First day in L.A.

  Los Angeles, California, United States
Sunday, July 15, 2007

We finally made it to L.A.!! Seems kind of surreal since I never really thought this date would come, after 2 whole years of planning the trip and looking forward to it, and then with so many things in my hectic life to deal with to get to this point - ie. this week I worked 40 hours from Monday-Thursday at Earthsave in order to get things prepared for my absence, plus had a challenging school final assignment to complete for my Flash class, and then had to attend the last class last night! (and then come home and finish packing!) Didn't get any sleep at all last night as I was still getting stuff ready until 3:30am when Ben's friend Dean came to get me to drive us to the airport (which was really nice of him to do). Then we got to the airport just after 4am for a 7am flight, and ended up having 1 1/2 hours to wait until boarding! I completely and totally fell asleep for just over an hour on one of the benches at our gate's waiting area, and didn't want to get up when it was finally 6:30am. And I even slept on the plane, I was so tired - and that is a rare thing for me. The plane ride was only 3 hours long.

Upon our descent at the Los Angeles International Airport (LAX), we proceeded to Budget to rent a vehicle for our stay, which was totally a necessary thing to have, I realized after today! We got a mid-sized vehicle at a really good deal - about 1/2 the price as what other car companies were quoting us! And we brought along Ben's GPS navigator unit, which has already proven to also be a necessary accessory for this trip! (Even Budget is renting GPS's now to their customers, so luckily we already had one.)

We then checked into our hotel, near the airport, and both fell asleep from exhaustion for a few hours. My plan for the evening was to attend a John Williams concert at an impressive outdoor concert venue in Hollywood called the Hollywood Bowl. And this concert was actually John Williams, the great composer himself, conducting the Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra in playing his own music! I had only found out about this concert 2 days prior and tickets were already sold out for tonight, so I then did the next best thing and went on the L.A. Craigslist website, where I immediately found lots of postings for people selling their tickets at good prices (face value, as stipulated by Craigslist). But I quickly found that shortly after people would post that they had tickets for sale, they would get sold, so I got a lot of negative responses. I was determined though to get a pair of tickets for this probably once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, and so I spent the whole next time continuously refreshing the "John Williams" Craigslist page to be able to catch the new postings as soon as they went on. Anyways, after some trial and error, I finally got some tickets! And decent seats too! I had little idea really what the venue was going to look like, but could still surmise by the website seating chart diagram what sections of the "bowl" probably constituted as good tickets, and which ones didn't.

We were to meet the ticket seller to exchange tickets and money at 7:30pm at the Bowl, so I thought we'd go down to the area first to get something to eat and then proceed from there to the concert. I found one vegan restaurant, called "Truly", in Hollywood on Happycow.net and we headed there. Any restaurant that is an all-vegan restaurant is a haven for me (we only have a couple of these in Vancouver), so it was a delight to choose whatever I wanted from the place's extensive menu. What I ended up choosing though was not overly impressively, but it was good and healthy and did the job. Ben got a strawberry-pineapple smoothie and blueberry pancakes, while I ordered the Protein Salad (romaine, chickpeas, edamame, avocado, onions with tahini dressing) and Scrambled Tofu burger, which was basically scrambled tofu, which I love, formed into a patty shape and put inside a white hamburger bun with some lettuce on top.

Protein Salad at Truly

They had lots of other stuff on the menu to that I would have like to have tried: barbequed tofu, pad thai, and various glutenous/soy meats, to name a few. The food was super quick. My salad arrived about 2 minutes after ordering, and the burger about 1 minute after that!

So we got out of the restaurant ahead of schedule, and next thing was to drive down the road a few minutes - Hollywood Blvd. - to stop at a mall to park there for cheap, and then to walk up to the venue, which I was told was only a 10 minute walk away. Anyways, it took us 40 minutes to get to the mall, as the traffic on that street was horrendous and very, very slow moving. And then I found out from an "information" person at the mall that it was actually a 30 minute walk to the Bowl and that there was actually a shuttle bus leaving from the mall to there. So we got on the shuttle bus and made it to the Hollywood Bowl, all in good time.

Bowl a bit closer

The Hollywood Bowl venue was just fantastic, a really huge outdoor "venue" consisting of an outdoor "shell" (bowl) for the stage and then about 10,0000 seats, also outdoors, in front of the stage! And can you imagine that this event was sold out? Yes, there were approximately 10,000 seats each filled with a person. The seats were actually benches with the seating spaces numbered on them. The weather tonight was very pleasant and mild, about 21 degrees, but I wondered what happened there when a concert was scheduled and it was raining? Not fun. But to sit outside on a pleasant summer night and underneath the stars, watching some great live music being played, was a memorable, unregrettable experience. Even moreso wonderful was to be able to watch THE John Williams, in person, conducting the orchestra playing many beautifully done movie soundtrack pieces. The first half of the concert consisted of old film scores, such as Dr. Zhivago and Lawrence of Arabia, but the performance really got exciting in the second half when it was just John Williams music. They played multiple movements from each of Superman, Catch Me If You Can, Harry Potter, and Star Wars, and then even rewarded us with 3 encore pieces! (including movie from Memoirs of a Geisha, and Raiders of the Lost Ark) It was interesting to be able to see John Williams up close (courtesy of the large video screen right in front of us) and personal, to watch him lead the musicians, and to hear him deliver his delightful words of experience and greatness, pertaining to the music. I will never forget this worthwhile experience, and I am so glad I made the effort to get us there tonight!!

John

It's very late now and tomorrow is an early and busy day, so I will check out now and talk more tomorrow.