LA Trip Bullets

A week ago we spent a week in LA to visit friends and family, eat food, and visit the Getty Center and Warner Brothers studio. Been a busy week at work, but finally had the chance to upload pics (Facebook). Couple of quick thoughts and observations...

• It's a great blessing to be able to get together with old friends around the dinner table and talk about everything under the sun.  We got to converse about topics ranging from parenting (the way we were brought up and the way we want to bring up our kids), Malcolm Gladwell's 10,000 hour mark for developing expertise, to our own issues and conflicts dealing with boundaries with our parents.  Lots of laughter and insight.
• Every time I go down to SoCal, I'm amazed at the sprawl of the area and the scope of multiple millions of people... who all want to be on the road at the same time.  People have to be asleep by 10 and out the door by 6 to get to the office on time at 8.  If we lived down there, the prospect of facing a 45-90 minute drive every commute would make me pull my hair out, and would be enough to discourage ever going out for fun.
• After going to Italy and visiting the Uffizi Gallery, showcasing the history of art from medieval times through the Renaissance, I've gained a greater appreciation for painting.  The audio guides explained how the painters during the Renaissance were experimenting and making breakthroughs in being able to depict accurate images with correct proportions in the fore-, mid-, and backgrounds, and going to the Getty, we could also see how artists in the 19th century were able to "perfect" realistic painting techniques before moving into the Impressionist period.  I suppose painting is one of those things you don't really start to enjoy until your 30s.
• Being avid Top Chef fans, we were disappointed that season 6 winner Michael Voltaggio's new restaurant "Ink." hadn't opened up yet, so we settled for going to his old place of employment, The Bazaar.  Most interesting dishes were the Philly cheesesteak and the Caprese salad, both re-imagined using molecular gastronomy to look and feel different but taste similar to what we were expecting.
• The Warner Brothers studio tour was our concession to an LA-specific thing we could do, since we didn't have the energy to get the most out of a Disneyland trip.  Interesting things we learned about the TV and movie-making business:
• Clint Eastwood has an almost-exclusive agreement with WB to be his movies' studio.
• The same outdoor sets have been used to depict urban New York and other cities since the 1930s.  To change the epoch, they change things like doorknobs and fire hydrants.
• Also, all the outdoor sets are fiberglass fronts on top of wood awnings and not brick and mortar.
• They build houses with two fronts rather than a front/back because there's no real need for a backyard in filming.
• We got to go onto the set of "Chuck" because we told our tour guide we were fans, so we saw the Buy More back room (with the cage) and the apartment complex... pretty cool.