Many of my tourist pictures have people in them, so of course I can't show them to you. Still, we did a lot of tourist stuff.

One of my favorite things was the Aquarium of the Pacific.

At the aquarium you can see and even touch all manner of aquatic creatures.

You don't want to touch jellyfish. They were very pretty, though, and mesmerizing in their movements.

This particular aquarium is famous for its sea dragons. It is I think the only place that has managed to breed the weedy sea dragon in captivity. They had excellent interpretation.

From the aquarium you take this roller coaster like bridge to The Pike, which used to be an amusement park and is now a mall.

There is a comment there on modern life, probably.

We went to the bookstore.

We saw Public Enemies, which was quite a good movie.

We visited Little Tokyo. There is an exhibition there about the internment camps. My hostess's mother and father got married in one of the camps in the state where I live, which furnished an odd point of connection.

We went shopping in Little Tokyo. We also went to a couple of bookstores and groceries, but I don't think those count as shopping. It was in Little Tokyo that we actually went into stores and marvelled at all the pretty things and bought stuff.

We went to Seal Beach, a very nice little town where you can get a one bedroom cottage for a million dollars. The sign here says "Seal Beach Mall." It adorned the Greek restaurant where we had lunch.

It was very wonderful to see and touch the ocean. I really miss the ocean.

We went to Hollywood, to Amoeba records. I think my sons would like this record store. #1 son should probably just go work there.

The main thing I intended to eat while in California was fruit. I live in a place with a shorter growing season, and much of the fruit here is brought in from elsewhere by truck, so of course it doesn't taste like fruit at all.

So I ate lots of fruit.

This particular dish of fruit was a white peach, a special Korean melon, and blueberries. The lady who served this to us also made a sort of tisane by boiling together sliced ginger root, a couple of cinnamon sticks, and a few dates. It was spicy and slightly sweet, and very delicious. She said it was comforting if you felt a bit delicate, and I believe her.

I also needed to eat fish while there, because again our fish where I live isn't fresh and doesn't taste the way fish is supposed to taste, unless of course it is a catfish.

Catfish are not salmon and mahi mahi.
 
The third essential item was pastry.

We have a couple of perfectly good bakeries and I can even make pastry myself, so you're thinking  that I really had no excuse for eating pastry, and this may be true.

Nonetheless, we went to this little Italian bakery and stood in a long line as people chose their prosciutto and sardines and whatnot.

There were many interesting groceries there, many of which I couldn't identify at all. Among the things I recognized were many, many types of pasta, tomatoes in many forms, and lots of sweets.

We got a bunch of little cakes, plus pine nut cookies. It was at this point that I learned that the people we were feeding mostly couldn't eat gluten.
I don't think I've ever before met anyone who couldn't eat gluten, but they were everywhere in L.A. Either it's a fad, or such people flock together for comfort.

Anyway, here we were with five little cakes of varying kinds, and only two people eating wheat.

I had cut a good slice from the chocolate cake on the right and considered myself finished, but the others wanted to know what all the flavors were, so the other wheat-eater and I were forced, in the interests of vicarious cake-eating, to taste all the cakes.
You're sorry for us, right?

Anyway, they were good and it was a shame that they were mostly thrown away at the end of the evening.

The other thing in the picture is rice pasta with tomatoes, basil, and shrimp. 

On another evening we had Moscow ham, a pepper and garlic infused sort of ham, piroshkis with potato and meat fillings, chicken wings marinated in lemon juice and garlic, and various salads and vegetables and things.

In addition to the home cooking, we also went to a lot of restaurants: Greek, Cuban, Basque, seafood, and others that didn't have any clear labels.

This is because we were on vacation.

  We went to the Cuban restaurant after stopping by the offices of one of my clients. He was quite a nice man, and I was glad to have the opportunity to meet him. The restaurant was quit near his office, which was also quite near my hostess's house.

There I had a medianoche sandwich, which is roast pork, ham, and cheese on a special sort of bread. They served it with fresh plantain chips. My hostess had a chicken salad, and potato balls, and also got an empanada, which she can't eat because of the whole gluten thing, so I also participated in vicarious empanada eating.

We followed this lunch with mousse torte for me and custard for her.

I don't think you can see that the mousse -- the striped one -- is decorated with a sugar-dusted raspberry and a triangle of white chocolate with multicolored stripes.

I ate very well while I was on vacation. Since my return I haven't been cooking much, frankly. I had the bookkeeper in yesterday and met with The Computer Guy and today I have a client coming by, so I have to clean the house, and I also have about 4,000 words to write, so I think I will put dinner in the slow-cooker. I did go to the grocery and buy produce, inferior trucked-in produce though it was. The guys ate mostly just meat while I was gone: a plate of ribs or a plate of chicken, with perhaps some rice. I'm tempted to go down to the farmers market this morning, though I really have too much work to do.

Yesterday I went walking with Janalisa and also went to choir, so I'm pretty well back to normal life. I fully intend to work from 8:00 to 5:00 today, with a break for lunch. There should also be a break for the gym in there, but at the moment it looks like a walk at 5:00, and perhaps I'll take the dogs.

During my trip, I enjoyed the architecture very much.

You have to have the Seven Dwarves as caryatids, right? This is the Disney building.

Even leaving the Disney buildings aside, the buildings were brighter and more whimsical than what you find here where I live.

There are lots of cute little bitty stucco houses painted pink and blue and peach.

There are large buildings in curious shapes. People don't feel constrained to make their houses with roofs designed for snow or to use right angles or to limit surface decoration.

A lot of the buildings look like cakes.

This is also at Disney. I hope you can see the art deco bubbles on the wall.

This isn't Disneyland or anything. The closest we got to Disneyland was when we were visiting my hostess's parents and there was a loud sound like fireworks.

We speculated a bit on what it might be before realizing that it was nightly fireworks at Disneyland.

I'd been hearing great stories about life in Japan and in California during the '20s, so it was a bit funny that they'd forgotten all about something that presumably happens every night at the same time, but they are in their 80s.

Those pictures are from the Disney TV company. There is a guard there and people aren't really allowed to go in, but we asked permission to admire the buildings and the guard allowed us to do so. We were clearly harmless

The Los Angeles Film School is inthe midst of a bunch of interesting buildings.

There was a wall of water just outside of this picture. Water just rained down, and was probably recirculated.

Also outside of the picture was the Cinerama, a concrete geodesic dome showing movies all around. It has been incorporated into a larger building now, and we went in and had a drink, which is to say a glass of mixed fruit juices.

There were pictures of people who must have been famous on the walls.

The movies are the local industry, and just as people where I live are likely to be interested in the Walton's empire or chickens or sustainable business practices, the people there are interested in movies and celebrities. People kept telling me about some connection with people who were presumably famous, and I never did manage the right degree of enthusiasm. The newspapers also are all about the movies. Emmies, you know, and how various movie stars feel about various stuff.

We saw a movie being filmed, in fact, or perhaps just set up for filming. It involved trucks full of electronic stuff, crime scene tape, and port-a-potties.

My hostess told me that the studos pay well when they use your house for a movie, so be sure to accept any such offers that come your way.

A lot of the buildings are like blocks -- flat roofs, some rounded edges, bright colors.

They look very pretty all lined up together.

Also, since the plants don't die back in winter, you get some really lush flowers. Oleander, bouganvillea, even just roses climb all over the houses. There are fruit trees in people's yards, with lemons and peaches and figs just sitting there. I felt as though everyone ought to be making jam.

The residential areas ended up being very colorful and charming and retro. I really loved all the little cottages and bungaloes, including my hostess's house.

But there are also very modern buildings.

There's a lot of white and black and mirrors, and also lots of interesting shapes of buildings.

Many of the buildings in the city had curved walls and ornate piercings in their cement.

Even the concrete ones had colorful patterns sometimes, with checkerboard or even plaid walls and interesting windows.

In other parts of town, they had rolls of barbed wire at the tops of the fences, which gave those neighborhoods a less picturesque air.

But even in the less picturesque neighborhoods there were often very interesting buildings. The poorer neighborhoods had many of the same tiny bungaloes and cottages crammed together, their bright colors faded to sherbet shades.

And room for buildings like this nearly circular bakery.

This is an Armenian bakery, where they had piroshkis (not the right word in Armenian) and nice white bread twisted into interesting shapes.

My hostess can't eat wheat, and in fact several of the people who ate with us couldn't have gluten. So the bread was mostly just for me.

We'd buy a loaf of some nice bread at some nice little bakery, serve it for dinner for me and the one other person who could eat it, and then I'd make French toast out of it for breakfast on succeeding days.

So I spent a lot of my vacation admiring all the interesting buildings as we went around the town.

I 'm back from my visit to L.A.

The flight there was smooth enough, though my luggage stayed an extra night in Dallas.

Once there, every day included the freeway. This was not a surprise to me, of course, because the freeway is how you go places.

There were old freeways, which were not so bad because they don't have much of the kind of spatial experience that gives me trouble, and new freeways, which were bad for me, and also quite a bit of swooping around and weaving in and out of traffic, but overall it wasn't all that bad and also I survived.

The trip back was something else. We were late out of Burbank and had to race to the gate for the connecting flight to the local airport. Then we had two hours of delays culminating in the cancellation of the flight. My bag spent the night in Dallas on the way out and I spent the night in Dallas on the way in.

Since my bag had had that trouble, I decided to check it through on the way home and avoid all troubles, so I had no toothbrush or night gown or clean clothes for the next day.

I went on to the airport at 7:00 a.m. so I could take advantage of the free internet connection and get some work done before my 9:00 a.m. flight.

However, they changed the gate and departure time estimate every few minutes, so I ended up just getting major email responses taken care of and then following the pack of poor beleaguered travelers around the airport as they moved us around. Some gates had interent available and some did not. Also, I had by then sunk into dumb misery along with the rest of the group, as we all missed our meetings and were wasting the best part of the day in the airport.

  We finally left about two hours after we were supposed to, and I got home 24 hours after leaving California, which may be some kind of record.

I have added pictures of the Hilton where they put us up so you won't be too sorry for me. As you see, there was hot tea in the room, and Crabtree and Evelyn toiletries and cunningly arranged washcloths in the bathroom, and I was perfectly comfortable.

I'm glad to be home. I'll be posting the rest of the pictures in days to come.

Yesterday we went to a Basque family style restaurant and then to have tea with the new girlfriend of one of the band members. She made the tea by steeping sliced ginger, cinnamon sticks, and dates, no tea, but it was quite good. We had an interesting discussion of neurology and then returned to my hostess's place.

We spent a few hours lolling around reading, and then a couple more assorted musicians arrived and we played and sang some more.

Today I'm flying home. I'm worrying that the departure time I have written down might be in my home time zone, in which case I'll be a couple of hours late to the airport. Also that I'll suffer from jet lag and be terrible at my meeting tomorrow morning.

Yes, I have an 8:00 meeting tomorrow to discuss my student evaluations. That will be 6:00 California time, and I'll have to drive on the freeway in rush hour to get there. I may not be at my best.

However, I also know that unreasonable worrying is a feature of travel for me, so I'll be ignoring these worries.

I've got a bit of work to do, and then I'll pack. Not that I really unpacked. It'll be good to see my family again.

I did very little work yesterday, and we went to lunch in a sports bar. This is probably my least favorite kind of restaurant, because of the noise level, and it wasn't better in an exotic locale. However, we still had good conversation, and there was creme brulee with caramelized bananas, so that was a plus.

We revived ourselves after this experience with Kose lotion masks. I could get used to those. They are hard little disks like checkers which you saturate with lotion, whereupon they bloom into a mask with a brightening agent, whatever that may be. The nice Japanese woman who sold these things to us in Little Tokyo explained to us with gestures and a few words of English that these masks would instantly hydrate our complexions and remove age spots. "Hydrate," "brightening agent," and "age spots" were in this woman's English vocabulary. The rest was accomplished with gestures.

Thus, we had no idea how to use these things, and all the directions were printed in Japanese. We didn't let this bother us. I have no idea whether we used these things correctly or not, but we decided that the thing to do was to put them onto our faces, giggling because we looked extremely funny in them, and then lie down on sofas for ten minutes.

We then removed the masks and congratulated one another on how dewy and bright we looked. I think lying down for ten minutes was probably the main value of the things.

All over this town there are fans with water lines attached so that they create a mist you can walk through to cool off. This is very snazzy. The natives here are suffering from the heat, but I am from the subtropical South, so I'm finding it mild and pleasant.

So last night's performance at the Traditional Music Gathering, which took place outdoors, featured four suffering sweaty Angelenos and me. It went well, actually, and was a lot of fun.

We were preceded by an Irish band with a full-sized harp, very nice, and followed by a band of pre-teens who did very well. They had a ten-minute set of original tunes including the instant classic "Produce Aisle" ("Little girl, don't eat all the carrots in the produce aisle...") and received a standing ovation.

Today we have no plans at all, as far as I know. I may loll around and read.

During last night's rehearsal -- I think it was the Cajun waltz section of the evening -- my hostess's three dogs all decided to get up and bark. They've mostly been lying in the middle of the ciricle of musicians throughout rehearsals, but last night they were moved to join in. Or possibly just couldn't take any more. They had to be put outside.

Before the rehearsal, my hostess and I went to see Johnny Depp in Public Enemies. It was very well done. Good osundtrack, visually interesting, good story, good acting. It was very violent, and they couldn't resist doing a slow motion scene, possibly because there is a clause in the contract saying that all violent movies must have a slow-motion scene, but otherwise it was very good.

Before that, I finished up the latest draft for the chocolatier and analyzed everybody's stats and did the basic blogging for the day. Our performance is this evening, and tomorrow is my last day here. Monday is a day of travel.

I didn't write at all yesterday, but that's not because nothing happened on Wednesday. We went to the aquarium, I got a gig (subject to their getting the deal) from an ad agency in a bigger town in my own state, and I survived a lot of time on the freeway.

I have a lot of pictures from Wednesday which I'll share with you when I get home.

Yesterday I got a new set of assignments from The Computer Guy and we went into the Armenian neighborhood for provisions before rehearsal.

The Armenian market was full of packages we couldn't read. When you can't read things, you can respond to them just as art. Of course, you also can't tell what's in the package. I had a student once who bought a can of Crisco thinking that the picture of a pie on the can meant that there was a pie inside it, and I always bear this in mind in these cases.

However, I did buy tea. Czar Nikolas II tea, in fact. There were brands of tea commemorating the entire doomed Romanoff family. I also bought some cinnamon tea. I haven't tried either of these yet, but I'll let you know how they are.

There were bins of olives and of seeds, mysterious produce, and even more mysterious meats. Giant flatbreads called lavash and cakes prompting lots of lively discussion in what I suppose must have been Armenian. Then there'd be a box of Frosted Flakes just for balance. My hostess bought Moscow ham and we combined that with salad and her marinated chicken wings for dinner with the other musicians.

The music is coming together well.

I'm only working eight hours on most days, though yesterday I did ten. If here are no horrible consequences from doing this for a couple of weeks, I'll keep it up. I remember how I practically took two weeks off at Christmas and earned very little in January, and #2 son's tuition payments loom. Here, tuition is very low at state schools. I think #1 son would like it here, too. I've suggested to my hostess that I send him here to go to school. He could help out around the house and garden and generally make himself useful, honing his skills as a musician the while.

Yesterday I wrote newsletters and blog posts and then went and met one of my clients. I've been working for this guy for a couple of months, but have had a bit of ambivalence about whether I was really going to be able to help him much, or even wanted to work with him. In the even,t I really enjoyed meeting him.

He works in a production company building. The neighboring offices, he said, had people come in with hours of film, for a reality show for example, and they'd be there for six months editing the stuff, and then they'd be gone. He stays on.

He gave us T shirts and product samples, and we trotted off to lunch at a Cuban restaurant and bakery. I had a Medianoche sandwich and my hostess brought over empanadas aqnd potato balls to share, along with her salad, which I also nibbled on. She had tirimasu and I had three-chocolate mousse cake. The client had a frothy pink drink. It was pretty lavish.

My hostess and I went on to Little Tokyo, where I found souvenirs for the kids and birthday presents for #2 daughter, whose birthday we're celebrating next week. My hostess is Japanese-American but, like my own kids, doesn't speak the language of her immigrant heritage, so we both got to listen and look at things with complete incomprehension.

There were many interesting things: tiny dried crabs, which I nearly bought to take home to my husband, little molds to turn a hard-boiled egg into the shape of a rabbit, brightening masks in the beauty shops about which more anon, patchwork kimonos, silk threads, and toys which we really couldn't grasp.

We came back to my hostess's house for salad and rehearsal.

Today I have a lot of blogging to do.

I worked for eight hours yesterday and then shut down the computer in spite of ongoing small crises among clients and went to Seal Beach.

We began with a late lunch at a Greek restaurant, where we luxuriated on the patio, by a fountain, with platesful of lamb and vegetables. Then we strolled about like tourists, what with actually being tourists and all, and then went down to the water.

I miss the ocean even after all the years I've lived inland. I stood there breathing deeply and smiling and getting wet, sandy feet. It was lovely. We weren't prepared for swimming, but it was wonderful anyway.

Then we visited my hostess's parents and they told us many stories about being Japanese-American in the 1920s, a subject on which I know little. I got home to a message from The Computer Guy asking me to stay out of my website, since he has stuff to do in there. I blithely assured him that I'd get my blog done and be out early.

Not normally a problem, because I get up earlier than he does. However, it is two hours earlier here than it is there. So his 9:00 usual start time was my 7:00.

I got to bed around midnight and got up again at 5:30, which is not enough sleep. I am ignoring this fact. I got the blog done and got out, did a couple of newsletters and Twitter postings and some correspondence, and am now finishing up blog posts.

If I am able to work a mere eight hours a day this week without facing terrible consequences like not earning enough or having angry clients or anything, I may keep it up when I get home.

Today we're going to Little Tokyo and meeting a client and then we have a rehearsal this evening.