I wanted a break from the museums and hiking, and I'm still recovering from last night's excesses at a bar, so I figured I'd sit down and talk about what I've been doing. I'm just going to copy things straight from my journal.
12/19/07
I'm sitting at gate 50 at the Beijing airport. Because, I suppose, my flight to Saigon has a stop in Nanning, China, we've been exiled to this single-gate area. There's a restroom, but that's it- no food, no water, nothing. Apparently I was supposed to be able to figure out to come here based on my boarding pass, but I tried to go through customs and was sent back from whence I came with a shaky explanation that what I was looking for was "S–Channel", which of course with the accent and the utter lack of inherent meaning in the phrase, was completely unintelligible to me. But I'm here in my purgatory, awaiting a chance to sit in an even more cramped China Air flight. A number of the Shanghainese folk sitting near me got trays of food as part of their flight to Shanghai, so I got the treat of listening to them smack their way through their meal. Now they're belching loudly. I'm so ready to be out of this country.
12/20/07
I’m sitting in the Jade Emperor Pagoda right now. It’s immediately off a busy street, but as soon as you step through the gate it’s noticeably calmer.
Last night at SGN airport was an adventure. First, the immigration guy gave me a hard time because I hadn’t indicated where I’d be staying in Vietnam on my form. It took some negotiation before he let me in without the address of a hotel. Then, once out of the customs area, I was shocked to find that there were no ATMs at the terminal. I had also screwed up the time change in my planning, making staying at the airport until morning 2-hours on hard chairs less appealing. I figured I’d get a cabbie to take me to a bank in town, but when I offered them the rate suggested in the Lonely Planet they told me that I should take the bus. I finally walked down the street to the domestic terminal, an open-air deal, and found a single ATM. Armed with Vietnam Dong, I managed to convince a cabbie to accept them instead of the requested US dollars, and to only overcharge me 30%.
I’m now at Tapiocup, a bubble tea joint. The Jade Emperor Pagoda was most interesting to me as an oasis in the city. In terms of architecture and content it doesn’t really stand up to Chinese temples in China. So after a few minutes sitting, then looking around, I moved on to the Ho Chi Minh City History Museum. It, along with most everything else right now, is closed for the afternoon siesta, so I’m killing time here.
So, back to last night, the taxi dropped me off on Pham Ngu Lao street, the backpacker ghetto. Every guesthouse in the Lonely Planet had its gate closed for the night when I got there at 3AM, and many of the other places were closed or full up. So I wandered seedy alleys for a while, carrying my bags, passport, cash, bank card, and an ATM statement that rather shockingly listed my remaining available balance of 62 million Dong. Target, much? I finally found a guesthouse with an 8-dollar room and took it. The room was on the main backpacker drag, on the 4th floor, and while the guesthouses were closed, the bars and noodle stalls were in full, noisy swing until the morning traffic sounds took over. I didn’t get to sleep until 6, but I blame my fucked-up sleep schedule more than the street sounds.
I got up at 9, showered, paid, and went out with my stuff to find a wherever I was going to spend the night. I went to the places in the Lonely Planet, but they were either fully-booked or quoting $15 a night (again, in dollars). I finally settled on one for $12 a night, probably not worth the savings for the quality drop, but I was in a hurry to get to the Chinese embassy before the visa office closed. This place, the Yellow House Hotel, had $5 a night dorm beds, which I would have gladly taken had there been a locker for my backpack during the day. Ah well.
I’m back in the room now. After bubble tea and the end of the siesta I went to the history museum. I have little interest in pottery and metal-age artifacts, but it was still worth the $1 entrance fee. One thing that struck me reading the descriptions was just how much of Vietnamese history has been spent fighting off aggressors with imperial aspirations- the Chinese, the Cambodians, the Siamese, the Mongols, the French, and finally the US. I didn’t realize, though I’m certain I’ve read about it, just how ridiculous our involvement here was. I mean, one can argue about the efficacy of containment, and even the logic of the doctrine, but I didn’t realize just how undemocratic our anti-communist actions had been. The North-South division was supposed to be a temporary of the Geneva peace accord that ended French occupation. There were supposed to have been nation-wide elections, but the US killed them because our man Diem was going to lose to Ho Chi Minh. Not to mention the parceling out of land that succeeded WW2, when the Japanese in Vietnam surrendered to the British in the South and the Kuomintang in the North, but certainly not to the Vietnamese.
12/21/07
Last night I forgot to mention the visa business. I took a ‘xe om’ to the embassy. ‘Xe om’ is literally ‘motorcycle hug’. I think. It seems to be a convenient was to travel if you’re alone. That was the first time I’ve ridden on a motorcycle, as far as I can remember. It was also my first time in Saigon traffic during the day, so the experience was pretty much terrifying. It’s possible, though I’m not certain, that the Vietnamese use their horns more than the Chinese, but I’ve yet to see Vietnamese at a stop light laying into them.
At the Chinese embassy the forms were easy. We spoke a combination of Chinese and English (I can never remember the word for ‘visa’ in Chinese, though I know how to write it). The only strange thing was that they don’t take RMB or Vietnamese Dong, only USD, so I’ll have to change some before collecting my passport on xmas morning.
So now I’m at Fanny’s, an ice cream place with a street-side brick patio, having just finished my tiny scoop of cinnamon ice cream. Earlier I went to the Ben Thanh market where I bought [gifts redacted so as to remain a surprise]. I went to the HCM City Fine Arts Museum, which is in a beautiful, yellow, colonial building with impressively tiled floors. The art wasn’t very interesting, with the exception of some propaganda pieces, but the setting was nice. I did like one painting of “Uncle Ho with the hill people”. Ho Chi Minh was literally twice the height of anyone else in the painting. Mao’s height is often exaggerated in the Chinese equivalents, but he’s infrequently a giant on that scale. I’ve also been asking around about engraved zippo lighters. They say “Vietnam”, a location, and a date (e.g., Danang 68-69). The back has a bit of platoon wisdom, like “When the power of love is stronger than the love of power the world will know peace”, and some have a metal unit seal glued on. I bought 2 of them when I found a street stall that quoted $3 up front, whereas most quotes had been $10. I’ll probably find a couple more that have a good combination of seal, wisdom, and a recognizable location. I don’t know who they’ll be gifts for, but I’ll figure it out. I also skipped the Lonely Planet recommendations for lunch and just stopped at a random street stall for a grilled pork chop over rice, a bowl of soup with an unidentifiable green vegetable, and an iced tea. I ordered by pointing and paid by holding up fingers, but if they overcharged me it was still only $1.50, under the $2 I’d figured.
I’m at the War Remnants Museum right now. Outside is an assortment of US military hardware, inside photos, text, and infantry weapons. I started by looking at the anti-personnel mines, which are gruesome enough. The next section was on Agent Orange and dioxin poisoning and its teratogenic and mutagenic effects. It showed photos both of American servicemen victims and Vietnamese victims, and quoted a call for the US government to morally and monetarily compensate Vietnamese poisoned, as they did with US veterans by apologizing and giving a payout. At this point I was thinking about how insane it was to dump tons of chemicals we didn’t understand all over a country, but I suppose science has always advanced through experiments in killing. It was when I got to the photos and descriptions of torture and murder that I really started to be bothered. Looking at deformed babies and fetuses in jars of formaldehyde is creepy, but I can at least rationalize the actions that led to them with ignorance. How a man who’d become senator, Bob Kerrey, had led a SEAL time gutted children and slit the throats of old people in bed, that I couldn’t understand. But most chilling, I think, were a series of photos of terrified people, women, children, and the elderly, and the descriptions by the journalist photographers of how they’d heard the shots of the M16s as they’d walked away, right after taking the pictures. Knowing that you were looking at someone defenseless, in the last moments before their life was needlessly ended by Americans looking them right in their eyes, was disturbing. I don’t know whether there is an order to visit the exhibits, and I don’t know whether I followed it, as the museum is undergoing renovations. The last thing I saw, though, was the beginning of the US Declaration of Independence. After all the images I looked at, seeing that shook me up the most. The number of tourists smiling their way through the exhibits wasn’t far off.
Showing posts with label art. Show all posts
Showing posts with label art. Show all posts
Saturday, December 22, 2007
Tuesday, September 25, 2007
High wattage
Photoblog link
09/17/07
I found out that I could crash the IEA conference dinner that evening, so I spent the whole day keeping my eyes open for yellow clothing, the theme of the evening. Monday is yellow day in Thailand. The king was born on a Monday some 80 years back, so now every Monday a huge portion of Thais wear yellow clothing. The monarchy is one of the most loved institutions in the country, and hugely respected. Besides the crowds of people wearing yellow, the king's image was sold on amulets and icons right next to images of Buddhas. Religion is the other widely respected institution. Thai men are expected to become monks at least twice in their lives, usually once while children as 10-vow novices, then again maybe after school as full 227 vow monks. I don't really know what the vows entail, so that's probably worth looking into when I get back.
My first stop of the day was the Grand Palace, home of Wat Phra Kaew and the Emerald Buddha. The emerald Buddha isn't really emerald, just a dark jade, but it's still spectacular. The king no longer lives in the grand palace, but the Wat there is still his personal temple. Every season he changes the solid gold clothing on the Emerald Buddha as part of an elaborate ritual. Again, I don't know how to describe everything that I saw, so I'll let the pictures do most of that. I especially liked the juxtaposition of classical European architecture with traditional Thai design. There was one building that reminded me very much of Versailles with the wood and mirrors and chandeliers, but instead of fleur de lis on the wallpaper there were Buddhas.
I asked a lot of different people to take my pictures. The Chinese lady was surprised that I was talking to her in Mandarin, but the guy I asked in Spanish responded in English. Ah well.
I'm not sure where the tactile boundary is in a place like the Grand Palace. What part is simply a building, something you interact with and touch, and what's considered art? There are mosaics on most of the walls, and some parts were roped off. Does that imply the rest of the mosaics are fair game to handle? Maybe it doesn't matter here. Yesterday the Reclining Buddha's feet were well worn, and I have clear memories of people touching paintings at the 798 district in Beijing.
In one park near the palace I had corn forced into my hands by a couple of different people, the immediately transparent scheme being that I feed the pigeons and then they hit me up for cash. So I resisted for a while, actually tossing the unopened bag of corn back at one girl from 20 feet away so she couldn't hand it back. One pair of guys actually dumped the corn into my hand, saying, “Present. Happy new year.” I walked down the sidewalk without throwing the corn on the ground, being mobbed with pigeons. I eventually dropped the corn, and when they asked me for money I explained to them that since I didn't have anything they'd given me and I didn't want anything from them now they didn't have any leverage, and that they should strive to live by the mantra of 'get the money first'. I'm only exaggerating slightly, and and I'm certain I confused them. As I walked away I smiled, waved, and bade them a happy new year. I've been generally very friendly on this trip, smiling a lot, as the Thais do, but there's only so much haranguing I can take.
After the Grand Palace I tried to find the river and ferry dock to cross to the other side, but I kept getting turned around in the rabbit warren of markets that hugs the shore of the river. I spent a while wandering a market in a more open area selling everything from washing machines to underwear to herbal medicine to new tires for cars. What do they do with the washing machines when it's time to close for the night? I tried to find yellow clothing, but all of the ubiquitous yellow polo shirts with the king's seal seemed to be for women.
I finally found the ferry taking near Wat Rakhang, but when I got to the other side I promptly became lost again. Next trip like this I'm brining a damn compass. Wat Rakhang, when I found it, wasn't visually spectacular, but it was a 'working' wat, with monks' orange robes hanging to dry, locals making offerings, and a small school attached with classes in session.
My next stop was Wat Arun, the temple of the dawn, which has an 82m stupa that looks like something out of Angkor Wat. (Note: I later found out that it's a 'prang', not a stupa. Chedis and stupas are the typical Thai style. A prang is Khmer, and that's why this looked Cambodian to me- it's the same design as Angkor.) Up close to the tower you can see that it's covered in mosaic. There's a fair bit of Chinese porcelain built into the decoration. It turns out that Chinese merchants sailed ships to Siam loaded with broken porcelain as ballast. They dumped it here when they loaded up on whatever they were bringing home, and the porcelain was dragged out of the harbor by the Thais to incorporate into their temples.
After Wat Arun I crossed the river and took the express ferry all the way down the shore to where there's a dock below a skytrain station. I like how you get around in Bangkok- some combination of car/tuk-tuk/motorcycle taxi/bus, skytrain/subway, boat, and walking through alleys.
I got back to the hotel just in time to shower before racing over to the mall next to the hotel to find yellow ties for dad and me to wear to dinner. The meal was a western menu, which was disappointing, but the entertainment was MCed by what I imagine were typical Thai presenters, a guy and a girl who were, for lack of a better word, cute. There was live music and a dance troupe performing a sampling of traditional Thai dance. The 4 women had numerous costume changes. One of the girls, now wearing a tail, paired up with a guy in an ornate, stylize monkey costume (that looked a lot like a demon) to tell the story of a mermaid and a monkey falling in love.
09/17/07
I found out that I could crash the IEA conference dinner that evening, so I spent the whole day keeping my eyes open for yellow clothing, the theme of the evening. Monday is yellow day in Thailand. The king was born on a Monday some 80 years back, so now every Monday a huge portion of Thais wear yellow clothing. The monarchy is one of the most loved institutions in the country, and hugely respected. Besides the crowds of people wearing yellow, the king's image was sold on amulets and icons right next to images of Buddhas. Religion is the other widely respected institution. Thai men are expected to become monks at least twice in their lives, usually once while children as 10-vow novices, then again maybe after school as full 227 vow monks. I don't really know what the vows entail, so that's probably worth looking into when I get back.
My first stop of the day was the Grand Palace, home of Wat Phra Kaew and the Emerald Buddha. The emerald Buddha isn't really emerald, just a dark jade, but it's still spectacular. The king no longer lives in the grand palace, but the Wat there is still his personal temple. Every season he changes the solid gold clothing on the Emerald Buddha as part of an elaborate ritual. Again, I don't know how to describe everything that I saw, so I'll let the pictures do most of that. I especially liked the juxtaposition of classical European architecture with traditional Thai design. There was one building that reminded me very much of Versailles with the wood and mirrors and chandeliers, but instead of fleur de lis on the wallpaper there were Buddhas.
I asked a lot of different people to take my pictures. The Chinese lady was surprised that I was talking to her in Mandarin, but the guy I asked in Spanish responded in English. Ah well.
I'm not sure where the tactile boundary is in a place like the Grand Palace. What part is simply a building, something you interact with and touch, and what's considered art? There are mosaics on most of the walls, and some parts were roped off. Does that imply the rest of the mosaics are fair game to handle? Maybe it doesn't matter here. Yesterday the Reclining Buddha's feet were well worn, and I have clear memories of people touching paintings at the 798 district in Beijing.
In one park near the palace I had corn forced into my hands by a couple of different people, the immediately transparent scheme being that I feed the pigeons and then they hit me up for cash. So I resisted for a while, actually tossing the unopened bag of corn back at one girl from 20 feet away so she couldn't hand it back. One pair of guys actually dumped the corn into my hand, saying, “Present. Happy new year.” I walked down the sidewalk without throwing the corn on the ground, being mobbed with pigeons. I eventually dropped the corn, and when they asked me for money I explained to them that since I didn't have anything they'd given me and I didn't want anything from them now they didn't have any leverage, and that they should strive to live by the mantra of 'get the money first'. I'm only exaggerating slightly, and and I'm certain I confused them. As I walked away I smiled, waved, and bade them a happy new year. I've been generally very friendly on this trip, smiling a lot, as the Thais do, but there's only so much haranguing I can take.
After the Grand Palace I tried to find the river and ferry dock to cross to the other side, but I kept getting turned around in the rabbit warren of markets that hugs the shore of the river. I spent a while wandering a market in a more open area selling everything from washing machines to underwear to herbal medicine to new tires for cars. What do they do with the washing machines when it's time to close for the night? I tried to find yellow clothing, but all of the ubiquitous yellow polo shirts with the king's seal seemed to be for women.
I finally found the ferry taking near Wat Rakhang, but when I got to the other side I promptly became lost again. Next trip like this I'm brining a damn compass. Wat Rakhang, when I found it, wasn't visually spectacular, but it was a 'working' wat, with monks' orange robes hanging to dry, locals making offerings, and a small school attached with classes in session.
My next stop was Wat Arun, the temple of the dawn, which has an 82m stupa that looks like something out of Angkor Wat. (Note: I later found out that it's a 'prang', not a stupa. Chedis and stupas are the typical Thai style. A prang is Khmer, and that's why this looked Cambodian to me- it's the same design as Angkor.) Up close to the tower you can see that it's covered in mosaic. There's a fair bit of Chinese porcelain built into the decoration. It turns out that Chinese merchants sailed ships to Siam loaded with broken porcelain as ballast. They dumped it here when they loaded up on whatever they were bringing home, and the porcelain was dragged out of the harbor by the Thais to incorporate into their temples.
After Wat Arun I crossed the river and took the express ferry all the way down the shore to where there's a dock below a skytrain station. I like how you get around in Bangkok- some combination of car/tuk-tuk/motorcycle taxi/bus, skytrain/subway, boat, and walking through alleys.
I got back to the hotel just in time to shower before racing over to the mall next to the hotel to find yellow ties for dad and me to wear to dinner. The meal was a western menu, which was disappointing, but the entertainment was MCed by what I imagine were typical Thai presenters, a guy and a girl who were, for lack of a better word, cute. There was live music and a dance troupe performing a sampling of traditional Thai dance. The 4 women had numerous costume changes. One of the girls, now wearing a tail, paired up with a guy in an ornate, stylize monkey costume (that looked a lot like a demon) to tell the story of a mermaid and a monkey falling in love.
Tuesday, September 11, 2007
Saturday In the Park
09/07
I was absolutely determined to go out on Friday rather than watch more DVDs, but didn't really have firm plans with anyone, so I ended up sitting alone at the Rickshaw for a while. I chatted briefly with strangers, but I wasn't nearly as successful at insinuating myself into a group as I had been the previous week. I think I probably have to be more forward; relying on situations to present themselves is silly and boring. Later in the evening, Randy, formerly of Harvard, and his friends joined me. We all ran into another group we knew and decided to bar hop together. So I met some new people, some of whom I'm meeting tonight to play poker, and successfully avoided another movie night. I went home late and slept in.
09/08
When I woke up it was still way too early to just sit around in the apartment. Because it was unusually clear and sunny I decided to finally go check out some of the nearby parks. Chaoyang Park, the huge one across from my apartment, was sort of unimpressive, at least the parts I saw. I pretended I didn't hear the gate guard yelling after me as I biked past. I thought she wanted money, but it turns out bikes are banned. She didn't run after me, though, and it wasn't until I was on my way out that I figured out what she'd wanted. The Beijing Pop Festival was going on, so I stood on the opposite side of the lake and listened a bit, but I was eager to find something more scenic.
The next stop was Hong Lingjin (Red Scarf) Park, by way of an interesting street. One side of the road was crumbling and filthy. The stores all sold construction supplies: racks of steel piping, bags of concrete, wire, simple metal tricycles for transportation. This is your destination if you need to run a labor-intensive, low-tech, somewhat shoddy building project. The other side of the road has the Park Avenue apartments, gleaming new towers on manicured, gated grounds. I imagine the side of the building with views towards the park is substantially more expensive than the side overlooking the slums. I tried to take a picture to capture the contrast, but it didn't work very well. I ended up stitching 2 together using photoshop. Had I known how easy the stitching process was I would have taken the pictures with that in mind and gotten a much better shot. Next time. In fact, I think I'm going to try to get some skyline shots in Beijing using stitching, and maybe play around with making the seams invisible.
The park itself was surprisingly nice considering the 4th Ring Road, one of the 5 concentric highways in Beijing, cuts right through the park and over its lake. But the gardens were pleasant and the trees and the bridges were elegant and very much fit my China archetype. The park was also filled with art. There were steel sculptures illustrating Chinese legends, painted mobiles hanging from trees, huge rocks split in half revealing foot-long 'fossils' of insects, and even garbage cans shaped like- well, something anthropomorphic.
I've noticed is that there's no graffiti around town, at least not the spray painted kind. I don't know if they clean it up quickly, if a severe punishment deters artists and vandals, or whether it's just that I live around a snooty expat neighborhood and a neighborhood probably too poor to afford paint. There is, however, extensive use of spray stencils. The otherwise beautiful bridges in the park had at least 4 'No fishing' signs each, and the walls around the park repeated that message and others. I guess the extensive use of sprayed behavioral dictums are a vestige of the Cultural Revolution. If the spray-painted signs aren't enough there are plenty of more western sign boards. I particularly like the warning not to swim in the water translated into English; I can't imagine anyone from a western country even considering a dip in the green, soupy lake. The locals seem not to be bothered by the idea of eating the fish that they catch in brazen violation of the many signs. My view is that if the water's so green you can't see a millimeter below the surface there's probably too much nitrogen in it, and one has to wonder, especially in a city of 17 million, what exactly happens to the nitrogen from human waste?
Here are the pictures from the park. You have to scroll down, I'm afraid, because iWeb messes up my old links if I put the new pictures on top and it doesn't let me use HTML anchors to send you to the bottom. It's lame, and I'll try to figure out a workaround soon. (Edit: I sort of fixed it. Still gimpy, but it'll work for now.)
I was absolutely determined to go out on Friday rather than watch more DVDs, but didn't really have firm plans with anyone, so I ended up sitting alone at the Rickshaw for a while. I chatted briefly with strangers, but I wasn't nearly as successful at insinuating myself into a group as I had been the previous week. I think I probably have to be more forward; relying on situations to present themselves is silly and boring. Later in the evening, Randy, formerly of Harvard, and his friends joined me. We all ran into another group we knew and decided to bar hop together. So I met some new people, some of whom I'm meeting tonight to play poker, and successfully avoided another movie night. I went home late and slept in.
09/08
When I woke up it was still way too early to just sit around in the apartment. Because it was unusually clear and sunny I decided to finally go check out some of the nearby parks. Chaoyang Park, the huge one across from my apartment, was sort of unimpressive, at least the parts I saw. I pretended I didn't hear the gate guard yelling after me as I biked past. I thought she wanted money, but it turns out bikes are banned. She didn't run after me, though, and it wasn't until I was on my way out that I figured out what she'd wanted. The Beijing Pop Festival was going on, so I stood on the opposite side of the lake and listened a bit, but I was eager to find something more scenic.
The next stop was Hong Lingjin (Red Scarf) Park, by way of an interesting street. One side of the road was crumbling and filthy. The stores all sold construction supplies: racks of steel piping, bags of concrete, wire, simple metal tricycles for transportation. This is your destination if you need to run a labor-intensive, low-tech, somewhat shoddy building project. The other side of the road has the Park Avenue apartments, gleaming new towers on manicured, gated grounds. I imagine the side of the building with views towards the park is substantially more expensive than the side overlooking the slums. I tried to take a picture to capture the contrast, but it didn't work very well. I ended up stitching 2 together using photoshop. Had I known how easy the stitching process was I would have taken the pictures with that in mind and gotten a much better shot. Next time. In fact, I think I'm going to try to get some skyline shots in Beijing using stitching, and maybe play around with making the seams invisible.
The park itself was surprisingly nice considering the 4th Ring Road, one of the 5 concentric highways in Beijing, cuts right through the park and over its lake. But the gardens were pleasant and the trees and the bridges were elegant and very much fit my China archetype. The park was also filled with art. There were steel sculptures illustrating Chinese legends, painted mobiles hanging from trees, huge rocks split in half revealing foot-long 'fossils' of insects, and even garbage cans shaped like- well, something anthropomorphic.
I've noticed is that there's no graffiti around town, at least not the spray painted kind. I don't know if they clean it up quickly, if a severe punishment deters artists and vandals, or whether it's just that I live around a snooty expat neighborhood and a neighborhood probably too poor to afford paint. There is, however, extensive use of spray stencils. The otherwise beautiful bridges in the park had at least 4 'No fishing' signs each, and the walls around the park repeated that message and others. I guess the extensive use of sprayed behavioral dictums are a vestige of the Cultural Revolution. If the spray-painted signs aren't enough there are plenty of more western sign boards. I particularly like the warning not to swim in the water translated into English; I can't imagine anyone from a western country even considering a dip in the green, soupy lake. The locals seem not to be bothered by the idea of eating the fish that they catch in brazen violation of the many signs. My view is that if the water's so green you can't see a millimeter below the surface there's probably too much nitrogen in it, and one has to wonder, especially in a city of 17 million, what exactly happens to the nitrogen from human waste?
Here are the pictures from the park. You have to scroll down, I'm afraid, because iWeb messes up my old links if I put the new pictures on top and it doesn't let me use HTML anchors to send you to the bottom. It's lame, and I'll try to figure out a workaround soon. (Edit: I sort of fixed it. Still gimpy, but it'll work for now.)
Saturday, September 8, 2007
Lost In Translation - A movie about a boy and his dog.
I was going through some of my flatmate's pirated DVDs and found some gems.
On the back of Munich they've included DVD extras for Skeleton Key, which I'd never heard of.
The Chinese synopsis of Cinderella Man is accurate, but the English is taken off of a review by some random movie goer
On the back of Munich they've included DVD extras for Skeleton Key, which I'd never heard of.
The Chinese synopsis of Cinderella Man is accurate, but the English is taken off of a review by some random movie goer
Monday, July 30, 2007
Meditation, movies, and meandering. Ok, so meandering's a stretch.
This weekend was quiet.
7/26
On Thursday I went out to dinner with Fan Xie (Bobby, my flatmate, but I think Bobby is a silly name and am going to try to stop using it) and a couple of his friends. The friends showed up at our apartment before he did, by about 45 minutes, and we couldn't reach Fan on his cell. So I met these people, a husband and wife that arrived separately, and chatted for a while. The husband works in advertisement directing TV spots and the wife does PR. As far as I can tell they're the classic upwardly-mobile young Beijingers. They drive a car (Nissan Bluebird) and 'own' a house (which I think means that they have a 99 year lease from the Chinese government, which is as close as you can get here), they're educated and in their mid-20s, and they seem pretty liberal. We went out to eat at a hot pot place nearby, then to meet a couple of their other friends at the Black Sun near my house. The evening was good, despite my $3 bottle of Guinness that was mostly disappointing. It was my first night out with all Chinese speakers, so I struggled to keep up with the language, often failing. I need to be doing a lot more of that or I'm never going to get any good.
7/27
After work I went to yoga and watched DVDs. It was a pretty quiet night. I accomplished my goal of going to yoga 5 times this week.
7/28
Pictures of today's wanderings, plus last week at Panjiayuan. I also started 2 new albums, one for random photos I take and the other documenting Beijing construction. I'll try to keep adding to them.
Workers started tearing down a wall right outside my window at about 7AM. I managed to stay in bed until about 12, but I'm sure those hours of sleep were completely unproductive, as every few minutes they'd start cutting through some rebar or sledge-hammering something solid and my whole bed would shake.
It had rained heavily the night before and the sky was a little bit clearer than normal, so I decided to go sightseeing. Because things close pretty early I booked it out the door as soon as I could. I took a couple of buses over to Dongcheng and my first stop, the Drum Tower and the Bell Tower (Gulou and Zhonglou). They're maybe 50m tall, and in the past were used to tell time. While I was there the guys in the Drum Tower played the drums to mark the hour, but other than the fact that they're cool old buildings with decent views of the hutong area around them there wasn't much to see.
After the towers I got porridge and pot stickers at a small restaurant nearby. I didn't realize how close the towers were to another place I'd been already. Mentally linking these different, distinct areas I'd visited was neat; I like it when cities start to click into place. I walked to the next place I was going to visit, on the way passing Mao Livehouse. I'd never heard of it, but the exterior was rusty bolts and sheet metal and white stenciled writing, so I noted the name and looked it up when I got home. It turns out it's a new bar/music venue that's well regarded. They're doing a Ramones tribute on Friday by local bands that I think I'll try to go to.
My next stop was going to be the Lama Temple, but they closed soon and they wouldn't give me a student discount, so I walked across the street to the Imperial College (Guozijian) and its attached Confucian temple (Kong Miao). The Imperial College was China's premier university for about 600 years, and is where the emperor would give an annual address to the elites on Confucian values. The Confucian temple houses a forest of 190 stela on which are carved the 13 classics of Confucianism. The main hall was closed for construction, which doesn't surprise me.
When the tourist sites closed I found a bus that took me straight home from the Imperial College. I was going to try to meet up with Scot and Catlin, but the logistics didn't work out and I ended up hanging out and watching more movies.
7/29
Reading, yoga, and movies. It was a relaxing weekend, but next week I'm going to a bar even if I have to go alone.
7/26
On Thursday I went out to dinner with Fan Xie (Bobby, my flatmate, but I think Bobby is a silly name and am going to try to stop using it) and a couple of his friends. The friends showed up at our apartment before he did, by about 45 minutes, and we couldn't reach Fan on his cell. So I met these people, a husband and wife that arrived separately, and chatted for a while. The husband works in advertisement directing TV spots and the wife does PR. As far as I can tell they're the classic upwardly-mobile young Beijingers. They drive a car (Nissan Bluebird) and 'own' a house (which I think means that they have a 99 year lease from the Chinese government, which is as close as you can get here), they're educated and in their mid-20s, and they seem pretty liberal. We went out to eat at a hot pot place nearby, then to meet a couple of their other friends at the Black Sun near my house. The evening was good, despite my $3 bottle of Guinness that was mostly disappointing. It was my first night out with all Chinese speakers, so I struggled to keep up with the language, often failing. I need to be doing a lot more of that or I'm never going to get any good.
7/27
After work I went to yoga and watched DVDs. It was a pretty quiet night. I accomplished my goal of going to yoga 5 times this week.
7/28
Pictures of today's wanderings, plus last week at Panjiayuan. I also started 2 new albums, one for random photos I take and the other documenting Beijing construction. I'll try to keep adding to them.
Workers started tearing down a wall right outside my window at about 7AM. I managed to stay in bed until about 12, but I'm sure those hours of sleep were completely unproductive, as every few minutes they'd start cutting through some rebar or sledge-hammering something solid and my whole bed would shake.
It had rained heavily the night before and the sky was a little bit clearer than normal, so I decided to go sightseeing. Because things close pretty early I booked it out the door as soon as I could. I took a couple of buses over to Dongcheng and my first stop, the Drum Tower and the Bell Tower (Gulou and Zhonglou). They're maybe 50m tall, and in the past were used to tell time. While I was there the guys in the Drum Tower played the drums to mark the hour, but other than the fact that they're cool old buildings with decent views of the hutong area around them there wasn't much to see.
After the towers I got porridge and pot stickers at a small restaurant nearby. I didn't realize how close the towers were to another place I'd been already. Mentally linking these different, distinct areas I'd visited was neat; I like it when cities start to click into place. I walked to the next place I was going to visit, on the way passing Mao Livehouse. I'd never heard of it, but the exterior was rusty bolts and sheet metal and white stenciled writing, so I noted the name and looked it up when I got home. It turns out it's a new bar/music venue that's well regarded. They're doing a Ramones tribute on Friday by local bands that I think I'll try to go to.
My next stop was going to be the Lama Temple, but they closed soon and they wouldn't give me a student discount, so I walked across the street to the Imperial College (Guozijian) and its attached Confucian temple (Kong Miao). The Imperial College was China's premier university for about 600 years, and is where the emperor would give an annual address to the elites on Confucian values. The Confucian temple houses a forest of 190 stela on which are carved the 13 classics of Confucianism. The main hall was closed for construction, which doesn't surprise me.
When the tourist sites closed I found a bus that took me straight home from the Imperial College. I was going to try to meet up with Scot and Catlin, but the logistics didn't work out and I ended up hanging out and watching more movies.
7/29
Reading, yoga, and movies. It was a relaxing weekend, but next week I'm going to a bar even if I have to go alone.
Wednesday, July 18, 2007
More about 798
(From an email to my brother. This is more here as a journal entry for me than for anyone else, but feel free to read about it)
Well, I'm not sure where the line to non-representational is. There was a gallery of one guy trying to paint the universe. They were brightly-colored splatter paintings and looked to me sort of like clouds with angels (sort of wispy shapes, not actual angel shapes) falling out of them. I didn't think they were particularly interesting.
The one installation piece I saw, besides this one gallery that had a bunch of props from a performance artist set up as a bedroom and such, sort of reminded me of the Dan Flavin exhibit at the LACMA. It was big, empty rooms with sort of metal arches of diminishing size (looks like mmmmm with the first peak tall and the last peak short) arranged in different ways. Some of them were really simple, like a pair of arches in the corner.
Well, I guess depending on what's included in 'installation pieces' there was some other stuff. There was a hole in the floor of one of the galleries, maybe a 6 foot square in one corner of the room, that was about 4 feet deep and had old, rusty metal tracks running in parallel. There were a couple of big mirrors set up to reflect each other and the tracks on the ground in geometrical patterns. The artist's exhibit was all about reflections, big Warholesque screens on lexan or some kind of plastic sheet. Somewhere in each piece there was a line drawn, and across that line was a reflection of the other side. Anyway, I thought that it was neat that the artist had seen the hole and incorporated it into the exhibit in a way that matched up with the pieces on the wall.
There were a TON of propaganda and Cultural Revolution era images. I expected a lot, but almost every exhibit was influenced by them. I'm going to try to go to an army surplus store soon to buy myself a new hat and a jacket. Only the construction workers wear them, I guess they either haven't become trendy here yet or the trend's already over.
Well, I'm not sure where the line to non-representational is. There was a gallery of one guy trying to paint the universe. They were brightly-colored splatter paintings and looked to me sort of like clouds with angels (sort of wispy shapes, not actual angel shapes) falling out of them. I didn't think they were particularly interesting.
The one installation piece I saw, besides this one gallery that had a bunch of props from a performance artist set up as a bedroom and such, sort of reminded me of the Dan Flavin exhibit at the LACMA. It was big, empty rooms with sort of metal arches of diminishing size (looks like mmmmm with the first peak tall and the last peak short) arranged in different ways. Some of them were really simple, like a pair of arches in the corner.
Well, I guess depending on what's included in 'installation pieces' there was some other stuff. There was a hole in the floor of one of the galleries, maybe a 6 foot square in one corner of the room, that was about 4 feet deep and had old, rusty metal tracks running in parallel. There were a couple of big mirrors set up to reflect each other and the tracks on the ground in geometrical patterns. The artist's exhibit was all about reflections, big Warholesque screens on lexan or some kind of plastic sheet. Somewhere in each piece there was a line drawn, and across that line was a reflection of the other side. Anyway, I thought that it was neat that the artist had seen the hole and incorporated it into the exhibit in a way that matched up with the pieces on the wall.
There were a TON of propaganda and Cultural Revolution era images. I expected a lot, but almost every exhibit was influenced by them. I'm going to try to go to an army surplus store soon to buy myself a new hat and a jacket. Only the construction workers wear them, I guess they either haven't become trendy here yet or the trend's already over.
Tuesday, July 17, 2007
Beijing: city of art, restaurants, and copycat bars
7/13
After work I went to a restaurant called Pure Lotus with Matt, Ru Shen, and Spring. This place is run by Buddhist Monks, and is pretty much out of control. There's no meat or alcohol on the menu, which mainly consists of items like "Red crane perches next to pond". Presentation and service are a big deal; the experience is supposed to be tranquil and encourage meditation. Some of the serving bowls are carved out of big chunks of wood, and our chopsticks seemed to be made by hand out of bamboo. The food was excellent. We got seaweed wrapped rolls of walnut, cucumber, mango, and sauce which combined to produce a vaguely Japanese, but unique, flavor. We got a clay pot of tofu prepared in different ways to imitate meat. The pot was over a flame, and the food simmered in hot oils and spices at the table while we ate. There were steamed vegetables in a light sauce wrapped in lotus leaf, curry vegetables, radish and some unidentifiable cucumber-like vegetable, barley stuffed dumplings, pumpkin soup, pickled apples, lichee served over dry ice, and fruit/vegetable juice. We'd heard that this place was expensive, and as we ordered we avoided the highest-priced items, and we got out for about 75RMB each, or maybe $10. It was by far the most expensive meal I've had in China, but also the best. Anyone who comes to visit me is going to be used as an excuse to go back. Here are some pictures.
After dinner we went to the Black Sun bar, across the street from my apartment, to see some of Spring's friends play music, but it turns out that there are two different Black Sun bars in Beijing. "Where are you?" "Black Sun. You?" "Black Sun." "Wait, where?" So we went next door to Souks, which has a Middle Eastern theme. They have shisha pipes, like almost every bar in Beijing following what seems to be a new trend, but they fit in here. We chatted with a random guy from MIT working on his PhD in economics at Tsinghua, and with the Reuter's reporters, who bought us a round of shots.
7/14
I went to the 798 art district on Saturday. It's a sort of neighborhood of art galleries all housed in an old munitions factory complex. The place has a dilapidated look, but they've been renovating some of the interiors to art-chic standards. One of the galleries still had the old, broken concrete floor covered in mud, though, so it's pretty varied. There's definitely no air conditioning, and the glass was shattered in some of skylight windows above the paintings in one gallery. I only made it to maybe 50% of the galleries, and they seem to rotate exhibits every month or so, so I'll have to keep going back.
There were a number of paintings I really liked.
There's a third, similar one I can't find copies of anywhere, but it's by a different artist. It's a fishtank on an ornate table, with aircraft carriers floating in it, a sub underwater, and one broken carrier that had sunken to the bottom. There was a squad of bombers flying overhead, bombing the table, fishtank, and the boats.
There were a lot of others in other styles that were good, but something about the real/toy military hardware in the living room appealed to me... I remember dragging my model battleships over the carpet at the Dayton Rd. house and building Lego armadas to duke it out.
This guy at the Pata gallery, Liu Chunhai, had some cool stuff. He's influenced a lot by old propaganda posters. I like the painting of the girl holding her jacket. She's wearing the communist uniform, but underneath it she's got a sort of bright hoodie with a tree, sort of a rebellion against conformity. When I read Wild Swans it struck me how significant some small bit of individuality, like brightly colored hair ties, was to young people growing up in a collectivist society, and this painting made me thing about that. The colors aren't very good on any of these online images, of course. I wish I had enough money to actually buy art... Some of this work is really neat, but I don't have $5k to drop on a big oil painting.
After work I went to a restaurant called Pure Lotus with Matt, Ru Shen, and Spring. This place is run by Buddhist Monks, and is pretty much out of control. There's no meat or alcohol on the menu, which mainly consists of items like "Red crane perches next to pond". Presentation and service are a big deal; the experience is supposed to be tranquil and encourage meditation. Some of the serving bowls are carved out of big chunks of wood, and our chopsticks seemed to be made by hand out of bamboo. The food was excellent. We got seaweed wrapped rolls of walnut, cucumber, mango, and sauce which combined to produce a vaguely Japanese, but unique, flavor. We got a clay pot of tofu prepared in different ways to imitate meat. The pot was over a flame, and the food simmered in hot oils and spices at the table while we ate. There were steamed vegetables in a light sauce wrapped in lotus leaf, curry vegetables, radish and some unidentifiable cucumber-like vegetable, barley stuffed dumplings, pumpkin soup, pickled apples, lichee served over dry ice, and fruit/vegetable juice. We'd heard that this place was expensive, and as we ordered we avoided the highest-priced items, and we got out for about 75RMB each, or maybe $10. It was by far the most expensive meal I've had in China, but also the best. Anyone who comes to visit me is going to be used as an excuse to go back. Here are some pictures.
After dinner we went to the Black Sun bar, across the street from my apartment, to see some of Spring's friends play music, but it turns out that there are two different Black Sun bars in Beijing. "Where are you?" "Black Sun. You?" "Black Sun." "Wait, where?" So we went next door to Souks, which has a Middle Eastern theme. They have shisha pipes, like almost every bar in Beijing following what seems to be a new trend, but they fit in here. We chatted with a random guy from MIT working on his PhD in economics at Tsinghua, and with the Reuter's reporters, who bought us a round of shots.
7/14
I went to the 798 art district on Saturday. It's a sort of neighborhood of art galleries all housed in an old munitions factory complex. The place has a dilapidated look, but they've been renovating some of the interiors to art-chic standards. One of the galleries still had the old, broken concrete floor covered in mud, though, so it's pretty varied. There's definitely no air conditioning, and the glass was shattered in some of skylight windows above the paintings in one gallery. I only made it to maybe 50% of the galleries, and they seem to rotate exhibits every month or so, so I'll have to keep going back.
There were a number of paintings I really liked.
There's a third, similar one I can't find copies of anywhere, but it's by a different artist. It's a fishtank on an ornate table, with aircraft carriers floating in it, a sub underwater, and one broken carrier that had sunken to the bottom. There was a squad of bombers flying overhead, bombing the table, fishtank, and the boats.
There were a lot of others in other styles that were good, but something about the real/toy military hardware in the living room appealed to me... I remember dragging my model battleships over the carpet at the Dayton Rd. house and building Lego armadas to duke it out.
This guy at the Pata gallery, Liu Chunhai, had some cool stuff. He's influenced a lot by old propaganda posters. I like the painting of the girl holding her jacket. She's wearing the communist uniform, but underneath it she's got a sort of bright hoodie with a tree, sort of a rebellion against conformity. When I read Wild Swans it struck me how significant some small bit of individuality, like brightly colored hair ties, was to young people growing up in a collectivist society, and this painting made me thing about that. The colors aren't very good on any of these online images, of course. I wish I had enough money to actually buy art... Some of this work is really neat, but I don't have $5k to drop on a big oil painting.
Monday, June 25, 2007
Under the bridge
I'm in LA now. My brother and I have been wandering around town for the past couple of days.
6/21
On Thursday night when I arrived we got sushi in Little Tokyo and walked around the civic center district. The area is apparently undergoing a rebirth, and the best evidence of that I saw was the heavy LAPD presence and some shiny new buildings like the Disney theater. A lot of the old hotels have been gutted and are being remodeled as apartments, and money seems to be pouring in. I had my new camera shipped to Mike's place, so I was playing with it as we walked. Most of the pictures didn't turn out very well (I hadn't figured out to change the ISO settings to shoot at night), but it was fun. When we went back to his place, we passed over the LA river and saw a rubble sorting facility. The air inside was filled with dust lit by flood lights, and pieces of heavy machinery were plucking tattered bits of plastic and broken stone from a big pile and moving them to smaller ones. There were people standing along a conveyor belt sorting things by hand. They also had guys spraying misters over the heaps to try to control the dust, and these huge sheets were dangling from the ceiling, supposedly to keep some of the floating particles contained. It was really surreal at first glance, so we walked back over after parking at Mikes (it was only 2 blocks away) and watched for a while.
6/22
On Friday I went for a run. Mike's apartment is in a warehouse in an industrial part of town (in case the heavy machinery didn't give it away), and for some reason I decided that running around the area was a good idea. Of course I went around noon, so the sun directly overhead meant everything was bleached and white and there was no shade to hide in. I knew that the temperature might be an issue, but when I left it was under 80 and I didn't really take relentless, brutal sunshine into account. Running around near a highway was new for me, and not very pleasant, but I'm glad I did it. I saw a lot of wholesalers and factories at work, loading trucks and operating machines and such. An awful lot of these buildings seem to be open to the street, so I peeked in as I went. I had mapped out my route online, but at some point 8th St. enters a giant factory complex with barbed wire and 'No Trespassing' signs. I want to know how big a company you have to be (or as my brother said, how long you have to have been there) before you get a portion of 8th street inside your facility. As far as I know the road resumes as normal when you leave the other side of their fence, but I didn't check it out.
After my run Mike and I went to lunch at a Vietnamese place that he knew of. The food was good and the noodles were cold, which was perfect in the heat. We ate outside (actually cooler than the inside), and the neighbor's cat spent the meal trying to climb my leg and swat bits of food off of the table. It should have been annoying, but the cat seemed smart and was very pretty, so it got away with being a sort of charming nuisance. There were also these guys in purple shirts who I'd started to notice during my run. They're some sort of public safety types, maybe city-funded rent-a-cops or something. They're unarmed, but they have radios and badges and ride around on bikes. I assume their job is to tell the Skid Row types to move along. Anyway, I had mentioned them to my brother, who didn't know what their job was, and then over lunch we saw a lanky white guy in full pimp regalia getting right up in one's face and yelling, "Fuck you!" repeatedly and with varying inflection. He ran off after shouting a few times. Then, later in the meal, a guy walking down the sidewalk carrying some sort of protest sign with only the words "Skid Row" visible yelled something about the "God damned purple-shirted pixies". Thankless job, I guess. There were two guys sitting at the table next to us. At one point I overheard one say, "So, have you read the script yet?" Only in LA, people.
When we finished lunch and got back to where we'd parked the car it was gone. A street sign, which of course we hadn't seen, prohibited parking from 3-7. My brother wanted to walk home and deal with it from there, but I convinced him to wander around to try to find the tow company's number on a sign. We didn't find it, and he went into a store to ask if they knew. The lady didn't, but she wondered why we hadn't asked the parking enforcement car that was visible through the window around the corner, where we'd just come from. It hadn't been there a moment ago, of course, but Mike sprinted out to catch it. He got a card from them with a phone number, then his call led to an address, and we started hiking. It was maybe a 20 minute walk away, which wasn't too bad, but combined with the rest of my day outside I ended up with a sunburn. Retrieving the car meant Mike had to pay a $100 towing fee and a $50 'administration fee', or rather LA's cut of the spoils. To add to the injury there was a $70 ticket on the windshield. The funny thing is that we had almost parked in a lot across the street from the meter for a $4 flat rate, and by the time we had put an hour's worth of quarters in the meter at a quarter per 10 minutes we barely would have saved anything. I'm usually pretty obsessive about checking signs, and my brother says he's the same, but our being lax this time cost him a ton of money.
6/23
On Saturday we went to the Getty Museum and drove around Mulholland Drive. I don't have much to say about either, but not because they weren't really cool. The Getty is on a hill and feels very distant from the city around it and the highway below. The art was great and the museum grounds were lush and green. There was a nice breeze and the sound of the fountains made you feel like you were out by a stream somewhere. Mulholland was twisty and peppered with unfathomably big houses and expensive cars, but it was sort of hard to see in the dark. We ended up getting off of it accidently before we'd seen the best of the lights, so hopefully we'll go back.
6/21
On Thursday night when I arrived we got sushi in Little Tokyo and walked around the civic center district. The area is apparently undergoing a rebirth, and the best evidence of that I saw was the heavy LAPD presence and some shiny new buildings like the Disney theater. A lot of the old hotels have been gutted and are being remodeled as apartments, and money seems to be pouring in. I had my new camera shipped to Mike's place, so I was playing with it as we walked. Most of the pictures didn't turn out very well (I hadn't figured out to change the ISO settings to shoot at night), but it was fun. When we went back to his place, we passed over the LA river and saw a rubble sorting facility. The air inside was filled with dust lit by flood lights, and pieces of heavy machinery were plucking tattered bits of plastic and broken stone from a big pile and moving them to smaller ones. There were people standing along a conveyor belt sorting things by hand. They also had guys spraying misters over the heaps to try to control the dust, and these huge sheets were dangling from the ceiling, supposedly to keep some of the floating particles contained. It was really surreal at first glance, so we walked back over after parking at Mikes (it was only 2 blocks away) and watched for a while.
6/22
On Friday I went for a run. Mike's apartment is in a warehouse in an industrial part of town (in case the heavy machinery didn't give it away), and for some reason I decided that running around the area was a good idea. Of course I went around noon, so the sun directly overhead meant everything was bleached and white and there was no shade to hide in. I knew that the temperature might be an issue, but when I left it was under 80 and I didn't really take relentless, brutal sunshine into account. Running around near a highway was new for me, and not very pleasant, but I'm glad I did it. I saw a lot of wholesalers and factories at work, loading trucks and operating machines and such. An awful lot of these buildings seem to be open to the street, so I peeked in as I went. I had mapped out my route online, but at some point 8th St. enters a giant factory complex with barbed wire and 'No Trespassing' signs. I want to know how big a company you have to be (or as my brother said, how long you have to have been there) before you get a portion of 8th street inside your facility. As far as I know the road resumes as normal when you leave the other side of their fence, but I didn't check it out.
After my run Mike and I went to lunch at a Vietnamese place that he knew of. The food was good and the noodles were cold, which was perfect in the heat. We ate outside (actually cooler than the inside), and the neighbor's cat spent the meal trying to climb my leg and swat bits of food off of the table. It should have been annoying, but the cat seemed smart and was very pretty, so it got away with being a sort of charming nuisance. There were also these guys in purple shirts who I'd started to notice during my run. They're some sort of public safety types, maybe city-funded rent-a-cops or something. They're unarmed, but they have radios and badges and ride around on bikes. I assume their job is to tell the Skid Row types to move along. Anyway, I had mentioned them to my brother, who didn't know what their job was, and then over lunch we saw a lanky white guy in full pimp regalia getting right up in one's face and yelling, "Fuck you!" repeatedly and with varying inflection. He ran off after shouting a few times. Then, later in the meal, a guy walking down the sidewalk carrying some sort of protest sign with only the words "Skid Row" visible yelled something about the "God damned purple-shirted pixies". Thankless job, I guess. There were two guys sitting at the table next to us. At one point I overheard one say, "So, have you read the script yet?" Only in LA, people.
When we finished lunch and got back to where we'd parked the car it was gone. A street sign, which of course we hadn't seen, prohibited parking from 3-7. My brother wanted to walk home and deal with it from there, but I convinced him to wander around to try to find the tow company's number on a sign. We didn't find it, and he went into a store to ask if they knew. The lady didn't, but she wondered why we hadn't asked the parking enforcement car that was visible through the window around the corner, where we'd just come from. It hadn't been there a moment ago, of course, but Mike sprinted out to catch it. He got a card from them with a phone number, then his call led to an address, and we started hiking. It was maybe a 20 minute walk away, which wasn't too bad, but combined with the rest of my day outside I ended up with a sunburn. Retrieving the car meant Mike had to pay a $100 towing fee and a $50 'administration fee', or rather LA's cut of the spoils. To add to the injury there was a $70 ticket on the windshield. The funny thing is that we had almost parked in a lot across the street from the meter for a $4 flat rate, and by the time we had put an hour's worth of quarters in the meter at a quarter per 10 minutes we barely would have saved anything. I'm usually pretty obsessive about checking signs, and my brother says he's the same, but our being lax this time cost him a ton of money.
6/23
On Saturday we went to the Getty Museum and drove around Mulholland Drive. I don't have much to say about either, but not because they weren't really cool. The Getty is on a hill and feels very distant from the city around it and the highway below. The art was great and the museum grounds were lush and green. There was a nice breeze and the sound of the fountains made you feel like you were out by a stream somewhere. Mulholland was twisty and peppered with unfathomably big houses and expensive cars, but it was sort of hard to see in the dark. We ended up getting off of it accidently before we'd seen the best of the lights, so hopefully we'll go back.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)