Shopping in LA

We didn't spend too much time shopping thankfully - just enough to keep Miriam satisfied, and for us to pick up some cheap clothes that we would otherwise have had to buy (and pay more for) back in England on our return. On our last couple of days we went to two malls - the first was Farmers Market just south of Hollywood, which was the usual collection of shops but was in an attractive area that (unusually for LA) had some history to it - it really was a Farmers Market in the 1930s ... ancient history by LA standards. The market itself now hosts dozens of food stalls and bars, and some live music, which was fun. Best shop I went to was Banana Republic, but the prices were pretty steep.

We left our major purchasing until the day before we left for home, when (on Barbara's friend Judy's recommendation) we drove out to the shopping centre at Glendale, a nearby suburb. This looked and felt a bit like Brent Cross in London, but less busy. I was looking for a jacket and found it depressing going into shop after shop seeing nothing I liked, or if I did finding it cost hundreds of dollars. But in the end I was delighted to find what seemed to me like jacket heaven, in a corner of JC Penny's. I ended up with a great leather jacket for $60, as well as a casual jacket and a couple of polo shirts, so I went home very happy. We sorted Miriam out with a few things for her new school, and it was a productive day all round.

Highlights of our last week in California

Three months after coming home, and I still haven't finished writing about our trip, so now is the time to draw it to a close with a brief overview of our last week in California. Highlights included:

- a day trip into Tijuana in Mexico - very tacky, but lots of fun, with cheap shopping and tasty and spicy enchilladas





- Ocean Beach - spent a long afternoon at this low-key bohemian beach, watching the surfers, looking in rock pools, watching the sun go down - this remains an abiding and very happy memory of our whole trip .... the golden light, all of us together, nothing to do and plenty of time to do it in

- Getty Museum in LA - beautifully situated in the hills with a fabulous vista to the bay. Gleaming white marble set in perfectly manicured gardens. A relatively small but high quality collection of art

- a drive out to Malibu Beach for the quintessential southern Californina beach experience. Catherine and I hired surfboards and joined the thorngs of surfers waiting for the (very frequent) rideable waves. I had no success at all, failing to stnad up for more than a few seconds, but had a few good rides. We could have got in lots of practice as the waves were so good, but the problem was that it was so tiring swimming out through the broken waves to where they were breaking. I felt I needed to be a lot fitter to be able to do this, and when you look at surfers they are a fit bunch. Another problem was that there were lots of rocks on the sand under the water, and we ended up with cuts on our feet and ankles. But its not a surprise that Malibu is a world-renowned surf spot - it has great waves that run for 100 metres or more. The best sight of the day was a bronzed, pony-talied dude riding a wave into shore whilst sitting on his surfbaord in the lotus position, thumbs and forefingers together and eyes closed!
Barbara didn't have too good a time on the beach - she had a migraine, and was then stung by a wasp that she had stepped on in the sand. We left early to drive back "home", and spent some time in the pool before going out for the evening with Barbara's old friends from animation days in London.

Sea World

With untypical discipline, we were all up and ready for an early start at Sea World, to get ahead of the crowds and avoid the worst of the queues. First stop was the dolphin-feeding pool. We queued up to buy a few small and over-priced sprats, then elbowed our way to the side of the pool to try and attract the grey, rubbery-skinned mammals. Despite the commercial set-up, it really was fun to get a close-up view of the dolphins. They are supposed to be the cleverest of animals, and with their sparkling black eyes and sweetly smiling mouth one does imagine a wry intelligence working away inside that large forehead.


We rushed to the next attraction, Shipwreck Rapids, which we were delighted to find without any queue. We climbed into a large tyre with a young Kiwi couple, and started down the “river”. As we went through the first bit of white water, which dumped copious amounts of H2O all over us, we realised why people were waiting for the sun to break through the morning clouds before ‘enjoying’ this ride. It was fun, in a perverse kind of way, going down the rapids, through waterfalls, past jets of water – the kids loved it of course and we had to go back on it a number of times.


The set-piece shows at Sea World are what everyone comes for – Dolphin Discovery, and Shamu’s Adventure. These take place in amphitheatres holding thousands, with a huge and deep pool instead of a stage, in which dolphins and killer whales show off their range of impressive tricks – jumping high into the air, letting their minders ride on their backs or noses, and waving to the audience with their tails, on cue. The shows have a warm-up entertainer who gets the crowd to sing along with a few songs, including, memorably, Brown-Eyed Girl by Van Morrison. But right before the show, they sing a kind of public warning song, which goes something like:
“If you’re sitting in the first 12 rows, there’s something you ought to know, if you haven’t heard about it yet, you’re going to get extremely wet”
This area, closest to the pool, is called the Soak Zone, and of course Catherine wanted to test out what this was really like, so I had to go with her. We thought we were going to get wet, but the dolphin and killer whale trainers seem to have a mission to ensure that the maximum possible amount of water gets dumped on those silly enough to sit in the soak zone. When we sat there, at the Shamu show, Shamu himself swam right by the edge of the pool, shaped his tail like a shovel, and sent waves of cold, salty, smelly water all over us, again and again. Again, getting this wet was fun, in a perverse way, and it was funny to see others sitting near us who hadn’t quite appreciated just how much water would be coming their way, and ended up with salt water all over their digital camcorders.

The shows were really good fun, with lots of oohs and aahs at the acrobatics of the dolphins and whales. Then only sour taste was the public address system before the performance, asking for those audience members in the military to stand up and for the rest of us to give them a round of applause and appreciate them as heroes who were defending our democracy. Anhauser-Busch, the company which owns SeaWorld and also makes Budweiser, are apparently big supporters of the Republicans, so glorification of the military fits with their world view – but it could have been a commercial decision, as so many residents of San Diego are connected in some way with the Navy or Air Force.

The kids’ favourite attraction was Journey to Atlantis, an uneasy mix between a roller-coaster and a mystical Atlantis story ride. A steep drop into water, and some fast twists and turns made it worthwhile, but by the fourth ride I was getting sick of the mystical nonsense about saving Atlantis. But on a warm day, with few queues, it made for mindless fun.

There was one other main “ride”, with a polar adventure theme, where you are strapped into chairs which then move a bit whilst a screen shows you flying in a helicopter over the arctic – very effective, it’s amazing how one’s senses can be fooled into thinking that you are actually flying. Many of the other attractions were zoo-like enclosures with polar bears, walruses, penguins, sharks – all sort of interesting.

We went to a couple of other shows. One was a kind of circus act starring a sealion called Clyde, and one or two penguins. The other one was called Cirque de la Mer, which really was painful to sit through. The performers were technically very talented, but I really did not want to sit through half an hour of mime and silent acrobatics, set to a John-Michel Jarre-esque soundtrack, on a psychedelic stage set with performers in day-glo costumes.

All in all then, a good day out (and we even went back for a couple of hours on our last day in San Diego, as it was free), but not a patch on Universal Studios.

San Diego

I had planned this side trip from LA after reading about San Diego, and how many people consider it to be the most pleasant and attractive city in the US. I’d also thought that we wouldn’t really enjoy LA, so we would need a few side trips to get out of there. But even though we did end up enjoying LA, we are so glad that we went to San Diego.

We started off relatively early on a Sunday morning heading south, thinking the traffic wouldn’t be too bad then. But the fabled traffic problems of LA started to make sense to us, as it took a good hour and a half to make it through Orange County, past a pretty horrible landscape of suburban sameness caked in car fumes. We made use of the Car Pool lane (only available to cars with more than one passenger) which helped us make slightly quicker progress, and eventually escaped the conurbation and hugged the coastal freeway travelling southwards, under a blanket of cloud. We stopped for a break in Carlsbad, a low key seaside town (where we had had an offer of a home exchange), and got talking to a woman from Chicago who had with her a gorgeous little stray kitten she had found, and an Armenian woman who was visiting her relations who ran the café we were in. Miriam and Catherine were delighted by the kitten, and indulged by the Armenian woman, who was all sweetness and light until I asked her about how she had come to America. Her family lived in Turkey, and she harboured still a loathing of Turks for their massacres of Armenians during World War One.

Arriving in San Diego, we found the Youth Hostel after a bit of hunting around, and settled ourselves in. We decided to spend out first afternoon there in Balboa Park, a huge park right in the middle of the city, home of the San Diego zoo and liberally sprinkled with ornate Mission-era building that now house a range of museums and galleries. Barbara and I had a bit of a falling out as she wanted to stay to let the kids play in a wilder area of the park, with grass and trees, whilst I wanted to explore the buildings and fountains, so we each did our own thing for a bit. I found them later and led them to some really beautiful areas, best of all being the large lily pond, where nearby a mature lady was standing alone on a lawn, singing operatic tunes for her own, and our pleasure. The park was very restful, after a long day on the road.

We headed off for a meal on the island of Coronado, reached by one of the world’s most astounding bridges, curving high above the bay to allow ships to pass beneath (to and from the huge naval base), and giving stupendous views of the city and the water around which it is built. The only problem for me as driver was that it was difficult to look at the view and keep the car going smoothly around the curve. Coronado is a pretty part of San Diego, and we had one of the first of a series of lovely Mexican meals there.

Back at the Youth Hostel we planned an early start the next day for our visit to Sea World, and went to bed. I woke about 2am on hearing a group of people in the common room downstairs, who had probably just come back from a club. There was supposed to be a keep quiet after 11pm rule, but I probably could have gone back to sleep had it not been for one particular voice, of a bloke from Bolton who I’d talked to earlier that day. The trouble with him was, I could understand what he was saying, and he was talking about Wayne Rooney and his granny-shagging antics, and analysing Man United’s game. There was no way I could have slept through that, so I had to go down in my pyjamas and tell him (and the rest) to keep the noise down. The next day, though, I took no chances and bought some earplugs, which were fantastic – I’ll be taking them with me wherever I travel now (and when Miriam’s friends sleepover!) as they almost guarantee uninterrupted sleep. They also reduced the noise from planes due to San Diego’s airport being right in the centre of the city. Despite the occasional noisy Bolton fan, the Youth Hostel was great, with free pancakes for breakfast in the morning, free films in the TV lounge, lots of guidebooks in the library, a table tennis table, and very helpful staff.

LA by the sea

One of LA’s great advantages is that it is situated along an almost unbroken expanse of beach, and we couldn’t miss out on the quintessential southern Californian beach experience. Santa Monica is LAs main beach location, almost a city in itself, loved especially by ex-pat Brits, including (oddly) Morrissey and John Lydon. But we thought we’d go to its slightly quieter neighbour, Venice Beach, so named because its creator installed a series of canals a few blocks back from the beachfront. The beach is wide and never-ending, but most people come to Venice for its Boardwalk, a sort of Camden Market by the sea, with wizened old hippies squatting on the pavement selling white sage and ear-rings, tattoo and piercing parlours every hundred yards, bars holding “Jim Morrison Appreciation weekends”, and of course a drum circle. I scoff, but it made for an interesting afternoon. We had lunch in the Sidewalk Café, and watched a street entertainer whose whole schtick was following people and imitating their walk, and pretending to be their partner by holding their hand … it was a lot funnier than it sounds. There were other street entertainers too, including a dreadlocked rasta on roller-skates playing Hendrix songs on his electric guitar, which all added to the local colour.

A few hundred yards further south we came to the renowned “Muscle Beach”. This was a bit of a disappointment. I had imagined a vast area filled with Arnie-wannabees working assiduously on their pecs and abs, but what was actually there was a smallish outdoor gym with three or four narcissists deigning to share the sight of their rippling bodies with us mere mortals. Perhaps it was the time of day, mid-afternoon in mid-summer not being the best time to exert oneself in the open air.















Hippie bus in Venice Beach

The canals of this Venice were not too extensive, but ambling among them with an ice cream in the late afternoon was delightful – imagining ourselves living in one of the small canal-side houses, the beach just around the corner. The long walk back to the car was made bearable by stopping off in shops selling ethnic furniture and gifts, and one man chanting to the sun as it set. We decided to drive back, with the top down, along Santa Monica Boulevard and through Beverly Hills, rather than on the freeway. This was interesting in parts but took much longer, and by the time we were in Beverly Hills it had gone dark and we were getting cold – we had to stop and convert the convertible.

Meeting the locals

What really helped us to enjoy LA was knowing some people who lived there. Barbara, who used to work in Animation Studios in London before we had kids, knew a couple of animators who had moved to LA in the late 1990s. Judy, originally from Australia, is a really lovely woman who I remembered from the first few months of going out with Barbara – she was very friendly at an animation studio picnic in Regents Park when I felt a bit alone as the non-artist in a bunch of creatives. She has left animation now and is studying to become a hypnotherapist. We went to visit her in her home up in the Hollywood Hills, quite near to our home exchange home. The house wasn’t very big, being on just one floor, but the rooms were large and there was an easy transition from indoors to out, and I think Judy and Jurgen spend a lot of their time outside, looking at the fantastic view of downtown. The only problem there is the coyotes that have in the past attacked their cats – but coyotes are like foxes in London … attracted by the rubbish that we leave out, and probably impossible to get rid of.

Judy took us up into the hills of Griffith Park, near the Observatory (famous as the setting for some of James Dean’s key scenes in “Rebel Without a Cause”), from where we got a classic view of the Hollywood sign, and LA sprawled below us. She also came over to our home exchange house to enjoy the pool, and we went out for a meal in Los Feliz with her and Paul Demeyer, another friend from Barbara’s animation days, and their partners. Paul had worked on the “Rugrats in Paris” movie and was working hard on another project now, and his German wife Renate was a dog trainer, specialising in dogs with acute behavioural problems (a normal LA kind of job). Judy’s husband Jurgen is also an animator but was now working on a live action movie directed by Danny de Vito, who they had both met and found delightful.

They were all happy to be living in Los Feliz, and it was strange that we ended up in a home exchange so close to where they all lived. It is the sort of area that has a lot of history (well, about 80 years worth) but then became a bit neglected as other areas became more fashionable, and thus seems a bit more real than some other LA neighbourhoods with a mix of population and relative lack of pretension. It is now having a resurgence as people recognise its attractions.

Universal Studios

Over the months leding up to our holiday, I had skilfully weaned the kids of the idea of going to Disneyland and got them excited about Universal instead, mainly cos I wanted to go there and cos we had already been to Eurodisney (albeit a few years ago). I had been slightly worried about this decision, as the original Disneyland is supposed to be really good, and it was the 50 year anniversary this year, with lots of special events …. but I am so glad we went to Universal. The kids loved the rides most of all, but Barbara and I enjoyed seeing the mechanics of movie-making – the studio tour, looking at the set for Psycho, Jaws, King Kong, etc., then the Special Effects show.

It was all very professionally done, and there was such a variety of things to do that we never got bored – and we didn’t even have to queue much, due to our early start (we arrived as the gates opened).

There were one or two dud shows – the Van Helsing “horror” walk-through was pretty pathetic, and I was left underwhelmed by Backdraft – but quite a few surpassed expectations, especially the Terminator and Waterworld. I got my photo taken with Stan and Ollie, and with Marilyn Monroe, which pleased me no end.

Miriam practising walking the red carpet, and looking the part.