City of Angels

I was spoiled by Los Angeles. I probably should say Heather spoiled me while I was in Los Angles, though – she and her family were such wonderful guides to the city.

We spent our afternoons in museums, surrounded by beauty and surging with inspiration. Scandalous Belgian art and convergences in contemporary and historical photographs hung on the walls. At the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, Heather and I split in different directions – I made a b-line for the impressionists and Heather strolled through the hall of Pacific art. We met in the courtyard for an appointment to stand in a room of breathing light.

People watching, in museums and on the streets, also proved a lovely way to pass the time. We watched a man, who held a bouquet of flowers, wait impatiently as his soon-to-be fiancé came to the Getty. He stood in a crowd of his friends in the museum’s beautiful gardens, with everyone talking about how beautiful the moment would be – at that moment, the man’s friend received a call and rushed off to usher the woman to the garden instead of an exhibit hall.

I ate well in Los Angeles, too. The night Heather flew in from DC, we visited an In ‘N’ Out, according to family tradition. Normally I’d be fine with a simple burger (maybe some hot sauce), but Heather and her mom whispered options for upgrading my culinary experience into my ear – the Secret Menu. While I couldn’t move for a few hours, the experience was glorious.

There was also Mexican food on Mexican food on Mexican food – I tried all kinds of dishes and ate my weight in mole, a thick, slow-cooked sauce that’s sweet and savory and perfect all at once. Mole, sweet mole, how do I love thee? Let me count the ways. Seven? We made two trips to one restaurant, which had a cave room in the back – the darkness aids in the digestion process, I think. No good meal can end without dessert, though. Boba tea and twenty-cent cookies were great, but – hands down – cream puffs from Beard Daddy’s were my favorite sweet. Huge doughy pastries filled with a variety of creamy goodness – they were messy, but so so good.

On the night of the Super Moon, we took a picnic at the Griffith Observatory. Everyone else in the city apparently shared this idea, but despite the crowds, the night was magical. Heather’s brother showed us Mars and Saturn with a laser pointer that, I kid you not, reached all the way to the planets (or at least it appeared so). I shoved down my thoughts about light pollution and the irony of stargazing in Los Angeles rather than in rural Minnesota and appreciated the beauty of the city at night. From the overlook of the planetarium, the city sparkled – a bedazzled circuit board, of sorts.

San Francisco/San Fran/SF

San Francisco had a great vibe.

Heather and I squealed driving up and down the hills, horrified at the prospect of the car’s breaks going out and falling to our doom. Rubber burned only once, fortunately. The city’s colors were gorgeous, especially against the grey of the sky and bay. It was much chillier than I expected – when people said it was cold, I assumed as a Midwesterner that I would be immune. I was very, very wrong – the sourdough breadbowl of chowder warmed us up, enough at least to run back to the car.

Another day, we came into the city in the early afternoon to explore and wander before seeing Beyoncé (and Jay Z was there too, I guess) in concert. Anticipating harsh cold, we brought blankets to the stadium – but the body heat of thousands of other Beyoncé fans and the thrill of dancing in unison with Bey kept the cold away. We sat next to a sister who had dragged her brother to the concert and a group of girls showing a lot of sideboob and dancing like maniacs in the aisle. When one girl fell into the row in front of us, they had to leave – which meant more room to dance and sing for me. No complaints here. The show was incredible and completely justified a nine-hour drive from LA.

No real crazy stories from this city, unless you count watching forty sea lions lounge in the sun.

West Coast (Best Coast?)

Following with this summer’s motif of roommate roadtrips, I flew to California last week to visit friends from university and take a drive up the California coast.

We drove the Pacific Coast Highway, PCH if we’re using local vernacular, which made for a gorgeous trip from Los Angeles to San Francisco. After two hours of weaving our way out of the largest urban region in the world – the Los Angeles megalopolis – we coasted through canyons and along the ocean on the one-lane highway.

Heather asked me to give her my “running commentary” of my impressions of California. Our conversations in the nine-hour car ride centered a lot around cultural differences between California and the rest of the country, especially on teaching state history in primary education. In Minnesota, state history centered on Les Voyageurs, Native Americans (though it skipped over the more violent parts), the frontier life, and farming. In California, young students learn about Spain and Jesuit missionaries. Heather told me the story of how the California flag came to be. Californians wanted to declare independence, similar to Texas, and needed a flag for their new republic. A man asked his wife to sew something together quickly, requesting a pear (to represent the bountiful fruit crops) to be the main feature on the flag. The woman misheard, and instead sewed on a bear (a more forceful symbol, anyway).

We talked about the vanity of cars in LA – because everyone spends so much time in transit, people are willing to invest loads of cash into their cars. Fancy cars I’d never seen (or admittedly heard of) sped by us on the highway. Many of these cars were white, which I took to be a clever way of avoiding overheating, since white absorbs less heat than darker colors. Heather told me that was a good theory, but that white cars are preferable because they need to be washed less often. It’s illegal to wash your own car in the city, due to drought concerns. Black cars show dust and dirt more clearly than lighter cars (a premise I didn’t entirely agree with), and so people prefer the cars they don’t have to take to the carwash as often.

During my trip earlier this summer that spanned a huge chunk of the country – from DC, through the Carolinas, down the Florida peninsula, along the Gulf, and back up the Mississippi to Memphis – I enjoyed watching changes in the landscape. Virginia forests look a lot different than the bayou, and it stunned me that so much physical variation could be contained in just one country. The California coast left me similarly surprised. From desert and sand dunes to forests with soil that feeds massive redwood trees, I saw so many different landscapes in the trip to San Francisco and back. There was no unattractive view from my passenger seat window.