Los Angeles: Part One

I wasn't all that interested in visiting LA, but (1) I felt like I should since it's, what? the second biggest city in the country and (2) (and more importantly!) I know several people who live there and I wanted to meet them.

L.A. is the home of four guildmates (that I know of) who I not only got to meet, but I got to meet all at once, so we had a cozy little Novus Victus reunion.  (Is it a reunion if we've never met in real life before?)  Everyone was super nice, especially my hosts Augie and Chris (aka Xenjoza and Astyanaax).  Not to imply that Dave and Kris (aka Richardboone and Enchantertim) were not nice; just that they didn't have to put up with me for 4 days straight like the girls did!  :)

Chris, Dave, Augie, Kris & Gaby

When we weren't all brunching at The Abbey, a popular restaurant and bar in West Hollywood, the girls took turns entertaining me.  Sometimes just sitting around gabbing, sometimes giving me driving tours of Hollywood, Beverly Hills and the beaches, sometimes watching movies, or dining out.  Food wise, L.A. lived up to my expectations, which were high.  (I've now spent maybe 20 days total in California, and it has, by far, the best food anywhere in the U.S.  Even the salad bars at groceries are great, tasty and healthy.)

The Chinese Theater

And speaking of movies, I had a special treat courtesy of Chris, who is a press photographer.  (If you read People or InStyle or probably several other magazines, you've seen photos of the stars taken by Chris!)  She often gets free passes to movie screenings, so she took me along to see The Thing, which is -- depending on how technical and nerdy you want to get -- either a prequel to or a remake of John Carpenter's 1982 The Thing.  Sci fi horror isn't one of my favorite movie genres.  There's usually too much unexplained silliness and not a lot of character or plot.  But for a movie of its type, the current The Thing is not a bad movie.  Go in expecting a lot of gore and some scares, and not much else, and you'll be satisfied.  Frankly, I think I'll remember the movie long past when I'd ordinarily remember it because I'll associate it with doing something very "Hollywood" and hanging out with Chris.

The quintet who brunched together also went to see the La Brea Tar Pits, which are big pools of, well, tar just sitting in the middle of L.A.  They have a lot of ice age fossils in them, and at least one pool was under excavation when we stopped in.  They were much less exciting than I was expecting.  Although now that I think about it, I'm not sure why I expected a bunch of black pools to be exciting.

Not real mammoths.

An excavated pool.  Look just below the patch of sunlight, you'll see the bones of some extinct animal.