Then in the evening I went back to Robin, our target was UCLA (University of California in L.A.), there was a free concert this evening. On the way up there we picked up a friend of Robin. We had luck with the traffic and so we arrived around 45min. later at our target, but once there came the next problem, the parking. The first UCLA entrance was completely clogged with cars that wanted to park there. So we went a bit further, to the second entrance which was empty and we thought we outsmarted the whole bunch of people trying to park in the other parking. But once we tried to get in the parking, the barrier wouldn’t open and we had to go back. So we tried another parking and we finally found one, but we remarked that we were more or less on the other side of the campus. So we had to walk quite a while until we reached the stage. It was really nice, the stage was in the middle of a park and on both sides of the park they had places where you could get some food. So we had something for dinner and then we looked around for beer. This was the bigger problem, since in America alcohol is banned from all the public places. But finally we found the “alcohol zone”. Here this means most times that you have kind of cages with an entry guarded by some security or police. To enter this zone you have to show a document to proof that you are 21 or elder. Once we passed this barrier we could line up to get our beer. It was kind of strange, because it looked more like a gala than a “bar” for the concert.
And there were some strange figures walking around. Later on we remarked that there was a new exposition that opened this night in the museum of UCLA. But I’ll come later on to this point. So we had beer and we were in the “alcohol zone” and there was an open door in the back of the zone. Because there was nothing to do in this zone, we walked through the door into the building and a bit later we were in the elevator bringing us to the main level of the museum. We walked a bit around and there were several expositions that were open so we walked through all this different ancient objects, drinking our beer. This was my first time I drank alcoholic drinks in a museum and this in America! I think even in Switzerland people would stare at you if you walk with a beer through a museum. Besides the “normal” expositions, there was one with a huge line in front, so we decided to line up for this one and after a certain time we could walk through the soundsuits designed by Nick cave. Later on when we left the museum, we remarked that there was an even longer line that we bypassed by sneaking in through the alcohol zone. So you see that drinking can have its advantages ;-) But sorry for all the peoples we bypassed So we went back to the concert and listened to the music. It was very peaceful and the people were dancing and all the time there were some soundsuits coming from the exposition to join the concert and dance to the rhythms of the music. And later on there was a invasion of the soundsuits, there were about 10 of them or even more invading the stage and then they started to do a performance. It was pretty cool to observe this spectacle, I think for the people in the soundsuits it was pretty hard, because these suits looked pretty warm and then you have to dance in the middle of a whole bunch of people. Once this performance was over, we decided to go back to the car and go home.
The next morning I picked up Yihao, a graduate student working in our lab. He originally comes from Shanghai and he is in our lab for a couple of months to do some research, before he’ll begin a PhD in South Carolina next September. Our target was in the south, we decided to go to San Diego, but haven’t decided to do anything specific. So we decided to go near Balboa Park and then to look on, once we are there. We arrived just in front of the San Diego Zoo and so we decided to go in and visit. It was pretty nice, because the zoo is huge and I think they have about 4000 different animals. So we walked through the zoo and observed the elephants, the lions, the camels, the tigers etc. One of the main attractions were the polar bears and when we got there they got some food.
And one of the bears was even fed by hand, so one of the trainers fed it through the fence. And she explained that they are trained so that they even can do some physical examinations without a narcotic. (What about examine some polar bears in the Tierarztpraxis Öschberg? ;-) ). Another highlight were the Pandas, they had two bears, while one of them had a baby bear. The first one without baby was just lying around, but the second one moved a bit around, but without the baby, it was sleeping in one of the “trees”. We found the same situation in the Koala cages. Most of them were just hanging or sitting around and were sleeping, but at least one of them was moving around.For other animals it was more a problem to find them in their cages, most of the snakes and saurians were hard to spot. But they had some pretty nice exemplars, like cobras, rattle snakes etc. Another very impressive animal is the komodo dragon, a saurian that can get up to 3m long! We spent the whole afternoon in the zoo, walking around and observing the different animals. At about 5pm we left the zoo and decided to go somewhere near the beach. So we went on the ocean beach, where we walked out on the pier. In the middle of the pier was a café located where we decided to refresh our caffeine reservoirs and we observed the waves. They were pretty big on this day, later on I watched on a surf site, where they report the surf conditions and there they reported that the waves this day were about 10 feet (~3 meters). Before getting back we picked up some fish tacos in one of the bars to eat them on the beach promenade and afterwards we get in our car heading back to Irvine.
kein Problem der Bär muss nur auf den Tisch liegen
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