8/20/15, 11:21 PM PDT
The origin of the name "La Jolla" is uncertain, but the two most popular theories are that it either derives from "La Joya," meaning "The jewel" or the Native American term "Woholle," meaning hole in the mountains.
Either of those etymologies apply to Sam though. She's probably gonna kill me if she reads this. But the joke was worth it.
Yeah, we went to La Jolla Cove today to mainly check out the places that were around. We found an exhibit that had art by Dr. Seuss on display.
How cocky are these guys, naming themselves legendary for just being
the exhibitors, huh?
Hey, it's Sam-I-Am, and I'm with Sam! It's like... a pun
or something.
I was especially impressed with the statues that he made.
Rudolph never recovered after never being able to join in any reindeer games.
Sam said this guy had my haircut. I agree.
This one kinda reminded me of a certain AP Physics teacher we had on Mira Mesa's campus.
Just kidding. We both had to go to the bathroom. So before the sun set, we looked around the cove to see where we could answer nature's call.
Of course, given the capitalistic society that we live in, literally EVERY place we visited had bathrooms reserved only for customers, so our hunt for a restroom ended up becoming a hunt for where the cheapest place to eat was. And we were in La Jolla, so no matter where we went, this was probably gonna be at least a 20 dollar bathroom break.
We ended up finding a Cold Stone here, so our pee session only cost us 10 dollars, which was much cheaper than the usual arm and a leg blood sacrifice required by La Jolla restaurants.
RFotD: Yes, there were port-a-potties near the beach. No, they were not worth it.
8/17/15, 11;37 PM PDT Today, Angela, Kayla, Nick, and I decided to go to the zoo in order to visit Christina's family just to hang out.
Hey, you can see Christina on top of the sign!
Somewhere in this park, there's a beautiful and elusive animal. Natively found in Africa, we San Diegans are lucky enough to have one grace us with its presence in our very own zoo. Hailed as a divine being in some cultures, it is the epitome of elegance.
It calls itself the "Dik-Dik." And I was on the hunt to find it today.
The first thing we did was take the skytram to the other side of the park. The first animal we saw was unfortunately, not the Dik-Dik, but this guy:
It looks like a living kiwi.
This cute little guy is called a peccary, a member of the pig family with prickly-looking fur surrounding his entire family. He deserves special recognition for being the unofficial welcoming animal for the first annual Kamichan zoo trip. Good on you, friend!
Congratulations!
Of course, with the 3,700 different species in the zoo, I couldn't afford to photoshop top hats on all of them nor can I upload pictures of all of them, so I'll post the highlights.
There was this snow leopard that happened to be standing on a walkway that connects the two leopard cages that I got a pretty okay silhouette picture of.
"I'm Batman."
Not to be outdone, this peacock (which is allowed to roam the park freely!) also did his best Batman impression by climbing on top of a roof.
"I am the night. Err, the dusk."
And there was this guy, star of the bestselling novel "The Poisonwood Bible."
Half giraffe, half horse, half zebra, it's a Gizebrorse! Also I'm bad with fractions.
We also saw a real Angry Bird! Look at how fat it is!
They had to surround it in sand because if it hits anything wooden, glass, or
pig-like, it instantly explodes.
Actually, I believe the title of "real life Angry Bird" belongs to this guy, where he's so angry that it's in his actual name.
Of course it's not threatened, it won't even allow poachers
to step on its lawn, let alone get close enough to kill it.
This animal quickly became one of my favorites when it let out its incredibly cry. My camera glitched when I recorded its song, so instead, have this YouTube video that I found:
Isn't it adorable? Also adorable was this plaque that we found.
We're not sure if Poseidon the leopard dog is an animal or the full legal name
of whatever rich philanthropist donated to the zoo.
We also found Christina's family!
With my estimates, her fist should come flying through my window and into
my face right about n-
Seriously though, hippos are pretty damn cool. Key club D21 definitely chose a good mascot, they're adorable.
We caught a video of one of these guys submerging...
Love me my underwater transition shots.
And we noticed a neat little symbiosis happening between these fish and the hippo:
Much like the symbiosis between Will Smith and those whales in a
particular Dreamworks animated film.
The highlight of the day though? THE ORANGUTANS. We luckily came to their exhibit right as they were starting up their daily Cirque du Soleape show, so we got some pretty good footage:
(Ignore how obnoxious I am on camera, I don't know what the hell is wrong with me)
I especially loved this little guy:
I really regret not bringing Joby to meet his family, but on the other hand, with how active some of the other animals were, it might have been a good thing not to bring him, lest he get mauled to death by these guys:
Oh and I also had a face to face encounter with a koala!
"It's like looking into a mirror." -Christina (Pic via Kayla)
We stayed at the zoo until it was pretty late. Late enough to see the golden hour...
It's pointing up because if koalas touch the ground to cross the street, they go straight to heaven.
And to see when the zoo was nothing but golden light.
The beauty of incandescent lighting.
We got that picture when we were on the skytram at night. And since we took it near the entrance of the park and it was near closing, we would have to walk back to the entrance from the other side of the park. At night. Pitch black night. And although it gave rise to a particularly cool picture of Kayla...
Looks like she's about to perform on stage but she has stage fright or something.
It also gave us some very creepy, horror-game worthy moments. It was inevitable that we had to pass through some of the animal enclosures to get back, and even though the zoo was essentially closed at that time, the ambient jungle-esque noise that played near each enclosure kept playing. And though it might give the exhibits a bit more realism during the day, at night it only served to hide the sound of footsteps from murderers that were walking right behind us.
After sprinting the last 40 miles of the zoo when we though we heard breathing behind us, we made it to the gift shop and decided to distract ourselves from the fact that the San Diego Slayer was definitely real and definitely almost murdered us with his dirty, bear-like paws by looking at the stuff they had for sale.
They of course had cute stuffed animals...
Reminds me of the look I had when I was first told that girls and boys had different parts.
Some "cute" baby children's shirts...
One of those things is not like the other. And no, I didn't just put the shirt there for a photo, you can see the stack of kids size snake shirts on the right.
And a kaleidoscope, which I used to simulate what you'd see when Kayla knocks your lights out when she finally snaps and becomes the San Diego Slayer.
Look closely at it.
RFotD: We never found the Dik-Dik enclosure, unfortunately :(
8/16/15, 10:57 PM PDT
Today, unfortunately, is the last day that we will see Gwen living in San Diego. Gwen, our surrogate white mother who enjoys white motherly things like reading books on her Kindle at the beach, drawing birds, and threatening us with physical violence if we're the wrong Zodiac sign, will unfortunately be in Utah for the next four years to continue her studies into becoming a park ranger/bird drawer/white mother.
God, it sounds like I'm writing an obituary.
Goodnight, sweet prince.
In order to cherish the last moments we had with her, we decided to have a last supper with her at TPOP. We ordered a big ol' ice cream hot pot, which is basically six scoops of ice cream with some awesome dry ice smoke coming out of the center.
Woah.
We also ordered honey brick toast...
Huh.
And a 150 gram rock of pure, Columbia-grade crack cocaine.
And we snorted it right in the restaurant too.
Just kidding, that giant block of chalk right there was Gwen's birthday gift. It's a dinosaur excavation toy, where you have to manually chisel out all the parts of a dinosaur skeleton and assemble the bones like a real life version of Indiana Jones!
As mentioned before, we did this right in the middle of TPOP.
They didn't appreciate the mess,
We got pretty excited when we successfully extracted our first limb.
But then later moved to the rec center to finish the job, fearing that the people at TPOP would throw us out. Here's a few pictures of our entire paleontologic process.
Check out that ribcage imprint on the top.
Making progress.
Things got especially exciting when we removed and assembled the head.
"Hello ladies."
And by "we," I mostly mean me. I got excited. So excited that I filmed this:
Eventually, we managed to assemble the entire skeleton. And we witnessed it in its full, bony glory.
Steven Spielberg would be proud.
We were so happy. And then we had to put it down.
God, so much death today. On a much lighter note, check out this family portrait that Phoenix drew of us!
They're creepy and they're kooky...
Lets go ahead and do roll call. There's Gwen...
You can also see her life goals in the top right.
Kayla...
She looks happy, sure, but inside, she wants your head
on a pike.
Later, we decided to end the day with a trip to Rita's and some fun talking about our Zodiac signs. I'm not really a big believer in horoscopes, but it's kinda impressive how accurate the description of a Taurus is to my personality. And yeah, yeah, I know it's not real and they spin it in such a way that the same traits applies to a lot of people, but I mean if you really know me as a person and you read some of these traits, you'd see some pretty true things.
The last thing we did was read this post on which Zodiac signs you should and shouldn't fight, and it is HILARIOUS, especially when Gwen read it in her really loud, super-dramatic way. We were just LOSING it in Rita's, we probably drove away all the other customers from how boisterous we were, but it was TOTALLY WORTH IT.
To get a slice of our fun, imagine these people when you read their respective paragraphs in that link above:
Aaliyah: Leo
Me: Taurus
Christina: Pisces
Angela: Scorpio
Kayla: Gemini
Ken: Sagittarius
Gwen: Capricorn
Phoenix: Virgo
Then imagine that it was being read by this woman:
And you would have a very rough estimation of how much of a good time we had at that Rita's at six in the afternoon, over Zodiac signs and frozen drinks.
Gwen, if you're reading this, I would like to say thank you for being a great mother and a great friend. Senior year would not have been as fun as it was if you hadn't been there to call me a bitch-ass pussy in class, or show me the beauty that is the giant Speed ride in the Del Mar Fair, or gouged out your eyes with us in some horrifying cultist blood pact. It's been awesome knowing you, but it's not gonna be goodbye because I know someday, the squad and I are gonna get lost in Utah looking for salty lakes and suddenly hordes of Mormons will attack us and right when we're closest to death, you'll descend from the sky and save us from their bicycles. And then you're gonna call us bitch-ass pussies and tell us to suck your ass as you fly back up, above the clouds, cackling the whole way.
Until then, we'll miss you, Gwen.
RFotD: I am actually not sure if she is going to Utah or not.
Today is my dad's birthday! In celebration of that fact, we decided to just relax and take it easy so it would be a low stress, low navigation kind of day.
Just kidding. We went everywhere. First up was Spain's Arc de Triomf.
Complete with unappreciative hipster man on the lower left corner.
For my readers familiar with la culture française, you'd recognize the similarities between that arch and the one in Paris. And you're right. They are very similar.
That's honestly all the city guide said about the arch. I don't know if they're connected or if they'll eventually turn into stargates, I have no clue.
Shrugs
We also visited a MASSIVE Gothic Cathedral that they had here.
Damn, look at those fractals.
Even from that wide shot, you can see the ridiculous intricacy of the architecture.
At this point, I think every blog post I have on Spain has contained the word "architecture" somewhere.
It didn't really have a badass name like the Notre Dame or anything, it was only called the "Gothic Cathedral," even in the city signs. But it's still very fancy.
Incredibly, they had LCD screens at the time this was constructed.
Later that night, we ate at a delicious Asian buffet called "Wok."
This restaurant was across from our hotel, so since we didn't have to go far, we just... wok'd.
The buffet wasn't that great compared to buffets in California though. They had sushi, but they only allowed you to take FIFTEEN PIECES per eating session. Which kind of sucked. But we still left with full bellies, so it was still worth it.
Happy 50th birthday, dad! You're a ripe old age now, but it's been fun having you as my dad for the past 18 years. Here's to many, many more years!
RFotD: My dad says he is 50 years old every time I ask him, so I'm not sure if he really is 50 this time or if he's just lying to me again.
Spain has so much gorgeous architecture that we basically have to stop every few seconds to take pictures of it all. It's a good thing that our main mode of transportation is the subway, else my camera would literally be full from all the pictures I take.
This wasn't even a landmark or anything, it was just awesome-looking.
One of the more prominent architectural marvels in the city, however, is the National Art Museum in Catalunya. And for good reason. It is MASSIVE.
See this? This is from A MILE AWAY. (Approximately)
This was the closest I could get while still getting all of its architecture in the shot.
The view from said building is magnificent.
Architecture as far as the eye can see...
Tell you what though, these Spanish people are a bunch of wannabes. Look at them and their blatant ripoff of my college's Janss Steps.
Biters.
We also visited the Olympic Park that they had. It wasn't as pretty as the one in Munich, in my opinion, but it is still very very nice.
With a public foot dipping station too! Wow!
I think my favorite thing about their Olympic Park was this AWESOME trippy space needle-like thing that looked like it could be straight out of a sci-fi dystopia film.
Complete with giant alien traffic cones too. Oooooooh, spooky.
When the sun started getting less hot, we decided to get on this thing called a funicular. Basically a slanted trolley thing designed to take you up steep slopes, it's hard to describe but if you've ever seen The Grand Budapest Hotel, it's the pink thing that takes the people to the hotel.
The pink thing in the center of the frame.
From there, we briefly looked at a Spanish fort they had...
Proof that I mean "my family" when I say "we," I'm not just roaming Spain solo.
Looks like a sandcastle made with those rectangular buckets from Target.
Then rode the gondola...
Gondola, cable car, I'm never really sure what to call these things.
All the way to their beach!
Perfect timing for golden hour too!
Every shot of the beach I got is a shot that I absolutely LOVE. Look at this!
Look at that glow, man.
Vague silhouettes are gorgeous.
We ate at that restaurant, it was actually not that deliciosa.
Good night, Barcelona!
If there's one thing I can say about Spanish beaches, it is that their sand is INCREDIBLE. It's clumpy and lumpy, but still somehow manages to feel incredibly soft and silky to step on. It's interesting, definitely.
Sorry I'm cutting these entries pretty short, I'm in a rush to catch up on entries right now, BUT for good reason. I have a little special something that's more career oriented for me that'll require a bit more time, but I'll disclose information on that later!
RFotD: ALMOST CAUGHT UP. Writing this as of August 16 and I am ALMOST DONE.
