When You've Got Worries All the Noise And The Hurry Seems to Help, I Know

That could win the prize for longest blog title so far. But how do you write a post about downtown without referencing Petula Clark? You don't. So I did.

First up, my apologies. The agency meeting yesterday (I think it went well, details soon if I'm right about that) has basically taken up all my free time as I made sure my scripts and pitches were as polished and impressive as could be. Plus, I've been super busy at my real job, so no time to throw up a quick post.

Anyway, two weekends ago, Melissa and I decided to hang out in downtown LA. I had served jury duty there and was surprised by how much I liked it. Join me on my tour, won't you?

We started out at the Civic Center/Music Center. This is where the Dorothy Chandler Pavilion, Mark Taper Forum, and Ahmanson Theatre (where we now have season tickets!) are located.

It was neat, but the real highlight was across the street- The Walt Disney Concert Hall.

As weird and cool as it looks on the outside, it's even neater on the inside. And they offer a free, self-guided audio tour narrated by John Lithgow!

You can see me being silly in that first one. That's what I do, I'm silly. One part of the tour leads you into the gardens upstairs. It's truly gorgeous, with some great views of the skyline.

(Melissa can be silly, too). After that, we stopped for lunch at Pastagina, a fast food place that has a patented machine that cooks individual pasta servings in 3 minutes. I want one! Of course, the free gelato offer helped draw us in.

At about that point, I got a little tired of taking my camera out everywhere. We went to the central library (it's the building with the pyramid top in the shot above from the gardens), which had a cool old movie poster section on display. Then I insisted we stop by Angel's Flight:

This funicular railroad was basically built so rich people wouldn't have to climb a hill to go shopping. When working (it's being refurbished), it claims to be the shortest operating railroad in the world. Pretty neat.

From there, we took a train to Union Station. I wish I'd had my camera out, because the central lobby/terminal really still looks like an old train station, the kind you only ever see in movies anymore. I felt like I was on Mad Men or something.

We walked back to the Civic Center area and went home for a bit before heading for the beach. My mom had asked for a picture of the ocean at sunset that she could have enlarged to hang above the fireplace, and this is a sampling of my shots:

We were far enough away from the Santa Monica Pier that it wasn't too crowded and a pod of dolphins (at least six) were playing about 50 feet off the shore. There were also a couple of sailboats not far off that I enjoyed shooting with my telephoto, but those were with my film camera and I haven't scanned them in yet. It was beautiful and peaceful, two things you can rarely say about LA.

I think that most people stop exploring LA not long after they move here (at least, that's the case with most people I know), and it's really a shame. The fact that I can go from the bustling skyscrapers of downtown to the beaches of the Pacific in a matter of minutes astounds me. I hope to find more time to explore soon. Until then,

Cheers,

Eli

p.s.- sorry if the font and formatting look weird here. Not sure what happened.