First visitors

We had G and C come to stay with us for two nights, which was exciting, because they were our first ever visitors. Well, they had been in Australia and New Zealand for 6 months, and they had two days to kill - so we killed the days for them. (G and C both work at University of Previous Employment, and coincidentally, at the Aunt and Uncle of R, who is an old friend - and was best man at our wedding.) The Getty Centre is an impressive building (or series of buildings) and apparently has some impressive art - I've never seen it, as my job at the Getty Centre, as it is every time we go there, is to hang around outside with the twins, so that they don't go smashing any vases.
The first two pictures are of the Centre, taken from my vantage point of the grass, where the twins could run around with destroying anything, anyone, or each other. (The rest of the place is made of very hard, and somewhat slippery marble and limestone.)
My one complaint about the place is that it's very non-interactive, there are streams and fountains and gardens and stuff like that, and it's all very impressive, but you are supposed to wander around looking at it, and going "Ooh" and "Aaah" (like at a fireworks display). You are not supposed to interact with it. And two four year olds really, really want to interact with everything. But you are not supposed to climb, dip, dig, sprinkle, or anything else, so it's slightly hard work.
There was a metal sculpture on the way out, that seemed to ask to be touched. G was about to touch it, when a guard jumped out and said "Don't touch!" We asked him if that was his job - to stop people touching the sculpture, and apparently it was.
The other thing that the Getty has is impressive views. Picture number 3 is looking towards Santa Monica, Venice, Marina del Rey, and Westchester. If you click on the picture, it gets bigger, and you might be able to see the marina (about half way up, and 1/3 of the way across). The hill just above that is Westchester, which has the airport.

This picture is looking the other way, towards (I think) Hollywood, Beverly Hills, and the San Gabriel mountains beyond (I might be completely wrong about that).

After the Getty Centre, we went to look at the Gene Autry museum, which was recommended to G. We were a bit knackered and basically couldn't be bothered, but we tried to drive past it to have a look and thereby convince ourselves that it wasn't actually worth going in. It turned out to be really hard to get to, because just as you almost got to it, the road was closed, and made into a one way street - with lots of cars coming the other way.

Obviously there was something exciting going on, so we went to investigate. It turned out to be the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power Festival of Light. We followed the directions to Los Feliz Avenue (or Boulevard, or whatever, no one cares about that bit of street names). G and C were moderately excited about trying to translate Spanish street names - this one they liked because it didn't seem to make any sense - feliz means happy, but Los implies a plural, so it meant something like The Happy, or The Happies.

Anyway the LADWPFoL (I'm not typing that again) is kind of like Blackpool illuminations. Except American. I'm going to pinch some pictures of it from Flickr - you won't know I didn't take them, will you. (I really like Flickr for that - if you want better pictures than you took, of anywhere you've been, then you just type its name into Flickr, and you've got 'em.
So here they are:



This last one celebrates William Mulholland, who, it seems, wasn't a very nice chap. LA has enough water to keep everything green and nice, because of a massive aqueduct that he built (well, not personally) to nick all the water from a place called the Owens Valley - where they used to grow stuff - until all their water got nicked. When they got pissed off about this, Mulholland said he "half-regretted the demise of so many of the valley’s orchard trees, because now there were no longer enough trees to hang all the troublemakers who live there." He also built a dam to contain the water, which later collapsed and killed 450 people.