Out to Lunch

One thing I really like about living in Pasadena is having such a wide choice of cafes and restaurants on my doorstep, it’s just a shame the city council have never cottoned on to that quaint European idea of pedestrianisation and stopped the main street traversing Old Town. It’s easy to imagine a piazza style walkway full of tables and chairs, without the noise and traffic fumes, but there again, would your average American visit a café if they had to park their car 500 yards away? Probably not.

About once a week I meet up with a few ex-pat friends plus anyone else who happens to want to join us (we’re not exclusive) and we go out to lunch.  

Ever since I first arrived in Pasadena 2 ½ years ago I’ve been  strolling past the Cordon Bleu cookery school peering in the large windows to watch the trainee chefs at work.  About a year ago the school opened up a new restaurant and ever since we’ve been promising to treat ourselves to lunch.  Last week we finally went (it’s amazing how inspired you get to actually do things when you realize your time is about to run out).

$10 for a three course lunch and a NO TIPPING PLEASE policy, how bad could it be? Well it wasn’t bad at all, in fact it was a great culinary experience! 

The menu offers a choice of 8 different starters, 7 mains and 5 desserts. In my opinion the starters and the desserts are always the best part of any menu and the Cordon Bleu  was no exception. In fact if I could have just eaten my way through the entire 8 starters and the 5 desserts I’d have been a very happy girl; as it was I was only allowed one of each for my $10 and it was compulsory to have the main course.  But it would have been churlish to complain.

It was great to go out to eat somewhere in Pasadena and not be totally over-faced with gigantic portions; the staff were attentive but we never felt rushed; the only negative comment I have about the whole experience was that the restaurant is housed in an architecturally very impressive building – its an old bank – but open kitchens and high ceilings are bad for acoustics.  It was extremely noisy, but what the heck, you’re there to eat, not to talk!!

Highly recommended!

Pleasure Pockets

You don’t have to read too many of these posts to realize that I’m not actually a great fan of Los Angeles.  It’s a city without a heart.

There’s no downtown as such – what they call “downtown” Los Angeles is a collection of high rise office blocks.  If you want the retail experience you head out of town to the Malls, if you want designer haute couture you head out to Beverly Hills; if you want tourist tat you head out to Hollywood, and if you want history then you head out of state.

Los Angeles itself doesn’t have an awful lot of inspiring architecture–the guidebooks will set you off on a trail along Wilshire Boulevard, with its rather faded art-deco collection of buildings; Olvera Street in El Pueblo de Los Angeles Historic Park, the original Mexican quarter can be walked around in half an hour.  LA is a vast sprawling metropolis and most of the tourist hotspots are good drive apart. Remember this is a city of 18 million people, all of whom have two cars. Something that looks a 20 minute drive on a map can still take two hours in rush hour gridlock.

However, it would be mean to spend nearly three years living here and not have a good word to say about it.  There are little pockets of pleasure in Los Angeles – you just have to look for them.  I like Angel’s Flight, it’s a bizarre two minute funicular ride that takes you away from the down and outs in Pershing Square to the top of Bunker Hill where you can stand and admire even more office blocks. It’s a novelty but blink and you’ll have missed it.

I also like Griffith Park – home of the Hollywood Sign and Griffith Observatory.  Over Christmas we took a walk around the north side of the park and you’d have never even known you were in LA. Hawks circled over head and a friendly coyote kept popping his head up out of the undergrowth.

When we want to go to the beach we usually go to Santa Monica. It’s not just the lure of the sand but because of the English Shop where we can stock up on essentials like Bisto, Orange Squash and Branston Pickle. However, now that our local Fresh and Easy has increased its stock of British goods, Santa Monica has lost its usefulness, so last weekend when the temperature hit  80 degrees, we headed to South LA and discovered Manhattan Beach.

The place was a revelation.  This was real So Cal living.  This is how I had imagined I would be spending my time when the idea of transplanting to LA was first suggested. We’d have a beach house in an urban village.  I’d be power walking or cycling along the seafront. We’d have a hub of restaurants and cafés, trendy clothes shops on our doorstep, surrounded by lots of fit young men carrying surfboards.

Manhattan Beach had me inspired.  I’d finally found a part of Los Angeles that I really liked, even envied. An eclectic mix of pastel coloured beach huts, high tech glass fronted uber modern apartments dotted amongst mock tudor mansions and a 1930’s style residence that looked suspiciously like a piece of Wedgewood.  A thriving community built around attractive winding lanes sloping down to the wide sandy beach. Shame it just costs millions of dollars to live there.

Maybe I have warmed to Southern California after all.  It just goes to show one should always keep an open mind.

My Weekend with Marilyn

Last Saturday was wet, and Los Angeles is not designed to cope with rain – there are no drains or run-offs on the road, so water gathers and pools on the tarmac.  Water gushes out onto the sidewalk from random down pipes and flooding occurs very rapidly.  Driving anywhere is not a great deal of fun.

Looking for something local to do we made the mistake of visiting the Pasadena Museum of California Art, just a couple of blocks away from the apartment.  The museum is housed in a large building with a surprisingly small doorway.  There is nothing on the door to advertise the fact that you are entering the museum, presumably that’s to keep out the plebs like me.  PMCA is one of those places that appears to be aimed at that elite band of “people in the know” as opposed  to encouraging the artistic enlightenment and self-improvement of Joe Public.  

LA Raw - Abject expression in Los Angeles 1945-1980, is the title of the current exhibition,  a rather grisly collection of graphic images of severed limbs and body parts, and yes you can guess exactly what particular predominantly female body part is mostly on display.

I know I have a predilection for art to be easy on the eye, but if it isn’t easy on the eye then at least it should be meaningful and thought provoking.  The only thought this sleazy collection provoked in me was how soon could I leave.   I felt I was intruding on someone’s personal nightmare and it was a very unpleasant way to spend the afternoon.  If the PMCA wants to enhance the cultural experience of the average Pasadenian then it really needs to come up with something less pretentious and more appealing than this.  I actually left the building thinking that rather than charging an entrance fee they should be paying me to go in; it really was that grim. 

So in need of some light relief we decided to head off to the cinema.  The previous weekend we had gone to see Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy which was also pretty grim and made 1970’s England look so grey and depressing I wonder how anyone made it out of the decade alive. The weekend before that we'd seen The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo. This week we really did need entertaining.

Having recently sat through a whole load of movie trailers promoting action packed, high kicking explosive big budget forthcoming Hollywood releases, we decided to go instead to the art deco Laemmles Playhouse on Colorado Boulevard and sit in a theatre the size of a living room to watch My Week with Marilyn. The sun was shining in 1950’s England; the film was beautifully shot and the story intelligent, quirky and amusing. Nobody died; nobody got blown to kingdom come, and there were no severed body parts. It was definitely a good choice and more than made up for the depressing afternoon at the PMCA.

Fortunately by Sunday the streets of Pasadena were once again dry and the sun had come back out.  A big sigh of relief all round the Bubble Household, no need to venture into any more art galleries.

A Novel Idea

I’m now on my 5^th visit to the Dentist’s Chair.  The whole tooth episode has been a complete nightmare. I don’t know why people undergo major gastric surgery or risk stomach stapling in a serious attempt to lose weight – just go and ask your dentist to put a couple of stitches in your gum.  That should curb your appetite.

My social life has been severely affected – I’ve had to curtail my usual dizzy round of lazy lunches as I’m fed up with a diet of soup, soup and more soup. In addition with a face puffed up like an over-fed hamster I haven’t particularly felt like I want to step out of the apartment.  In fact, I’ve only been venturing out for the barest of necessities (another tin of soup) and the school run of course.

The teenager and I have been having some precious mother-daughter bonding moments behind the wheel of the car on the school run.  I was rather reluctant to let her learn to drive over here, anyone who reads this blog regularly will know that I don’t hold LA car drivers in any great esteem.  Unlike back home where you happily pay a professional to teach your child to drive, here the onus is definitely on the parent to teach their offspring all they know. Say no more.  Anyway, to her credit she is doing very well and definitely has more patience with American rules of the road than her mother.

Being housebound has also fired me up to finally get to grips with that novel.  And yes I have been positively inspired.  Without the added distraction of the husband who is currently in Saudi Arabia checking out the next stage of his major oil refinery construction project, I’ve been able to shut myself away and concentrate on producing a great work of literary art (aka a chick-lit).    As any writer will tell you, once you get engrossed, even taking a break for a bite to eat is out of the question – which is perfect for me right now because I can’t eat anyway.  The teenager is more than happy to spend every evening in solitary confinement plugged into her usual  heady concoction of tumblr-facebook-homework-twitter, so I have been left entirely to my own devices.

It’s been absolutely wonderful.  Chapters have been flying off the printer quicker than I can pop down to Office Max to pick up the next ream of paper.  On a hasty trip to Target to buy a baby soft toddler toothbrush for my poor tender gums, I was so absorbed in trying to work out how to contrive the plot to get my two main characters back into bed together, that I returned home empty handed having left my toothbrush at the checkout.  I expect Emily Bronte experienced exactly the same problem.

That's the wonderful thing about writing - you can make your characters do whatever you want; so much easier to manipulate people on paper than it is in real life.  My heroine can meet the man of my her dreams and live happily ever after, for a couple of chapters at least.

Creative genius is a gift and we’re not always in control of it.  According to my bible –  Bestseller Writing for Beginners - the art of writing a good book is knowing when to stop.  Well my stitches are out, I’m finally off to meet a friend for lunch, and the husband is due back from Saudi tomorrow. Probably about now then.

The Dentist's Chair

There will be a lot of people who will tell you America is a wonderful country – and if you like junk food and crap TV then it certainly is.  But even those who are addicted to Dunkin’ Donuts and Jerry Springer would probably agree that America’s reliance on a totally private health care system is not without its faults.

The one thing I had been doing my utmost to avoid here in the US was a trip to the dentist. It’s not that I have a dental phobia, but we learned early on from the orthodontics required to maintain the teenager’s braces that US dentistry is not cheap, and that our insurance policy would cover us for very little.  So just like other British ex-pats I’ve met, I have continued to visit my own UK dentist for routine check-ups on trips back home.  On my last visit I was warned that I had a couple of fillings that needed replacement and I agreed I would have the work done next time – after all, I joked, I’ve no intention of seeing a dentist in the US. Definitely not, my UK dentist kindly replied, one look in your mouth and they’ll want to whip everything out. Words that have now come back to haunt me.

I’ll be the first to admit that my teeth aren’t my best feature and coming to California has only made them look decidedly worst.  Everyone here, even if they aren’t born with two rows of large perfectly formed pearly whites will have acquired them by the time they finish High School.

On Boxing Day I broke a filling – and whilst that probably wasn’t the end of the world the part of filling that remained in place had a jagged edge which made it  painful not just to eat but I could hardly talk. I reasoned with myself that whilst I could realistically manage on a diet of fluids for the seven or so weeks until my next planned UK visit, not speaking would be a killer. I needed a dentist. 

 After signing my life away on six pages of paperwork and biting my way through 10 x-rays, there followed a bout off hysterical laughter and lots of tutting before I was reluctantly informed by new  dental consultant that at the very least the broken filling was a crown and a root canal job.  As for everything else, well a couple of sessions of sleep therapy was the answer.  Yes whilst under the influence of propofol  (“Michael Jackson would still be alive today if I’d been in charge of him”  is apparently the latest in-dentist joke) he would not only perform magic on my broken filling, but he would happily stick a crown on the corresponding opposite tooth, replace all my other silver with porcelain, and, as a bonus, whip out my wisdom teeth. And the wonderful thing was, I wouldn’t remember a thing.

 Sadly I declined.  Whilst I might well wake up in a state of drug induced euphoric amnesia, I wasn’t sure it would be quite so easy for my husband to forget how I had just spent $3,500 of his hard earned cash.   

Half an hour’s negotiation with the insurance assessor and it was agreed just to fix the tooth that was broken.  Never mind, she was quick to assure me, my timing was perfect.  As the work had to be completed across a couple of appointments I was entitled to use not just the whole of my 2011 insurance allowance but 2012 as well.  Lucky me! Just $1000 on the credit card then.

Sorry kids, no trips to Disney for you this year. Mommy's spent the all money on a mega ride in the dentist's chair.

This Sporting Life

Just before Christmas we packed the snow chains into the car and headed up to the mountains.  We were off to Big Bear,  a mere two hours from Los Angeles.  Still under a travel arrangement ban after the Needles fiasco I was more than happy to leave all the organization to my husband and he had lovingly selected this old style resort for its close proximity to home and its excellent early season ski-ing.  The local TV channel had only announced the day before that Big Bear had the best early snow in the whole of  America and there were long lines at the rental shop to prove it.  

American ski-resorts are certainly very different from their European counterparts –a diet pepsi in a slopeside 1950’s style diner doesn’t really live up to my après-ski fantasy of sipping a warm mug of gluhwein in some cosy Alpine hostelry – but the snow, and the sunshine, were plentiful.

This year I didn’t attempt any ski-ing myself.  I’ve accepted that for me ski-ing works better as a spectator sport. I’ve tried my best and quite simply my best is not good enough.  Personally I think the family have no right to mock my inadequacy – in my opinion the ability to zip down a mountainside like Franz Klammer is not one of life’s necessities.

I see no pleasure in tumbling down a hillside head first to the raucous laughter of snowboarding teenagers - I don’t need that kind of humiliation in my life, nor do I want the subsequent medical bills.  It's not that I'm not active and fit but I do have an aversion to height and speed. In addition I totally lack the eye-hand co-ordination and competitive edge needed for any degree of sporting achievement.

One of the reasons I signed up for my recent golf lessons was because I thought, how difficult can that be? It’s a game specifically designed for the elderly  with no element of  risk or danger involved.  They say the younger you take up a sport the quicker you pick it up.  It made sense to start now so that by the time I reach retirement age hopefully  I’ll be just as good as everyone else.

I made it through my first five lessons with great success and was well chuffed with myself until I ventured onto the golf course.  However, as I am now the proud owner of my own set of clubs and a smart pink golf bag, even though I may not look like a pro when I take a swing, at least I look the part when I’m stationary.

And realistically I could say the same about ski-ing.  After all I have the outfit, but not the ability.  There were plenty of other non-skiers hanging about on the slopes at Big Bear, posing in their sallopettes with their sunglasses on, basking in that Californian sunshine. I too could have easily pretended that I had just returned from a speedy descent and was taking a break sipping my coke, perhaps waiting for the rest of the family to catch up.  But unfortunately the teenager developed a suspicious sore throat and insisted we retreat to the cafe with a book - a definite give-away that we were not there to ski, and on the second day we didn't even make it out of the hotel room.

Still, back home in Pasadena the next day my husband complained of apres-ski aches and pains, he had developed a high altitude wheeze and cough that he couldn't shake off and  finally he took to his bed for the rest of the Christmas week.  Who says all this sporting activity is good for you?!

The Me Shopper

So that’s another Christmas over with and Santa has rolled away his sleigh. Stocking up on Christmas presents in your T-shirt and sandals doesn’t exactly put you in a particularly festive mood – neither does the thought of sitting down to a hearty roast dinner when its 70 degrees outside. This is our third Californian Christmas and it still takes some getting used to.

Another New Year and another Pasadena Rose Parade, the highlight of which this year was spotting a woman in the crowd in front of me wearing a nappy on her head as sun protection (yes it was hot but I'm not totally sure the diaper-sunhat combo really worked).

Another set of New Year's resolutions to be made and broken, although this year I'm going to add QUIT SHOPPING to my regular list.  With only six months left in California we have to start planning for our impending move back to the UK and I realise I'll be returning with a lot more clutter than I started with.


Shopping is one of America's favourite past-times, but in the run up to Christmas, apart from the flurry of excitement around Thanksgiving and Black Friday, the shops here in Pasadena were surprisingly devoid of shoppers.  The rush literally starts the day before Christmas Eve – when most stores suddenly reduce everything.

I used to watch those old Americans films where everyone was dashing around the night before Christmas  to complete their present shopping and think that's so disorganized – why had they left it so late?  Now I know  it’s not disorganization – it’s perfect planning.

Christmas Eve is the day to do your Christmas shopping, and I don't just mean for everyone else – why should just your family and friends be the ones getting all the gifts.  Go on indulge.

 

Of course just like back home any shop sales here will always include those bizarre shelves of imported stock that you have never seen in store before, the rails of clothes which really shriek out I’m not a bargain I’m one of those things that will sit at the back of the closet and you will never wear, but what the heck! It’s $10 reduced from $60!

And yes it is very tempting.  When you enter a shop and realize that everything – yes everything – has 50% to 60% off then of course you can’t walk away.  I made the mistake of re-visiting my local Anthropology store (very upmarket and I swear I never buy anything unless it’s on the bargain rail) to discover that I could now buy two sweaters for less than the sale price of the one I had spotted a day or two before.  How could I resist?  And yes there is apparently an official name for this - I became a “Me shopper”, or the "self-gifter" as one local newsreader referred to it, which almost makes it sound like you are donating yourself to a charitable event. And what could be a more worthy cause?

So I stood in a very long line to make my purchase(s) and then hurried home; no need to gift wrap or pop them under the tree of course.  Just tuck them away and produce them a month or two later to the husband’s hesitant  questioning of “I’ve not seen that before, is it new?” To which of course I can honestly reply “ No darling, I’ve actually had it quite some time….”