Opa's Photo

Opa borrowed my camera to go and take some photos of Route 66. When he gave it back to me, this photo was on it. He isn't forthcoming with the story.

295 miles

295 miles
Originally uploaded by Beautiful Freaks

At least when we'd gone 295 miles on this road, we were almost where we wanted to be.

Great Los Angeles Walk

Los Angeles is known for a few things - one of them is cars. Lots of cars. Walking is rare in LA, because a complete dearth of any kind of planning has led to no centralization at all of anything, so you can't walk from anywhere you want to be to anywhere else you might want to be. And public transport is fairly poor - if you're lucky, there's a bus that goes from where you are to where you want to go. If you're really lucky, there's a subway. I've never been on the subway. Again, it's the fault of the sprawl, there aren't enough people in one place who are trying to get to another place to make it economic to build / run a decent public transport

So, Two years ago, someone called Mike decided to walk along Pico Boulevard. All the way along it. And the next year they decided to walk along Wilshire Boulevard. But they told some friends about it, who told some friends about it, and in the end about 100 people went, and they called it the Great Los Angeles Walk.

And this year they decided to walk along Santa Monica Boulevard. Except Santa Monica Boulevard is only 14 miles long, and that wasn't considered long enough, so they added a bit of Sunset Boulevard, and then a bit more so they could start at Union Station.

So Oma and I drove to Santa Monica, and then caught the bus to Union Station (although there's a subway stop a couple of miles from our house, this was actually quicker).

Susanne wanted to walk some of it, so we had to have a bizarre procedure where she would drive the car to me, I would then drive it forward a mile or two, and then walk back as fast as I could (to about a zillion comments that I was going the wrong way) so as to not violate the integrity of the walk. To preserve my integrity I then carried one of the boys as far as I could.

Daniel walked about three miles, and rode on my shoulders about another mile. He then burst into tears with exhaustion. Alex walked about the last mile with me, and then vomited.

Here's a bunch of people at the start (I was standing in the middle, so I couldn't get everyone, but there were an estimated couple of hundred.)



One advantage of walking is that you see all kinds of things you don't normally notice..






I think about 100 people took a photo of these next two:





Here is me and Opa, at the very end. Opa walked about the last mile, and a mile in the middle.

Granparent Visitation

Oma and Opa are visiting at the moment. Today, they have gone to see the spot where James Dean died, which is a non-descript junction, on a non-descript road, near a non-descript town. And it's not the place where he died any more, because they've moved the road.

Oh, and it's 190 miles away.

Anyway, I know you're all seeking an example of how exasperating it is to have them here, so here we go. Susanne sent them to pick up the boys from school. It's really (really) easy to get to the school from where we live. You walk out of the gate, and there's a school in front of you. But there's a fence, so you turn right, and walk until you reach the gap in the fence - i.e. the gate, and you wait for the boys to appear.

So, this is what they did. But also waiting at the gate was someone else - I think they worked there, but they might have been a mother. And they were African American. The fact that they weren't white is enough to worry the grandparents, but it's hardly surprising, given that 39% of the kids at the school are black (I don't know that off the top of my head, I just looked it up on greatschools.net, if you're interested 29% are white, 26% Hispanic, 9% Asian [which means East Asian, not South Asian, as it does in the UK) and 1% something else. )

In addition, one of the security guards in our complex is black, and female. (I make it sound like there are teams of security guards, there aren't, theirs one at a time). Therefore a black person waiting outside the school was probably some sort of security guard. This person said something to them. We don't know what, probably because they didn't understand, but Opa won't confess to not understanding anything in English - we have argued about both the meaning, and the pronunciation of English words. Whenever Opa finds a word he doesn't know, he displays shock and astonishment - and this happens pretty regularly; in a restaurant yesterday he displayed shock and astonishment that Susanne used the obscure word 'check' when she wanted to pay, rather than saying "Please I want to pay". Whatever it was that the non-white non-security guard said to them, frightened them and made them go away, so that when Susanne came to pick them up with the boys, she found the boys, but no grandparents.

After circling the block a couple of times, she found them by a different school gate.

But it's not all bad. Opa has finally acquired a credit card, and he is very proud of his move into late 20th century banking practice.

Pledging Allegiance

Yesterday was the Laterne Umzug in Santa Monica, which means 'Lantern Walk' - children walked around a Clover Park, carrying lanterns. I don't quite understand it, but it's a big thing in Germany, apparently. (You can see pictures on Flickr, if you want to get the gist. Not of our Laterne Umzug, but of Laterne Umzugs in general).

We bumped into Karin there, who was off to the Mar Vista Neighhborhood Council meeting, to talk about the joys of having a charter school in their neighborhood - for which she would be given two minutes. She was a little nervous, and so I said I'd go with her for moral support. She was very grateful for my altruistic gesture, which wasn't altruistic at all. I'm going to do a similar thing next month at Westchester Neighborhood Council, and had no idea what to say, or how it worked.

Anyway, I got there before her (I was on my bike, she had to go home first) in time for the Pledge of Allegiance. I'd never done the pledge of allegiance before, but I knew it was coming so I'd read about it on Wikipedia.

First, I wasn't sure if, as a foreigner, I was supposed to pledge allegiance - I mean, it wasn't strictly true. Given a war between the US and the UK, I guess I'd be on the UK's side (unless I was stuck in America, in which case I'd pledge allegiance to anything they wanted me to pledge allegiance to, rather than be stuck in Guantanamo Bay). I wondered if I should cross my fingers or something.

Second, although I knew the words (because, as I've said, I looked it up on Wikipedia) I didn't know that there was a rhythm to it, which everyone else knew. I imagined it would be a sort of drone, something like when we had to recite the Lord's Prayer at school. ('Cos of the separation of church and state, the boys don't learn things like the Lord's Prayer at school - which makes me worry about what will happen when they meet vampires). The rhythm goes kind of:

i PLEdge allEGiance to the flag [slight pause] of the UNIted states of AMERICA [pause] AND to the rePUBLIC for which it STANDS ....

So I didn't need to worry about crossing my fingers or anything, 'cos I was completely out of synch and just mumbled along.

I asked the boys about it this morning on the way to school, and they could recite it, and had the right rhythm. So, thankfully, it looks like they will be able to visit their father in PoW camp.