than the grouping we had Saturday night. Korean food is all about the side dishes. Top row from left to right in the photo below: cucumber kimchi (my favorite), a sort of green onion kimchee, a potato salad that also had persimmon in it, kabocha – think acorn squash, which was my 2nd favorite, fish cake, and a noodle dish. In the back were two kinds of wraps, one flour, one pickled radish, which was Dan’s favorite.

    The bottom four were seaweed, cilantro, another herb or sprout we couldn’t identify, and bean sprouts.

     

    We had pork belly, which is how bacon starts out before it’s cured. Hard to go wrong with that.

     

    This was spicy pork, also very good.

     

    That’s it for Christmas Day. It was a nice relaxing day and we enjoyed seeing so many people out and about enjoying the different neighborhoods.

  • Day 2, Dec 24: Pasadena & Glendale

    Day 2, Dec 24: Pasadena & Glendale

    This was Sunday, for those of us (namely me) having trouble keeping track of what day it is. We had breakfast in the hotel and got an early start, leaving before 8:30. The plan was to go to the theater we would be going to today and buy the tickets a day early. It’s one of those “reserved seating” theaters and we didn’t want to wait too much longer in case things were selling out. Turns out the prices were more than we were willing to pay – $16.75 and no matinee prices. That just seemed ridiculous. When did going to the movies get so expensive? Or are these just LA prices? We found much cheaper prices online – less than half that – at a theater in Burbank and still reserved seating – so got those instead.

    But the theaters were in a shopping center called Americana at Brand, and we liked the look of it. It was completed in 2008, so Dan hadn’t seen it before, and we decided to come back at night, so more on this later. It’s about a mile away from the hotel and we walked, so got 2 miles in before we even really began our day. We ended up walking almost 11 miles today.

    We drove over to Pasadena and didn’t have much planned here, just a walking tour in the morning and the Norton Simon in the afternoon since we skipped that yesterday. One of the first things you’re reminded of as you get into central Pasadena is that it is the home of the famous Tournament of Roses Parade on New Year’s day, and they were already in full prep mode for that. The signs on the lamppost as seen above map out the parade route, which is 5.5 miles and most of that up Colorado Blvd, which is also Route 66. In addition to the marked lampposts, you also see bleachers set up in nooks and crannies between building as shown below.

    We went first towards City Hall and ran across these guys in the parking lot.

     

    Meet Mack and Jackie Robinson, brothers from Pasadena. Mack won a silver medal for the 200 meter dash in the 1936 Berlin Olympics. Jackie, a name you probably recognize, was the first African-American major league baseball player. That’s Mack on the right, eternally facing City Hall, as he stayed in Pasadena his whole life. Jackie is on the left looking east towards Brooklyn where he lived as an adult.

    And this is City Hall. Completed in 1927 for just 1.3 million at the time, it is a significant example of what’s referred to as the City Beautiful Movement in architecture, which inspired architects in the early part of the last century to create public buildings that reflected grandeur. If you are a Parks and Recreation fan, it’s also the exterior of Pawnee City Hall.

     

     

     Above and below taken from the interior courtyard.

     

     The entrance from the back side. Or is it the front? Not sure it matters.

     

    We walked around town a bit just looking at the shops and restaurants and things to do. Eventually we worked our way out of the central district and adjacent to it is Caltech, or California Institute of Technology, the west coast version of MIT. Dan applied here back in the day but was waitlisted, although he said he would have gone to Penn even if he had been accepted here. But it’s a good school, considered one of the premier science colleges in the world. It ranks 13th in the production of Nobel Laureates, but because it’s small it’s probably #1 from a per capita perspective. A 2015 Pomona College Study ranked in #1 in the percentage of graduates who go on to earn PhDs. The next few photos are of the campus. There were a fair number of people walking around, using it as a park.

     

     

    We spent a decent amount of time after this walking through some residential areas. It felt creepy somehow to take photos of people’s houses so we got nothing to show for it. But it was pretty :) Lots of big houses from the 20’s with big lawns, wide fronts, and semi-circular driveways.

    We worked our way to a fast food joint called Yoshinoya, which was called Beef Bowl when Dan lived here and was a place he frequented. For Sacramento types, think I Love Teriyaki – same set up.

    Above: Dan had to get what he always got back in the day, their traditional beef and teriyaki chicken. Below: I got angus steak with honey walnut shrimp. I liked both of mine better than his. And I Love Teriyaki is better :) But you know how that is – you have to revisit haunts and it was worth the stop – a cheap and satisfying lunch.

     

    We stopped an at a used book store that also had an antique art collection and Dan talked with the owner quite a bit. He thought about getting some prints he found that he liked, and we even went back later in the day to see if he could haggle the guy down to what he would be willing to pay, but he was gone for the day. So perhaps we will come back sometime this week.

     This is the entrance to the Norton Simon museum, with a front yard filled with Rodin sculptures. Dan couldn’t resist.

     

    The first two galleries, which covered 14th-18th century art, didn’t have a lot that interested us. The one above caught my attention only because it was a self portrait. Her name is Marie-Genevieve Bouliar, and she painted this in 1792. It’s pretty rare to see a female artist anytime before the 21st century.

     The 19th century gallery was our favorite, with a nice collection of some well known artists, including Renior above, and Monet below.

     

     I’m not always a Van Gogh fan, but I liked these next three. Above is a portrait of his mother from 1888. Below is Portrait of a Peasant from the same year.

     

    Van Gogh did this in 1889 when he was a self-admitted patient at Saint-Remy-de-Provence after a series of nervous breakdowns. While it’s hard to see in this photo, the brush strokes are very thick, adding quite a bit of texture to the paining, almost like a bas-relief sculpture. It’s one of Van Gogh’s favorites.

     Picasso, Woman with a Book.

     

    In the back was a nice sculpture garden with a little coffee shop and places to sit.

     

    This was may favorite piece in the garden. The placement of it was thoughtful, with the color of the ice plant ground cover and the blue cedar in the background worked with the statue to create this interesting sea of blue-green. It worked. Below is the same artist, Aristide Maillol.

     

     The gardens themselves were interesting, too. Dan thought this looked alien.

     

     The downstairs gallery was all Asian art. This is a temple wall with scenes from Krishna’s life, 19th century India.

     

    Siddhartha (Buddha) Meditating below the Jambu Tree. From 3rd century Pakistan. There were an interesting number of pieces from Pakistan from the 100s-300s. I don’t remember seeing a lot from Pakistan in our travels so this stood out to me for some reason.

     Stele with Vishnu and other Hindu Deities, 12th century India. I love seeing old things with this much detail, always makes me appreciate the time and talent it took to do this stuff by hand.

     

     This view of the garden taken from the inside, the entire wall was glass.

     

    We went back to our room and rested for a bit before heading out again for dinner. We walked to a restaurant in downtown Glendale called Carousel, which served Middle Eastern food. It was a fixed price set menu so there was nothing to order, you just sat down and they starting bringing things out.

    First course was mezza or small dishes, we thought of it as cold appetizers – various things to eat with the pita bread. Pretty typical fair for Middle Eastern cuisine: tabbouleh, a chili paste which was one of my favorite from this round, hummus, baba ganoush, dolmas, a coleslaw that had too much dill in it for my taste but Dan liked it. Of course olives and carrots, etc., and a dish we had to ask what it was but we really liked it – turned out it was cracked wheat.

    The warm appetizers included some sausage in the dish at the top of the photo which I liked more than Dan did. The larger plate had beef balls, fried chickpea, a salad, and what I thought was the best bite of the night, something they called cheese pie, the pastry item. Three kinds of cheese fried in a sort of crispy filo dough. I could’ve eaten a plate of that.

     The main course was two different kinds of rice and a meat platter with chicken, lamb and beef.

     

    We were out of there in a just a little over and hour and wanted to walk off some of that food, so headed back to the Americana Brand. It’s definitely our kind of place, a mix of retail, restaurants and residential, something you don’t see a lot of in Southern California especially, but we really enjoyed it. The shops were mostly closed at this time, but the restaurants were open. And it was decorated nicely for Christmas and there were lots of people about taking photos. We joined them.

    A dancing fountain was the highlight of the central area.
     The little house where Santa lived and during the day kids would line up for photos. He was out working that night. (Christmas Eve)

     

     The other side of the dancing fountain which looped around a sculpture.
     And a nice big tree that looked much better at night than it did during the day. But isn’t that always the case? Below are the exposed elevators that take residents up to their units.
    And that was our day. We walked through the Glendale Galleria on our way out – which was mostly closed at this time, approaching 8pm, but you could still walk through the 2 block 3 story mall – and ended up helping a lost couple find their way to the movie theaters. Our good deed for the day I guess.
    Merry Christmas, everyone!

     

  • Day 1, Dec 23: Huntington Library

    Day 1, Dec 23: Huntington Library

    Day 1 of vacation. I’m so happy to be off I can’t seem to remember what day it is. I kept thinking it was Friday; Dan kept thinking it was Sunday. Oh well. (It’s a Saturday, by the way.) As long as we know when to check out I guess that’s all that matters.

    We went down for breakfast when it opened at 7am, and I was happy to see it was more normal seating than my dining experience the night before, as shown below. We got a nice little table in the corner. Food was typical breakfast fare, nothing special. But free and satisfying, so that definitely counts.

    We left the hotel about 9:20. We stopped first at a CVS to get me some cough syrup and cough drops, a lingering symptom from being pretty sick a couple of weeks ago. Then a quick stop at an Enterprise Rental to get Dan added as a driver, because that could only be done in person.

    Last year when we were here we’d spent some time in the Los Feliz area around the two different places his family had lived for the first few years after moving here from Korea in 1978 and Dan was 9. When he was a sophomore in high school, they moved to Glendale, so we stopped by that apartment next which was just a few blocks from Enterprise. It’s always fun and interesting to return to old stomping grounds.

    Pasadena is just about 8 miles east of Glendale, we moved in that direction next. The big stop of the day is the Huntington Library, technically in San Marino just south of Pasadena. Henry Edwards Huntington was a railroad magnate, largely responsible for building the railroad system in Southern California, and who was also an extensive collector of books, art, and botanical items. His wife, Arabella, was an art collector and expert in her own right, and advised him about art collecting before they we married. The bought a 1700 acre ranch in San Marino. After their deaths, that estate and its holding became the foundation for the Huntington Library which, in addition to being a museum attraction for the public, is still used by up to 2000 scholars each year as a research facility because of it’s rare collection of books especially.

    It’s not much to look at as you first approach, above. Tickets were pricey as these things go, $29 each. We kept commenting on that as we toured; the maintenance on this place must be pretty costly. We originally were only going to stay here until lunch, then leave for lunch and go to the Norton Simon museum in Pasadena in the afternoon. There was so much to do here we decided to get our money’s worth, eat lunch here, and not rush to check everything out. We never made it to the other museum.

    The initial part of the complex is the research and education center, a collection of buildings (which we skipped) around a long courtyard. This garden is at the end of it. The Library exhibits are to the right of this and that’s where we headed first. We were both surprised by what we found here. A few times we were like “shouldn’t this be somewhere else?”

    This is an original publication, from 1623, of what’s referred to as Shakespeare’s “first folio”, the first publication of  “authoritative versions of thirty-six of his works that form the basis for all later editions. Half of them, including Macbeth, Julius Caesar, Twelfth night, As You Like It, and The Tempest, did not appear previously in print. Without this edition, many of his plays might not have survived.”

    Above: an original Huckleberry Finn, from 1889. Below: Jack London’s original manuscript from The Call of the Wild.

     

    A fountain as seen from one of library windows.

     

    An original print of The Birds of America, John James Audubon’s (think Audubon Society) first attempt in the early part of the 1800’s to identify all 435 species then known in the United States. I asked Dan to stand in front of the display for scale, but I’m still not sure it captured how big this book is.

    This didn’t photograph well, but is an original manuscript of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales from the early 1400’s.

    At least our 3rd “we can’t believe this is here,” a Guttenberg bible. I’d seen one on my very first trip to Europe in March of 2013. Dan was in Mainz, Germany, at a conference for work and I met him there, so my first day of exploration was in Mainz, a city many if not most have never heard of. But it is where Guttenberg lived and where he invented the printing press, choosing the bible as his first product in 1455. He only printed 175 of these total, and there are only 48 of them left in the world. And now I’ve seen two of them.

    The European art collection is housed in the mansion the Huntington’s used to live in. We enjoy museums like this – and we’ve lost count of how many mansions/palaces we’ve been in that have been turned into museums – because even if you don’t care for the art, the building itself is worth seeing.

    Many of these rooms are still as they furnished them when they lived here from their extensive personal collections. I think the room above was called the parlor, and the room below obviously the dining room. Each room had a touch display that gave you as much detail as you wanted about every piece in it, whether it was art on the wall, the items on the mantel, or the furniture. Arabella loved French furniture and the house is full of it.

     

    Huntington’s European art collection was primarily British, an aspect we were intrigued by because we’d never seen such a large collection of British art before, not even when we were in London. European museums seem to have a huge focus on French, Dutch, and Italian art, but you don’t see much British, at least we haven’t. But we did today, and I was super thrilled to discover this. I literally gasped when I saw it. If any of my siblings are reading this, they will instantly recognize this – the Blue Boy – because we had a print of it hanging in the house we grew up in. I haven’t thought of it in years and will admit it never occurred to me to wonder about the original. But here it is, painted in 1770 by Thomas Gainsborough. I couldn’t get a decent shot of this without the glare from the light above, but it’s pretty stunning in person and close up. It’s considered a masterpiece because of the way he was able to show the satin, the many textures of the color blue, and the gold trim around the tunic is like glitter. It’s been very well maintained and looks terrific. The sale of it to the Huntington’s in 1921 at $700,000 set a record for the time as the most expensive art transaction in history. 

    I don’t remember anything about this just thought it was pretty.

     

    Dan was looking at this piece when I came up behind him and said ‘hey, that looks like Salisbury Cathedral.” And that’s because it is. We were there last summer, and get a kick out of seeing places we’ve been in paintings in museums. Sort of the opposite happened the first time we walked into St. Mark’s Square in Venice in 2016 – we’d seen it so many times in museum paintings we felt like wee were walking into a painting when we finally came across it in real life. We decided today after seeing some more that Venice in general is the place we’ve seen the most paintings of in museums.

     

    Above: the beginnings of the most extensive rose garden we’ve ever come across, continued in the two photos below.

     

     

    From there we went to the Japanese gardens, which were huge and breathtaking. This was when are discussion of costly maintenance really kicked in.

     

     

     

    Dry Landscape Garden

     

    The first of two significant bonsai collections. Bonsai are beautiful but ridiculously high maintenance.
    This was the 2nd bonsai collection up the hill from the first, in an enclosed garden with a water feature in the middle. I liked this one much better. The display below was in the corner to my left.

    We came across a little stream that had a great sound which I tried to capture here. Probably not the best quality but you’ll get the idea. It’s pretty though!

    A Japanese tea room.

    A little bamboo tunnel on our way to the Chinese gardens, below, where we ultimately stopped for lunch.

     

    There was a little Chinese place by the gardens and we sat in a structure that was mostly windows. The food wasn’t bad – usually a 50/50 chance at museums. Dan had the congee (top bowl) and I had a beef noodle dish.

     

    After lunch we went to the Boone Gallery, which housed temporary exhibits. Photos weren’t allowed, but the topic was indigenous American art from the 1400s to early 1800’s. It was actually pretty interesting.

    We went to the American Gallery next. The painting above is by Guy Rose, an American Impressionist from San Gabriel, California. He lived in Paris for awhile and Claude Monet was his mentor. It shows.

    Above and below: they had a decent collection of Favrile Glass, a type of iridescent art glass developed by Louis Tiffany. From the late 1800’s.

     

    Dan liked this piece, The Locomotive by Reginald Marsh, 1935. He was commissioned to paint murals for the post office building in Washington DC and wanted to do them fresco, which is a style that paints directly onto wet plaster. He used this painting to practice and master the process. This was lifted from his studio wall, and is unique in that it shows different textures based on the smoothness, or not, of the plaster he was painting on. The variations in surface texture create a sense of atmosphere and depth.

    Quilts are particular to American art and there’s generally a decent collection of them in galleries which focus on such. This was no exception.
    By Gilbert Stuart, 1797. Look familiar? This painting of George Washington served as the basis for the engraving used on the one dollar bill.
    Council of War, by John Rogers, 1868. Lincoln with General Ulysses Grant (cleaning his glasses) and Secretary of War Edwin Stanton as they discuss Civil War plans.
    On our way to the botanical gardens, in the conservatory building in the rear of this photo. But the point of it is Dan in front mimicking the statue in the middle of the garden :)
    We left around 3:30 I guess, having spent about  5.5 hours there. That’s quite a stop for one place even for us, but it went by pretty fast and we enjoyed it, and definitely felt like we got our money’s worth! We went back to our room and relaxed until we had to go out again to meet Dan’s family for dinner in Koreatown. I only took one photo below, which included all of the side dishes, which Dan claims is the best part of Korean food anyway. The dish to the left is Korean BBQ beef which was excellent.

     

    I asked about taking a group photo but no one was in the mood. Oh well. We went back to our room and I for one was in bed by 9:15. I had managed to get the photos uploaded for this before dinner yesterday, and started to write last night but just couldn’t do it. Decided that would work much better after a good night’s sleep, which I got, and some coffee, which I’ve had. Ready for another day.

  • Catch-up & Departure

    For some reason I am always a little ambivalent about blogging for these more local trips. I think maybe it’s because they’re shorter, and/or I think people won’t be interested, and/or I get in a lazy mood and don’t want the work. It is vacation after all, right?

    And then I remember a little jaunt to Richmond, VA, Memorial Day Weekend of 2016, which I chose not to blog and have regretted it ever since. Because in the end, I enjoy having the memento. It’s really the only thing we take with us from our travels. I don’t know if you’ve ever noticed, but in all of the places we’ve gone, we’ve never bought anything: not a t-shirt, magnet, piece of art, or chochtke of any kind. THIS is our souvenir. This is what we bring back.

    So here we are. A little catch-up on us is in order I guess, although there isn’t really that much to report since our last trip to Europe which ended July 8. If you’ve been following for awhile, you know Dan and I are living apart – me in Sacramento, him in Raleigh, NC – while we wait out this limbo of his job status with Bayer while they make progress on their acquisition of Monsanto. So while we have news, there’s no real status change: the limbo will continue for awhile. And the news is that when the deal is final, and that date keeps getting pushed out, currently late first quarter 2018, Dan will be one of 1800 Bayer employees who will be divested to another German company called BASF. If you’re interested in that kind of business news, you can read more about it here.

    The limbo part is two-fold. One, if somehow the Bayer-Monsanto deal collapses, which is unlikely at this point, then the divestiture doesn’t happen. If it all goes as planned, then Dan and his team will become BASF employees and that’s then essentially like starting a new job. Because BASF is buying the whole shop, there’s no need to move at the moment – everyone, at least in Dan’s immediate world, stays where they are and the signs on the buildings change. But we don’t yet know how it will impact Dan’s day-to-day: who he’ll report to, whether he’ll like it, how much if any he still needs to travel to Europe for business, etc. So while we’re waiting for all that to settle, it still doesn’t quite make sense for us to get me to Raleigh, because we don’t know how long all that will take. And there’s a whole bunch going on in my job right now that would make it less than ideal for them to have to take on a search for a new HR Director, and I’m interested in seeing some changes I’m driving there through to the end. So we wait some more.

    When we first started talking about traveling for Christmas way back when, this trip was originally this cool concept of Madrid-Lisbon-Marrakesh. But we wanted that to be a longer trip and there was too much unknown in Dan’s job to be able to plan that when we would have needed to. So then it was a Grand Canyon-Sedona excursion. Both of these trips we will still do at some point. But we ended up in LA for a couple of reasons. One, way back in 2012 before we started blogging, we had a 2 week trip planned in LA in December of that year that we had to cut short 2 days into it because of an emergency at Dan’s work. Starting with our trip here last year heading into New Year’s, we’ve been working our way through the list of things we’d planned to do then but never did. This is a continuation of that. Plus Dan’s family is here and it gives us a good excuse to see them a bit.

    Friday, 12/22, was our departure day. I drove (rented a car this time for a variety of reasons) and got to the room about 5pm. There was plenty of traffic all the way down, lots of holiday travelers, but I made satisfying time. I only stopped once in Kettleman City (because you kind of “have to” stop in KC in my opinion on that trip) to get gas, use the restroom and get a quick bite to eat. I was on the Grapevine around 4pm and hit some rush hour traffic after that. We are staying at a Hilton in Glendale, which is north of LA proper.

    We have a nice room! I took these just as I arrived so I could grab them before the sun set completely.

    This is sort of from the doorway as you walk in. Bathroom to the right out of view, the desk area, pictured below, is to the left of where I’m standing in the above photo.

     

    Downtown LA in the distance, that’s looking south. And caught a bit of a nice sunset over the mountains to the west, below.

    I unpacked, went to the gym to get some cardio in and stretch the legs after 5.5 hours of driving. Showered after and just went down to the hotel restaurant for dinner because I did not feel like getting in the car again. The restaurant seating is bizarre – more just like a bar/lounge area. Will be interesting to see if it’s the same for breakfast. There weren’t any traditional tables or booths, just counters and couches and some of the high bar tables. But the food was decent, a pork sausage pasta dish above with a simple garlic sauce and some broccoli.

    Dan worked most of the day and had a direct flight to LAX which landed him here just after 9:30. I left about 8:45 to go get him. Apparently everyone and their mother flew into LAX Friday night because traffic was a joke, with a 27 minute delay for just the mile getting into the airport on the freeway. I ended up getting off the freeway one exit early and the google reroute ended up being faster if not more direct shot (very circuitous) shot, but at least I didn’t have to sit in the parking lot that was the freeway. And lots of people must’ve taken that because there was no other good reason for me to be following as many cars as I was going through the bowels and back alleys of LAX. It was kind of bizarre.

    We have a nice little stay planned, starting with hanging out in the Glendale/Pasadena area this weekend. We have dinner with this family tonight in Koreatown. Monday, Christmas Day, will be movie day (Jedi & Churchill). Tuesday is Warner Brothers Studios, and Wednesday we head south the explore the Long Beach area. Dan flies out Thursday morning and I’ll drive home that day, still giving us both nice 4 day weekends to wind down the year. I haven’t taken this particular week off (“the week in between”) in over 10 years and am super-excited about it.
    [PS: Weird things going on with the font, I know. Working on it…]