L.A.: Where you don't need a car.

LA Xmas Trip.

Ok, so I’ve got a little catching up to do with the old blog. I won’t have any more long trip reports for a bit yet, but I’ve got lots of general photos and ideas I want to get up there. First up: My company Christmas party in L.A.

The company I work for (www.cajaeir.com) has their main office in West L.A. and most of the staff down south are ardent sports fans. This led to the idea of holding the company Christmas (ok, holiday) party at a Lakers game. Now, for those who don’t know, I don’t watch sports. It’s never really interested me that much, aside from the occasional binge on motorcycle racing or the Tour de France. So a Lakers game sounded kinda ‘meh’ to me. But a free weekend trip to L.A. with VIP treatment at the Staples Center and free food was good enough. Four of the 6 in our Petaluma contingent were going to try to do L.A. without renting a car. There’d been rumors that L.A. had a decent public transit system and we, being planning geeks, wanted to see how it worked. Our co-workers who live down there thought we were crazy. Dangerously crazy, not funny crazy. They told us it couldn’t be done. Ha! Now honor was on the line. Not much, but a little.

We carpooled to the airport with the two who didn’t indulge in our transit interest and flew down on Friday afternoon. They convinced us to join them in the rental so we could at least get to the Staples center on time. As it happened, it would’ve been faster and easier to get from LAX to downtown by the light-rail line than by car at commute time on Friday night. The Staples center looks like a giant green ufo. I’m told it’s purple most of the year, but due to Christmas they’ve changed the light.

Once inside we found a large and well appointed suite with catered food and a good view of the court, along with 3 or 4 tvs so we wouldn’t miss any of the action no matter which way we turned our heads. The best part was that we were the first ones there so I descended upon the food trays and laid waste to the fruit and cheese section. Sated, I sat down and chatted with other co-workers, most of whom I hadn’t met yet. One guy gave me an intro into NBA basketball, and explained who was who. Very helpful. The game turned out to be riveting. Gary, Terri and I are not big sports fans, yet we were all on our feet and yelling by the third quarter. It was within 4 or 5 points all game long and went into overtime. In the end the Lakers lost, but I was stunned at what those guys could do. ‘Skills’ does not do them justice.

After the game I went out to a club in Santa Monica (http://www.zanzibarlive.com/Zanzibar.html) with some people from work. It was fun, and we got to see some good DJs (Jason Bentley, and some other guy whose name escapes me). Then eventually we made it back to my friend’s apartment in Long Beach. She and her boyfriend kindly put me up for the night, and she cooked up some tasty drunk-vittles but unfortunately burned herself pretty badly. Let that be a lesson, don’t cook when you’re loaded. The next day I got up and made my way downtown (LBC) and hopped onto a light rail line that took me to LA. It was cheap, fast, clean, and came every 15 minutes. It was also pretty packed for a Saturday morning. And that was the rule applied to all my transit experiences in LA. Cheap, fast, clean and took you where you wanted to go. It was weird. Being a NorCal snob, I always look down with disdain on LA, but they’ve got an awesome downtown (with a huge number of stunning run-down art-deco buildings and theaters), efficient transit, and glorius weather. It was 72 degrees in the middle of December. Of course, I write this on the day that a massive mudslide kills 4 people, and there’s flooding all over the greater LA basin, but….

I had gone into LA to see the Body World exhibit (http://www.koerperwelten.com/en/pages/ausstellung_usa.asp) It was amazing, and bizarre. This German Dr. Guy had figured out a way to preserve soft tissue in people without resorting to keeping them in jars of formaldehyde. Well, maybe not preserving, but anyway, he created a huge number of exhibits that focus on one system of the body after another, and the catch is these are (were?) real people who’d donated their bodies to the project. And he puts them in realistic poses, like playing basketball, or reading a book, but he’s sectioned them apart. It’s weird, but not as disturbing in real life as it is in pictures.

After that all four of us (I’d met Gary, Spud, and Terri at the museum) went back out to Long Beach and wandered around and had dinner. Then I went back downtown and got a hotel room. Heidi (my friend in Long Beach) insisted that she drive us back, because we’d been on transit all day. It was very nice of her, but the transit system down there is so much nicer than it is here, that it was no hardship to ride transit.

After we got back to the hotel I wandered around and shot pictures of LA at night. At least my uninhabited part of LA. I’d really wanted to see both the Maritime Museum at San Pedro, and the Bradley Hotel (Site of the end fight scene in Blade Runner) but I’d run out of time. Ironically, the Bradley was a block and a half away but I didn’t know it until we were on our way to catch the train back. D’oh! Next time, but I hear it’s all fixed up and not as cool anymore. Still…I’d like to see it.

The next morning we got up and hopped on the subway to Union Station, the last of the great rail stations (Grand Cental in NY being the first). It’s built in a deco-mission style that suits the locale perfectly. It was beautiful. I kept thinking about Douglas Adam’s line “No one has ever said ‘As pretty as an airport’” because they are all so awful. Why is it that train-stations (at least the grand ones) are so beautiful? Is there a way we can create large public structures with some semblance of the beauty like we used to? Think of San Francisco’s City Hall…and is it something endemic to airports that they have to be ugly and unfriendly?

We had decided to take Amtrak back, the Coast Starlight, and we were going in style: sleeper cabins. I’d never been on the train in the U.S. and I’d never been in a sleeper, so I was very excited. One interesting note: there is no apparent security apparatus for trains, no metal detectors, no dogs, no searches, nada. The lack was so apparent compared with airtravel, especially since I’d had my nail clippers confiscated at Oakland two days before. For the record, I hadn’t meant to bring them I just had a pair in my bag that I’d forgotten about.

Anyway. The train was awesome. Being in a sleeper meant free snacks/drinks/coffee all day long so I spent the time eating, and napping. It was a cat’s holiday. Also because the train has all the nap-inducing qualities of a bus (gentle rocking, low-freq hum, etc) with the benefit that there isn’t some guy next to you drooling, and you can hop onto your fold out bed and snuggle under the blankets. It ruled. I got like 6.5 hours of sleep on the train, in the middle of the day.

We got back to Oakland at 10:30pm (we’d left about 11 hours earlier) and took a cab to the airport and then drove home. A great trip.