Since we finished finals early, my friend and I had planned to spend our day visiting the Getty Museum and the beach at Santa Monica. We were woken up a little before ten because someone had forgotten his wallet in the dorms and was already at the airport. So I got together my stuff for the day and we rushed to the airport. Let me tell you, everything you've heard about LA traffic is not exaggerated. The freeways at ten looked like the four o' clock rush hour of the highways around Boulder. Unfortunately, we were too late to catch him as much as we tried, but luckily he was able to get through security without his wallet and boarded the plane. So there we were, sitting at the LAX airport with someone else's wallet. As much as it felt like failure, we didn't let that dampen the day we had ahead of us.
The weather was chilly and cloudy so we decided on skipping the beach.I plugged the Getty address into my iPhone and we started driving.We had looked up the general location of the Getty the night before, and after about 20 minutes, the directions started seeming wrong. Checking out the map again, I realized that we were driving to the wrong Getty. Turns out there is more than one. Trying to find our way to the Getty Museum, the one we wanted, we found ourselves in Beverly Hills, the very affluent part of LA. It looked nice so we parked to walk around. What first caught my eye was this magnificent tree. It looked like the mother tree from Avatar where all the blue creatures slept, and I just wanted to climb the tree. But my better judgement told me to keep walking, and we came to Rodeo Drive (the street with lots of stores):
I don't know much about cars, but from the number of people standing around this Bugatti, anyone could tell that it was uncommon.
The Getty is special in that it sits on top of a hill and overlooks LA and its surrounding cities.
There was a train that took people to and from their cars to the museum. The museum was super interesting but it was too cold to visit the garden they had. The exhibits consisted of various types of artwork and artifacts, taking visitors through the last few centuries of European culture. Here are some pictures:
It was nice to be off campus and have a change of scenery.The day was fun and somewhat spontaneous. LA is so close to Caltech I will definitely try and take advantage of it next term.
Over my nearly three years at Caltech, I’ve explored a lot of different study spots. Besides the obvious places like the library or my House library, I’ve also studied in the fourth floor of Lauritsen, the third floor of Linde, the Morgan library in Kerckhoff, the Dabney library, and more. Each locale has its upsides and downsides; the noise level, the comfy-ness of the chairs, the proximity to snacks and coffee. Through all my explorations, I’ve finally determined my perfect study spot: GTL 139.
A friendly desert community where the sun is hot, the mountains are beautiful, and mysterious sounds echo between our walls while we don’t even pretend to sleep.
Note: I’ll hyperlink some of the concepts I think are cool in this article, but generally, the topics I mention from classes should not be too difficult to research with some googling. I definitely encourage you to learn about these things on your own if they look interesting to you!
