It has indeed been a few weeks since my last post, but there is good reason for this. No, I have not quit my job. Rather, I have been enjoying the fruits of my labor. I was able to take a week long trip to Japan, which I wrote about on my
other blog. If you care to check that out,
clicky here...
My airline has strung together nearly 20 consecutive days of no cancellations, which is unheard of for an airline of its size. Due to this impressive streak, a lot of my flights as of late have consisted of just one or two legs or have been ferry flights (no passengers). This past week I flew from LAX to Santa Barbara, went to a hotel for 7 hours during the day, then flew to San Francisco to stay overnight, and hitched a ride home the following day. If I hadn't felt like I needed sleep recovery from a 4am wakeup call, I would have taken BART into the city for a more interesting blog post, but yaaaaaaaawn. A few days ago, I flew from San Diego to LAX and then to Sacramento, only to deadhead back to LA. This allowed me to snap the picture you see here.
As I live on the coast, we have experienced the infamous "June Gloom," the unfortunate sequel to "May Grey." Sometimes this marine layer breaks up after 10 or 11am, but the farther inland one goes, the better probability one has of avoiding it altogether. With the day off, Nicole and I decided to take the metro to downtown LA. What? LA has a metro? Yes. And people actually ride it too! We got off at Union Station and walked a couple blocks to Philippe's, the self-proclaimed home of the french dip sandwich. There is another place to the south, called Cole's that also claims to be the origin of the french-dip sandwich, but it is not as good. There. I said it.
From there, we took a stroll to the south where we stopped off in Little Tokyo as an appropriate followup to our Japan trip. We went into a few shops including an outlet store where I purchased an onigiri mold for rice. Onigiri are the rice balls that contain some sort fish or meat inside. As was our case in Japan where we could not read any of the packaging, it was like a surprise every time. Now I have the tools to make my own onigiri and can enjoy further surprising Nicole. "Oh! Is this chicken katsu? Beef brisket?Chocolate chips?!"
After making a few brief stops at places like the Disney Concert Hall to relax in air-conditioned comfort, we headed back out into the hot sun. We eventually reached the public library, where I saw a poster for an exhibit on Nazi propaganda and thought it looked interesting. Also, it was free, so I figured we couldn't go wrong. It was small, but well organized. It attempted to explain Hitler's rise to power through the use of propaganda and anti-semitism. And though many Germans did not buy into the whole "It's the Jews fault" garbage, they mostly ignored it since they were so eager for someone with different ideas. It's an idea that I am afraid has resonated with some Americans in this current election cycle. Also, I enjoyed the architecture of the library as you see here. I would not have expected this from inside a library, and it lent itself perfectly to my new wide-angle lens I purchased in Japan. We set out once more into the sun. We were thirsty and grabbed a beer on the top of the Standard Hotel, where we relaxed and looked at the LA skyline before hopping on the metro back home. Not a bad day off.
