Three Meals In Los Angeles

On July 23, 2017January 26, 2020 By StevenIn Domestic Travel2 Comments

Here’s the last of the Los Angeles pictures! This time, it’s all about the food.

On our first day, Wendy showed us a fantastic place in downtown Los Angeles called Grand Central Market. The Grand Central Market occupies the entire ground floor of the Homer Laughlin Building, at 317 South Broadway.

It’s a market-hall format, which means there’s a big open space in the building filled with all kinds of great little places to eat inside. I’ve been to stuff like this in other countries, but this was one of the larger and more interesting ones I’ve been to. The next three pictures give you an idea of what it looks like inside.

Next up in our tiny culinary tour of Los Angeles is the Original Pantry Cafe. We stumbled across this wonderful little diner while looking for a place to dine before Bob’s Burger’s Live.

The sign on the top says that the restaurant was opened in 1924, moved to the current location in 1960, and has been opened continually since it first opened. If true, that’s amazing.

There is a guestbook under glass, obviously reserved for famous guests. The page it was open to includes a number of names that I’m not familiar with, and Conan O’Brien.

While we were eating, Richard Masur came in with a small group. I was facing away from him, but Amelie spotted him right away.

This isn’t a great picture of the cashier cage, but I didn’t think to grab the picture until we were standing in front of it to pay. The Country Pantry has been cash only since it opened in 1924.

I didn’t know it was cash only until we were already seated, but the signage was clearly marked. They also didn’t give us menus- all the menu information was on wall signs, so we took it in stride. I think I slightly annoyed the waitress by not being aware of this before we sat down.

There were lots of old photographs on the walls, and Amelie pointed out that one of the waiters in the restaurant was clearly the same as the younger version of him in the black and white photographs on the right.

I dined on french toast and eggs, which is one of my favorite dishes. The french toast was amazing. I would definitely go back here, if I ever wound up in downtown Los Angeles again.

The third and final stop in our saunter through the comestibles of California is Pink’s, a hot dog restaurant that has been there for nearly eighty years.

This original location of Pink’s has been there since 1939. Until this visit, I thought it was the only one. Little did I realize that there are locations in Ohio, Hawaii, New York, and Las Vegas. Some are in amusement parks. A few are temporary locations in various California state fairs. One is in a hotel in Manila. There’s even a Pink’s location in the Miami Seaquarium!

Still, we wanted to go to the original one. In the middle of the afternoon, the line was manageable. From what I’ve heard, the line can get somewhat entertaining on a Friday or Saturday evening.

Many of the offerings are named after celebrities or movies. There’s a dog with onion rings called the Lord of the Rings that looked delicious.

I tried the New York Dog, which had sweet and saucy onions. Amelie tried the Chicago Polish Dog, which included mustard, relish, onions, tomatoes, and lettuce. I don’t have a picture of mine, but it was way messier than hers.

Before we left, we couldn’t resist the Pink’s photo-op!

What’s your favorite Los Angeles dining experience?

Madame Tussaud’s Hollywood

On July 18, 2017January 26, 2020 By StevenIn Domestic Travel2 Comments

Are you still with me? We only have two posts left from the Los Angeles trip, and these last two are pretty fun. Whenever I wind up in a Tussaud’s wax museum, hilarity ensues. With little commentary, I present many pictures of us goofing around with wax dummies:

Wendy and Joan Rivers.

Charlie Chaplin and me.

Wendy again and Marlene Dietrich.

Amelie and the amazing curtain dress of Vivien Leigh.

Amelie and Jimmy Stewart in Bedford Falls.

Me, trying not to die on Hitchcock’s “Psycho” set.

Amelie with Audrey Hepburn, having a breakfast of some sort.

Tom Hanks is like a box of chocolates.

Engage! Let’s go straight into that giant shimmery glowing part of space! What could go wrong?

My best MJ impression. Now I just need the one glove…

Amelie with Sarah Michelle Gellar as Buffy. Katniss in the background gets no love.

The eye of the Terminator was a camera, and this was the output.

The life-sized Master Chief was far less entertaining than Amelie’s facial expression here.

Wendy and Amelie both hangin’ with Barry.

This is an honest to goodness Donald Trump handprint.

Tony Stark does not abide bunny ears. But he’s wax, so there’s not much he can do about it.

Have you ever been to a Tussaud’s Wax Museum?

Hollywood and Vine

On July 10, 2017January 26, 2020 By StevenIn Domestic Travel1 Comment

This is the fourth of seven Los Angeles posts, so we’re halfway done! This is also the most touristy of all the posts, because everything in Hollywood is geared toward tourism.

Even the Metro station at Hollywood and Vine is kind of glitzy, with movie reels lining the ceiling, and old projectors and cameras on display.

Here’s a close-up of the movie reel ceiling.

During our walk around Hollywood, we ducked into a place for lunch and a cool drink. I cannot for the life of me remember the name of the restaurant, but this amazing photograph was just hanging out casually near the bathroom.

Before this trip, I always thought that the Walk of Fame with all the stars was in one concentrated section of Hollywood. Now that I’ve been there, I realize that it’s much bigger than that. The Walk of Fame stars are spread out over fifteen blocks of Hollywood Boulevard and a few blocks of Vine. There are more than 2,600 stars, and I took more than a hundred photos of individual stars. I’m only going to post two, though, because a few dozen of these would get old real fast.

Mickey was the first animated character to get a star, in 1978.

This was just a few days after the passing of Adam West, and people were stopping by his star to leave playing cards and flowers. ::sniff:: His star is a relatively recent addition, only being placed there in 2012. I was pleased to see that it was right next to Bob Kane‘s star, though.

We also saw this on our walk. The place is enormous. And terrifying.

The only thing better than this guy’s leggings are Wendy’s reaction to him.

This is when we started to get close to the major touristy stuff. You can see the peak of Grauman’s Chinese Theatre here. More on that further down this post.

I quite liked the Metro in LA. It went to most of the places we wanted to be. (Not La Brea, though. Alas.)

More tourism to scope out.

I was underneath the archway of the Dolby Theatre before I even knew it. The Dolby (formerly known as the Kodak Theatre) is where they host the Academy Awards, among other things. In the daytime in the middle of June, though, it’s just another big sign.

When you get a little closer to the Chinese Theatre, you can see the construction is actually very beautiful.

This is where the concrete hand and footprints are so famously imprinted. One of the first tiles we saw was this one, with the entire original Star Trek cast present.

I didn’t take pictures of too many of these, but I liked seeing Jimmy Stewart.

Mel Brooks, Christopher Nolan, Christopher Plummer, and Tim Burton, who I mistakenly read at first as “Tim Butt.”

The three leads of the Harry Potter film franchise, hanging out right near Clooney. And there was a giant panel off to the side with the cast of Twilight.

The staff of the Chinese Theatre sells a map to where each celebrity has made their mark, but if you ask nicely they will help you find a single tile. I was specifically looking for the Droids, and they kindly pointed me toward the front, where they made their mark along with a certain Sith-lord.

The last picture in this post was not from the same day as the Walk of Fame and the Chinese Theatre. This picture was taken on the same day as our visit to La Brea. On our way back, we had the Lyft driver pull over so that I could get a picture of the gates to the Jim Henson Company Lot.

This was originally built in 1917 by Charlie Chaplin. It was Charlie Chaplin Studios first, which is why the twelve-foot Kermit statue on the gate is dressed as The Tramp. The property was sold by Charlie in 1953, and it went through some other identities, including the filming location for The Adventures of Superman in the late 1950s and the headquarters of A&M Records in the 1990s. It was acquired by Jim Henson’s children in 2000 to be their new headquarters, and was even seen as the abandoned Muppet Studios in the 2011 Muppets movie.

You can’t really just visit the Jim Henson Company as a tourist, but I couldn’t resist taking a minute to stop and look at the front gate.

Who’s your favorite Muppet?

La Brea Tar Pits and Museum

On July 7, 2017January 26, 2020 By StevenIn Domestic Travel2 Comments

On the Saturday of our LA trip, Amelie and I headed from downtown Los Angeles over to La Brea, because we wanted to see the Tar Pits. This was one of the few places in our plans that public transportation wouldn’t easily reach, but a Lyft got us there easily. On the way in, we passed this amazing looking coffee shop- we never got the chance to check it out, but I researched it when I got back, and here’s what I learned:

This is Johnie’s Coffee Shop. It’s usually vacant, but it was named a historical landmark in November of 2013 by the LA City Council because it’s a perfect example of Googie style architecture from the 1950s. The current decorations are because the place served as a Bernie Sanders campaign headquarters for much of the 2016 election, and the Bernie themed decor was simply left in place. (I’m happy to see this, by the way, because I really dig Googie styled stuff.)

When we arrived at La Brea, our Lyft driver didn’t really know where the best place to drop us off was, so we wound up on the Los Angeles County Museum of Art side.

LACMA wasn’t our intended destination, but that didn’t stop us from goofing off near “Urban Light,” the lightpole column installation at the front.

A short walk past the LACMA doors got us to one of the entrances of the Tar Pits. The La Brea Tar Pits are a large open-air park with many different dig sites and individual pits visible. You can actually walk around much of the park without paying an admission fee- the fee is just for the indoor portions of the museum.

The structure in the previous photograph is the building surrounding the very first and oldest tarpit dig site. It has been reset to show what a typical pit might contain, and there are four or five distinct species of critter represented in the pile at the center.

Some of the pits are active sites, where they are setting up a grid to track where each fossil comes from. In this photo, there are about six species visible, with a tiny colored flag on each one. If you click to expand this photo, you can see a few of them.

Most of the pits at La Brea are fenced off and look more or less like a tarry swamp. In a labeling error that amuses me terribly, the black gooey substance in the La Brea tar pits isn’t actually tar- it’s natural asphalt.

Here’s a fun fact that I learned from Wikipedia: Since la brea can be translated from Spanish as the tar, the modern name “the La Brea Tar Pits” literally means “the the tar tar pits.”

In other news, I cannot resist hugging giant fiberglass sloths.

One of the most interesting things about the tar pits is that you can watch the tar bubbling up from beneath. It’s a constant process. In this photo, a bubble just came up and separated the tar into that round patch you see in the bottom third of the frame. There’s still tar underneath the bubble, though. I can see why so many animals got stuck in what would mostly look like a regular watering hole.

A recreation in the largest tar pit lake of a family of mammoth saying goodbye to one another. It’s historically fascinating, but it’s also really terribly sad.

After a walk through the park on a fairly hot day, we were both happy to see the museum portion of La Brea, because air conditioning.

The paleontologists inside are doing finely detailed work, sifting for bones and micro-fossils. During this part of the day, I could not stop myself from humming the Indiana Jones theme music, even though these are paleontologists, not archaeologists.

Zed’s Left Tusk is my new favorite name for my hypothetical 70s funk band.

A favorite interaction from the visit to La Brea was overheard as we were approaching this display of Dire Wolf skulls from the tar pits. A Game of Thrones fan, talking to her friend, was heard saying, “I didn’t know Dire Wolves were real!”

I’m pretty sure that this skeleton is what comes to mind when most people think of La Brea.

This guy is the giant sloth again. They look dangerous from the skeleton, but they were herbivorous and mostly wanted to have some food and a nap.

There’s a display in the museum with metal rods dipped in asphalt from the tar pits, to demonstrate how viscous the stuff really is.

It is not at all easy to move the rods up or down. Scary stuff.

Have you ever been to the La Brea Tar Pits?

Los Angeles 2: Electric Boogaloo

On July 5, 2017January 26, 2020 By StevenIn Domestic Travel1 Comment

While my first Los Angeles post was about Saturday night, most of what I’m including in this post took place on Friday. We had arrived on Thursday night, and after a bit of sleep, we were ready to go see Los Angeles like proper tourists.

This awesome little Starbucks had just opened next to the hotel, and after briefly caffeinating, we were ready to go see the city. (We sat on that deck once or twice, later in the weekend. It’s really very nice.)

We started out a little before lunch, and Amelie’s friend Wendy met us at the metro station closest to the hotel. We had a short list of things we wanted to see, so we set out on foot. Halfway to our first destination, I realized that we were in front of the Webhosting company I’ve been using since about 2003. Hi, Dreamhost!

We also walked right past The Bradbury Building, a lovely old built in 1893.

If this looks familiar to you, it’s probably because it’s used often in television, movies, literature, and even comics. The Bradbury is where Sebastian’s apartment was located in Blade Runner, and there’s a Blade Runner sign posted near the stairwell detailing the movie’s production at the Bradbury Building.

Later in the day, we went to City Hall to take advantage of the free observation deck on the 27th floor. I wish we had known that the night before this, they were shining the Bat Signal on City Hall in memory of the recently departed Adam West. I would have liked to have seen that. Our visit was mid-afternoon on Friday, so no Bat Signal.

Across the street from City Hall is a signpost showing all of the sister cities of Los Angeles.

Once we went inside the Main Street entrance to City Hall, we went through metal detectors and checked in with the security desk. First we took an express elevator to the 22nd floor, followed by another elevator to go up to 26. On our way up, we saw the Mayor’s office, which in no way tempted us to knock.

After the elevator to floor 26,there’s one flight of stairs up to the observation level. Inside, there’s a lectern set up, which leads to mugging for the camera, of course. The first two are Amelie and her friend Wendy, and the third is me doing my best Shatner. I’m not sure why podiums make me go full-Shat, but there it is.

Once we were done playing with the lectern, we went out to the observation part of the observation deck. While City Hall isn’t the tallest building in LA, the observation deck goes all the way around the building for 360 degree views of Los Angeles. You can even see all the wonderful LA traffic!

City Hall is just a block or two away from the Los Angeles Times, which gave us a pretty great view of that building.

This is the Walt Disney Concert Hall, a Frank Gehry building with a pretty interesting face.

Union Station is the main train station for Los Angeles. We walked through it when we first reached LA the night before, and it’s a very pretty station. It’s also much larger than I realized- the red roof here is all part of the station, along with the many tracks behind it.

Here’s part of the Los Angeles skyline, as seen from City Hall.

The Hollywood sign and Griffith Park observatory are both visible from City Hall, but it was kind of hazy so this was the best shot I got on Friday.

I took a few dozen photos from the observation deck, but mostly it just looks like rambling cityscape. Here’s a nice picture of tall LA buildings from sidewalk level.

During our walk on Friday, we also walked right past the Angel’s Flight funicular. It was originally opened in 1901 about a block away, and was moved to its current location in the mid-1990s. It’s been closed since 2013, but is currently being restored with some safety enhancements and should re-open later this year. I’m sad it wasn’t open- I love a good funicular.

This next picture was not taken on the same day- this was a different part of our visit, where we were at a Hollywood metro station which was closer to the Griffith Observatory. There’s a Dash bus line which runs between this metro station and the Observatory on a regular schedule. You can actually see the very top of the Dash bus in the bottom edge of this photo. Not pictured: A tiny Rocketeer taking off from the Observatory to fight a Nazi zeppelin.

You can always tell where you are in LA by the decorations in the Metro. Not sure you’re in the station closest to the Griffith Observatory? Just look for starfields in the station’s rafters.

The last picture in this post is not related to anything else in the photo- it’s just a Korean restaurant where we had dinner on Sunday night. We all thought the name of the place was pretty entertaining. The food was delicious, if a bit zippy for my tastes. I had Kimchi pancakes, and tried Soju, a clear Korean liquor that was similar to vodka. Tasty stuff.