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| Not quite like the movies |
"New Year in LA" makes it sound a bit more glamorous
than the reality. Arrived late, weather coming
down in buckets, up for more
than 24 hours, and the only pair of trousers I have are wringing wet. I
finally negotiate entry into my hostel, and not even an invite to some party
in downtown LA was enough to deter me going to bed an hour before the bells.
Rock n roll.
I wasn't even intending to come to LA, having been in California back in July.
Sadly, the cheapest way to New Zealand is via LA, so I decided to stay for a
couple of days to see a couple of sights. But which ones?
Well, if there are two things that America knows how to do, it's go into space
and go to war, so I opted to visit an observatory and a
battleship.
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Cloudy. Perfect weather for visiting an observatory
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The Griffith observatory is located on Mount Hollywood and was well worth a
visit - even accounting for the fact it was cloudy and it was crawling with
kids who were far too young to understand or appreciate any of it. Still, you
can't moan at free. Even the bus up the massive hill was free. As is most
public transport in LA by virtue if the fact that half just don't pay, and the
other half try to pay by card and it rarely works.
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| The moon |
At the entrance of the observatory, the Foucault Pendulum weighs over 100kg,
and was used to demonstrate that the world is spinning. Every seven minutes, a
wee peg is knocked over. And it was so riveting, I hung about to watch the
next toppling. Twice.
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| Wait for it.... |
They also had a periodic table with a wee sample of each element (or at least
all the ones that don't have a half-life of seconds). Also empty was oxygen -
which I guess contained air, but that seemed like a bit of a cop-out.
Moored at Long Beach, the Battleship Iowa has quite the history, having
served in WWII, the Korean War, and subsequently the Cold War, before
being put out to pasture (well, put out to scuttling), before being rescued and restored by enthusiastic volunteers).
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I lost count of the number of guns
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This is where they stored the Tomahawk missiles
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I'll take the lobster thermidor in a white wine bisque, and the
Châteauneuf-du-Pape '79
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It was also the only US naval vessel to be visited by three different US
presidents.
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| George H.W. Bush even got his hair cut here. Sadly, they wouldn't do mine. |
And that was LA. One quick (9 hours) bus journey late, and I'm sitting in San Francisco airport (
again), where the weather is positively
biblical. So I'm going to don my grass skirt and head off to somewhere a bit
sunnier ... Tahiti!
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