Be It Ever So Humble, I'm Glad to Be Home

[akirlu]

Back in Seattle, land of normal temperature ranges. Driving around LA sunshine in a red convertible was fun for a few days, but on the whole, I'd rather be in Kent.

And I am here to report that Southern California is right where I left it, only moreso. The creepy majesty of gray concrete freeway canyons, ten and twelve lanes wide, with their soaring, collonnaded overpasses, is made that much more striking by my years in Washington. Irvine, Aliso Viejo, and the rest of southern OC, are just as stepfordian as ever, with their deserted sidewalks, their inward facing neighborhoods hidden behind hobbit knolls, and their arterial streets wider than Washington highways -- three and four lanes in each direction, and posted for 55 mph. But now I do appreciate the alien-planet beauties of blooming jacarandas (purple trees!) and spidery Dr. Seuss eucalypts for their novelty and nostalgia, in addition to their plain old weirdness.

In four days we accomplished many things, but had to take a pass on rather more. I was especially disappointed with the outright rotten web ticket interface for the Getty villa. Tickets are free, because it's the Getty and they're loaded, but nonetheless absolutely required, so that the very limited parking doesn't get overloaded. Same day tickets can in theory be ordered from the website, e-mailed to you, and printed out for use. I particularly wanted to catch the villa because it closed in 1997 for refurbishing, and so I haven't been back in over a decade. Some of my favorite pieces in the Getty collection belong to the villa.

I tried to get tickets on Monday -- the only day we were at liberty when the villa was open -- only to find the Getty ticket purchasing page is made of fail. The interface would lock up over and over just at the point of e-mailing the bar-coded tickets. It would spout a bunch of internal error code and then stall. So I would wait until the screen unlocked, return to the ticketing page and try again. Rinse, lather, iterate. When I finally got it to the point where it claimed it had sent the tickets, they never showed up. After a lot of fiddling with "refresh", we finally gave up and went out to doodle around OC more generally instead. Four days letter, I still haven't gotten my tickets. I plan to send a stern letter to the Getty. On paper.

Comments

[cakmpls.livejournal.com]

Your second paragraph echoes much of my own feeling about Orange County, and is very nicely expressed.