DAY TWENTY TWO

LOS ANGELES

TOTAL LOS ANGELES MILES: 230.5

We woke up this morning and drove back down Sunset Boulevard. We got onto Mulholland Drive the opposite way, to reach Mulholland Drive Park which offers a nice view of the Hollywood sign. I'm a little surprised at how the roads in Beverly Hills are all messed up, like don't they have enough money to fix it? We played a game at whether we saw more Mercedes or BMWs and in our half hour drive we must've seen at least 30 of each.
 

Beverly Hills

lol big house

 The park was cool, and filled with tourists, and we continued on to the downtown area. We saw the Walt Disney Concert Hall, which is an awesome Frank Gehry building, and then parked in Chinatown. 

This Chinatown is weird, super picturesque, but pretty empty. It does not seem like the area that Chinese-Americans actually live, but rather a place where some tourists go. From there, we went to Little Tokyo for lunch, and had a really delicious Japanese lunch.

 All of these destinations were downtown, so we then drove over to LACMA or the Los Angeles County Museum of Art. It took us a long time to get 7 miles, so were very happy when we were told that the museum was open two hours later than we had expected. We walked past the La Brea Tar Pits, which smell pretty bad... and started checking out the museum. This museum is really cool, and spread out through a bunch of buildings. I liked the contemporary building, and was excited to see a bunch of works that we reviewed in my recent Contemporary Art History class. 

This museum doesn't really make sense chronologically, so after getting exhausted, we walked back to the car and decided to drive over the the J. Paul Getty Museum to round out our day. 

The Getty's courtyard

The museum was 11 miles away. It took us one hour and thirty minutes to get to. I was really ready to turn around and just be done with LA for the trip, but Kenny insisted and I'm glad he did. The line to get into the parking garage was insane, and then the line to take the tram over to the Museum (which is up on a mountain) was even more insane. I was really confused about why so many dressed up young people wanted to go see art at 7pm on a Saturday night, and finally figured it out once we got to the museum. They have a huge courtyard where a band, The Geographers was playing a show. That was packed, and the museum was virtually empty. I knew something had to be up... We did an express tour since the museum was going to close in about an hour, but the highlights for me were definitely Vincent Van Gogh's Irises and Claude Monet's Impression Sunrise. 
 

I've had a poster of this hanging in my room for 6 years!

 We left the museum after that, and instead of taking the tram, walked downhill about a mile to get back to the parking garage. We left and started our trek northward to Yosemite National Park! We stopped to eat Jack in the Box, which is probably my 4th out of 5th favorite unique to not-Philadelphia fast food place. (1st - In N Out Burger, 2nd - Carl's Jr., 3rd - Del Taco, 4th - Jack in the Box, and 5th - Hardee's) We drove about another hour and stopped to sleep in Tulare, California.