San Pedro Fish Market for a late breakfast of a giant fish and mega tray of fajita-style potatoes, onions, and peppers sounded great to Caroline and me; maybe a little unorthodox for my mother-in-law, but she’s a good sport, and what could she do anyway as her home is nearly 6,000 miles away and she is traveling in our car.
Plus, how many times in our lives do we get to sit in a dining area where this is the view on a winter day?
The fish was picked clean aside from the eyeballs as for the veggies, we gave them our best try but were ultimately defeated.
Today’s view is courtesy of the incredible efforts to combat smog in the Los Angeles basin and California in general. Out in the middle of this photo is a sliver of blue between the dark land and a silver low horizon of the sky, that’s the Pacific Ocean. More than likely, just to the right and out of view is San Pedro, where we were having breakfast, which is about 30 miles away or probably a couple of hours by car on a weekday.
Here we are at the Griffith Park Observatory in the Hollywood Hills, and strangely enough, after visiting Los Angeles off and on over the past 21 years, this is the first time Caroline and I have made it up here. With this kind of visibility and weather, we couldn’t have picked a better day.
A Foucault Pendulum built back in 1935 is here, but I have to admit that I hope Caroline is willing to add something or other to the description of what exactly makes it a Foucault Pendulum. [In 1851, French physicist Leon Foucault used his pendulum to prove that the Earth rotates. His pendulum shows that when you have a really tall pendulum, it doesn’t just swing back and forth on the same plane, but the plane keeps shifting, and that is caused by the Earth’s rotation and what is called the Coriolis effect. Often, these pendulums are installed in science museums over a basin with flat sand so that the bob’s swings can be traced. – Caroline]
If you’ve never seen a Tesla Coil in operation, this is the place to witness it with your own eyes. When it was donated to the Observatory in 1937, there were a number of parts missing, but it was restored with the help of Kenneth Strickfaden, a Hollywood special FX artist who’d worked on the original Frankenstein with Boris Karloff, the Wizard of Oz, and his last film Young Frankenstein.
I don’t think I’m wrong about this educated guess, but that should be the San Gabriel Mountains in the distance, with Mt. Wilson being the highest peak.
Maybe a little redundant, considering I posted another photo above that included downtown Los Angeles, but I’m amazed by the view that I never knew growing up out here in the 70s.
Just hanging out, trying to walk off breakfast so we can grab an early dinner on the way back to Phoenix. Jutta was highly intrigued by the observatory since it is featured in the film “Rebel Without a Cause” with James Dean (whom she had a crush on back in the day).
Will I ever again have the opportunity to see the Hollywood sign with such clarity?
An empty plate is not the most compelling image. Heck, maybe none of the photos I share here are truly compelling, but I’m not posting to impress others; I’m posting to stoke the distant memories of those who experienced these days, that being Caroline and myself. From that one piece of oily green vegetable matter above the fork, I can be certain that this plate held a portion of Laphet Thoke, also known as Burmese fermented green tea salad. This place called Yoma Myanmar in Monterey Park was our food stop on our way home.