Me and Duke at Santa Monica

 A birdwatching spot at Malibu — and if you look carefully in the photo below, you’ll see a strange shape in the water to the lower front right… Guess what?

I’ve been staying in Venice. Venice, Los Angeles, the area between Santa Monica and Marina del Ray on the Pacific coast. And this Venice actually does have canals as well as a beach. The whole area was once a marshy wasteland, until a man named Abbot Kinney came to live in Santa Monica in 1886. He was a developer and a conservationist, and one of main streets in Venice, near where my daughter is staying, is called Abbot Kinney.

According to Wikipedia:

By mid-January 1906, an area was built along the edge of the Grand
Lagoon patterned after the amusement thoroughfares of the great 19th and
20th century expositions. It featured foreign exhibits, amusements, and
freak shows. Trolley service was available from Downtown Los Angeles
and nearby Santa Monica. Visitors were dazzled by the system of canals complete with gondalas and gondoliers brought in from Venice, Italy. 

The area eventually went downhill, many of the canals were paved over.

In the 1990s the canals were cleaned up and now it’s an area for people with a lot of money. And me? Well, I’ve enjoyed going there birdwatching in the mornings. there are always hummingbirds hovering over the water, or sucking nectar from the flowers…

Frankly, I never knew it existed. Given the lack of greenery generally around Los Angeles, this place is a lovely oasis… The canals are tidal.

I’m here, and my family is all somewhere else…

I am leaving for Virginia tomorrow.
Here are some photos we took this evening around where my daughter lives.

Space invader art – these tiled art works are found in many different parts of the world…

Pix 2, 3 and 4 all portray where I have been staying…if you know where to look.

5 is L.A. city and 6 is an owl – on guard against the pigeons, I guess. Or just some fun art?

…Rome L.A, do as the locals do?

Since coming here I have done some things I have never done before: had a massage in an upmarket spa along Sunset Boulevard, for a start.

Anyone who knows me will know that spending time in a spa is, well, not exactly me. Firstly, I can always think of things I would rather be doing with my money than pampering myself with stuff that really doesn’t matter. Secondly, well – do I need a second reason? But my daughter had some gift certificates, and so off we went to the spa…

Which was all insanely luxurious and deliciously pleasant and horribly decadent.

We then went and had a cheapo pedicure and a manicure in a Vietnamese assembly line beauty parlour – fun place actually, where you can – at the same time as your feet are being mangled by charmingly indifferent humans – have your back massaged by one of those awful massage chairs that feel like something out of a horror movie. (“Eek! Janey, the chair’s alive! It’s eating meeeffmwmwm!”)

I now have polished nails for the first time in…um…thirty years? Which is much more fun than doing it every week…

It’s the 10th of August. It was also the 10th of August yesterday.

I never really understand how these things can happen, but it has something to do with time displacement distortion caused by being crammed into too small a place behind a little hinged table watching dreadful movies with a soundtrack distorted through earphones that never work properly, all while eating food that all tastes the same – like cardboard with sauce – no matter what it looks like.

And doing that for about 19 hours, on top of spending 12 hours in a wide variety of airports. Which definitely adds up to more than 24 hours. And yet it’s still the same day.

To add to my confusion, I am in Los Angeles. And the darn place looks just like my original home town of Perth, West Australia, except L.A. has been super-sized.

The climate is the same. The trees look the same. The flowers look the same. The houses look the same. The streets look the same. The shops look the same. The beach sand looks a bit yellower here (it’s white in Perth). Downtown L.A. is not as pretty as Perth, though…

And everything is just…more.

I think I am falling asleep. Thirty-one-hour days and airplanes and sore hips don’t seem conducive to a good night’s shut-eye.