In Los Angeles, there's not nearly as big a focus on the CBD area as we have in, say, Melbourne. Sure, there are big 'ole office towers in the Downtown district which you wouldn't find anywhere else, but in LA, there are a lot of business district scattered around the place - Westwood, Century City, Universal City, Long Beach etc etc. That said, Downtown is still numero uno, and has, in recent years, improved siginificantly over the kinda questionable place it used to be. (it's stil questionable in some parts, but I managed to steer well clear of them in my travels).
After spending the morning chasing around to pick up my wallet (big shout out to Eric, the guy who found my wallet and reported it to the card company, btw), I managed to hop on a train (eventually - my impression of getting around LA are another blog entirely)
and headed downtown. passed by the ever impressive, Frank Gehry designed Disney Concert Hall (on the left there), and headed
to the rather good Museum of Contemporary Art. After a visit to the museum, I headed out to the famous 1920s Bradbury building (think of the last scenes of Blade Runner, in the darkened apartment building, that was filmed here, at right). After that, I mostly walked around and indulged in one of my favourite extracurricular activities -taking photos of tall buildings - there are a cople of particularly interesting skyscrapers downtown, and was to to be able to see them up close and in person (Incidentally, however, I found out that the Library Tower (Below) looks better the further away from it you get - standing at its base, its fairly generic, and not nearly as impressive as it appear from afar.
So, after a lot of walking and snapping photos, I made my way slowly back to the hostel for a nap (I can't even guess how many kilometers I've walked in the last couple of days), and then headed into the hostel lounge for the Saturday night, hawaiian themed luau party. Later in the evening, I also took a walk down to Hollywood and Highland, where there were a bunch of cars coming in from a big rally they're holding (the Gumball 3000 or something - I'm just jealous because their next stop is Pyongyang - what kind of a car rally gets to go to North Korea?!?!)
Anyway, that's about all from me today - for those of you interested in dozens of pictures of tall buildings, all of today's photos are up on Flickr. Hope your enjoying my reportage, look forward to hearing from y'all.
PS. the day after tomorrow is a transit day from me - heading from LA very early in the morning, and stopping for 1 night in a town halfway up the coast, San Luis Obispo - not sure when I'll be able
to blog tomorrow's adventures (I'm headed out to the Getty Museum), but I'll make sure I get to everything in the end.
Jono
2 comments:
GREAT photos Jono - back in your comfort zone of buildings!! The Bradbury building is amazing, but I was very sad to see how much in disrepair angel's flight is check out http://www.usc.edu/libraries/archives/la/historic/angels_flight.html for some great photos of it in its original form. What was with the bag of bananas? Anyway really enjoying reading about your adventures, and look forward to seeing your Getty photos.
Mum
not sure what was with the bag of bananas - it was just sitting next to the intersection - and there was no-one else around. I should've grabbed a snack!
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