a whirlwind tour of san diego (1/2)

[jazzfish]

Many thanks to darkfyre_muse for putting me up and putting up with me on relatively short notice, and for being generally excellent company for forty-eight hours straight.

I still don't like Dulles. I don't like the people-movers, I don't like the horribly inefficient use of space, I don't like the location. I don't like the economy parking and the lack of schedule for the shuttles from it.

Stuck in a middle seat on the flight to San Francisco. The late-forties woman in the window seat was too busy reading People and Us to bother looking out the window at the gorgeous cityscape or the Grand Canyon. Grr. I tried to watch The Golden Compass but fell asleep about twenty minutes in. This is more a reflection on two weeks of sleep-debt than the quality of the movie. The 'extended legroom' seats are kinda nice, but not worth paying money for.

Same plane from SF to SD but they made me get off and get back on anyway.

Arrived in SD at about ten and wandered outside to wait for darkfyre_muse. My first thought: "Wow, that's a lot of palm trees." (All non-native.) My second thought: "Wow, that's a lot of California license plates." I suspect I was a little tired. She picked me up and we headed back to her rather nice house somewhere north of the city, and we talked for another half-hour or so before I fell over.

She's got two dogs, both Chow mixes of some variety. Both nice and calm and quiet fluffy beasts, the kind of dogs I can get along with. She's also got two cats, one of which is even more insistently lovey than Chaos. The other likes to groom the dogs.

Woke up at the reasonable hour of sevenish and headed out to Balboa Park. This is mostly a random bit of greenery in the middle of San Diego, but it also includes a bunch of museums and things. I can't really come up with a comparison.

The park's quite good for wandering around in. Like most of the area it's got its share of ups and downs, usually rather steep ones. Very pretty, very green and springlike. Also, I had no idea I'd absorbed so much East Coast dendro. I kept looking at trees and being mildly disturbed because I had no idea what they were.

I enjoyed the refreshing springtime weather. I think that after about six weeks of unrelenting sunshine and perfect afternoons, I'd start to gibber. It does mean that they can have an outdoor greenhouse, though, which is fairly awesome.

We hit three different art museums: one local contemporary gallery, one devoted to older stuff, and one that had an exhibit on an Indian artist and Gandhi contemporary (Nandalal Bose) and a quite cool sound installation. Oh, and also Tijuana Anonymous.

Then the zoo. The SD Zoo is . . . different from the Nat'l. Lots more outdoor exhibits, lots more random exhibits tucked into corners and along pathways. Bigger, I think; definitely more sprawling. Filled with mallard ducks instead of squirrels.

We must have spent a quarter of an hour watching the orangutangs and siamangs playing on their cable/bamboo structure. Didn't get to see the giraffes or polar bears, but other than that I think we got to everything I was wanting to see.

Dinner at a tasty Mexican place, then home, where we were both asleep by ten.