LA for the day

On Saturday I headed to LA for the day. The number of degrees of separation between me and the people I went with is too long to bother with. First we made our way to The Griffith Observatory which reopened somewhat recently after having been closed for a while. It is a bit small but had some interesting aspects. It has a small museum about space and astronomy. One of the parts of the museum is a periodic table setup so that there is a piece of each element in a case labeled by its symbol (hm, I wonder if they actually bothered with putting hydrogen in there or if they figured no one would know one clear gas from another). I found that exciting because I finally got to see what molybdenum looks like (when I went to SciTech at the Technion in high school my group's project was spectroscopy and every thing we looked at seemed to have molybdenum in it - I think there was some operator error going on there). Even though it was a cloudy day it was still a nice view of LA (if for some reason you want a clear view of the hollywood sign Griffith Park is the place to go). Since it was a cloudy day we did not stick around until night time to look through the telescope. I'd like to go back some time and look through the telescope, but it is from the 1930s or 40s so I'm not sure how impressive the view will be. There is also a planetarium there. I think the last time I went to a planetarium was in middle school and I was really impressed by the changes. I seem to remember the stars moving around and someone with a laser pointer trying to circle constellations (or maybe if it was really fancy it would put up outlines of them). At this one, there was a little of that, but a lot of it was computer animation telling a story of the history of astronomy and explaining the importance of further exploration. The guy doing the narration was a bit over the top (not every line should sound like it is the most important thing ever said), but overall I was very impressed. I was a little disappointed that the Leonard Nimoy event horizon theater was showing a video about the construction of the building, I was expecting something a bit more interesting based on the name (it was also funny when I commented on it and over the course of the conversation slowly realized that not everyone knows Leonard Nimoy by name, I am actually still a bit thrown off by that). It was cool though that their coffee shop is called the Cafe at the End of the Universe (One of the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy books is called the Restaurant at the End of the Universe, I also almost assumed people would get that, but I'm not quite that disconnected from society). Of all the things a young adult could do to show they are somewhat different than their parents I think that I wrapped it up by going to a museum and not even walking into the gift shop.

After the observatory we made our way to little Ethiopia for dinner (living in San Clemente, I'm so close to good, interesting food, and yet so far). We sat around a little table in an area made to look like a little hut. When they brought out the food it was all on a big platter in the middle and we were given a plate of bread. The idea is that you take some bread, pick up some food with it and eat it. For communal eating it actually makes a lot more sense than a fork since you don't reuse anything that you put in your mouth. This is somewhat similar to some Indian food, and the food looked similar too. Some of the flavors were the same, but some were quite different. The bread actually had a bit of a sponge look and a somewhat sour flavor. Overall I prefer Indian food, but it provided some interesting variety.

After dinner we headed to a free play at a theater school. I was expecting a bit more from a theater school in West Hollywood. The actors seemed to do a good job, but I definitely did not get whatever point they were trying to make and did not appreciate the amount of time spent by actors standing at the front of the stage giving a yelling monolog to the audience. Luckily there were a few amusing lines mixed in there.