For some reason I always end up in California when I go to the U. S. But the weather is OK, so...
California 1999 |
Santa Cruz is on the American West Coast, a short distance from San Francisco, and a nice little city, not at all as dirty and burdened by crime as Los Angeles. I was there on a documentary trip to SCO (described here). There is also a panorama showing the Santa Cruz area, among the panoramas.
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I found these magnificent flowers stuck up on a transformer station. I don't know what kind it is, because I am no biologist, but they were so smashing violet against the blue sky I couldn't resist making a few pictures. |
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I lived on the University of California, Santa Cruz (UCSC) campus and the deer had got used to humans. One could get pretty close before they retreated. One morning I saw a few deer grazing right outside my window, and I was able to get out with my camera and take a few pictures without scaring them. The rightmost picture is actually two pictures taken from the same spot with a one-minute interval, and later put together. It shows the same animal, first grazing, and one minute later deciding to leave. |
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The amusement area in Santa Cruz is called the Boardwalk, and consists of a kilometre of restaurants, amusement arcades, roller coasters and all the other stuff that makes up an amusement park. There is also a cable car running along the whole area. From the beach it looks like this. |
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If you turn the other way around you see the pier, also some sort of amusement area, and if you walk all the way to the end of the pier, when it's dark, the lobsters are all eaten, and the wine is all drunk, the boardwalk looks like this. |
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The city of Monterey has a colourful history. When the area was industrialised somewhere in the end of the 19:th century, the bay was brimming with herring. They fished and fished and got catches so big they were flowing over the rail of the fishing boats. Monterey was soon established as a cannery city. By ruthless over-fishing the herring was finished within a few years. Instead they turned to the tuna fish. After a few years they had finished that too. Then they had to turn to the museum business. Now, the giant sterilising apparatus stand like polished dinosaurs, reminiscent of the lost days of glory. Here is a Science Fiction variety of the same picture, looking like it was taken on an alien planet. Normally, switching the red and blue colours yields nothing of interest, but this time it did. |
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Monterey has an excellent aquarium, showing the life in Monterey Bay. One can descend one floor beneath the sea surface and look into a big fish tank, through metre-high windows. You can see shark, herring and tuna fish swimming around. The water is in movement and everything looks like you are actually in a submarine in the bay. |
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Jellyfish does not make very good friends at all, unless they, as here, are behind a photography-friendly pane of glass. The blue background is intended purely for us photographers, and the very thin fish tank forces the jellyfish to swim side by side. Excellent idea! |
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Funny houses with fun colours and ditto shapes. In this city they're not afraid of a few challenges and some odd houses, that would make the Swedish city planners fall off their chairs. At the end of Pier 39 the sea lions lie since the beginning of the 20:th century and make their “ulk-ulk” sounds all day. They lead a comfortable life, with lots of food, and no threats. The have even become a national monument. |
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Chinatown is a wonderful place. There is an unbelievable amount of things to buy, most of it cheap junk of course, but one is overwhelmed by the enormous amount of stuff. Chinatown has its own style of street-lamps, and Chinese text is more common than English on the walls. Another picture I just couldn't resist: Buddha the Bar. Possible only in America. |
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When I entered this shop to get a picture of the extraordinarily enormous collections of ivory objects, all the shop assistants covered their faces and screamed “No pictuls, no pictuls”. Perhaps it is a Chinese tradition, or maybe it was because the shop happened to be full of ivory, forbidden to trade with. Well, I took a picture through the window anyway, because this boat was so fantastic, I just had to have a picture of it. Look at all the detail, all the finely ornamented soldiers, the rails of the boat, et cetera. Switching the blue and red colours renders a peculiar blue effect, nice in its own way. |
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In the evening we came to the doubtful parts of town, full of doubtful ladies, and gentlemen with questionable intentions. But it looked fine, so I made a picture. I can't understand why the Americans call porno movies “Swedish films”. They have probably never seen the “bad parts” of Stockholm. They're hardly visible. Compared to Amsterdam or London or, as in this picture, San Francisco. |
| Americans are fascinating in their own way. They have to be told everything on signs. Otherwise, the one who forgot to put up the sign can be sued for millions. Even the Road Administration. That's why the roads are spotted with road signs, to us Swedes seemingly superfluous. Most of them have text and no symbols, so their meaning is quickly lost as you pass a forest of them in high speed. On the restaurant one has to be told the floor is slippery after cleaning, in the dance-place they were obliged to tell that “Wooden floors may be slippery”. And in this picture, if you don't lead your bicycle over the railroad tracks you may fall. I don't think any one would lead their bicycles anyway, but the railroad company had guarded themselves against being sued. |
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And then I went home. It is Silicon Valley to the left and Sweden to the right. Spot the difference? |
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California 1994 |
LAX. Down through the smog-sludge. It was like diving into coffee. American coffee. You simply don't understand how big Los Angeles is before you see it from the air, from a sufficient altitude, that is. We lived in a hotel halfway down The Street, in the middle of Sunset Boulevard. The electric installations would make an inspector from the Swedish board for electric safety cry, but it was calm and quiet. There are no police cars driving by outside every third minute down the Sunset, no no. Actually, we didn't hear one single police car siren, and saw no car chases during the time we lived there.
The part of the city called Hollywood houses no film stars any more. There, the slum is slowly coming. Instead the film stars live in Beverly Hills, a heavily guarded area without sidewalks, because people are not expected to walk there.
Of course we took a day in Universal City, the large amusement park of Universal Studios, featuring film interiors and exteriors in the studio back lot, a few kilometres outside L.A. A sign outside said “The world's longest escalator.” Rubbish. The escalator at the subway station Östermalmstorg in Stockholm is longer. But the “Back to the Future” flight simulator ride was a nice one.
Everywhere you got this see-through, American coffee. The food was excellent, especially the hamburgers, but the coffee both tastes and looks like tea.
They said we should take Route 1 if we went to San Francisco. So we did. We stayed overnight in Carmel, the city of Clint Eastwood. Ah, well, it was a long time since he was mayor, the motel staff said. Hooray, the rooms had their own coffee-thing. I could decide my own coffee dosage. I took a double dose, but alas – it was the same dishwater. Carmel was the cleanest-but-one city I have ever seen. The streets looked as if they had been vacuum cleaned (Monte Carlo was the next-cleanest-but-one. All the ugly tire marks in the streets reduce the score). We passed outside Clint's favourite place, The Red Bull, but we didn't go in because one of us wanted fish...
The Madonna Inn Hotel is on the way. It was the most fantastic hotel I have seen, and here is a link to their web page, and it wasn't expensive. The name has nothing to do with the popstar. It's the little city close by which is called Madonna. Even the toilets were fantastic.
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We bumped into Denmark too, out in the middle of the Californian flatlands. Solvang was a little village, founded by Danish immigrants in the 19th century. The signs were in Danish, the waitresses spoke Danish, the schnapps and the “smørrebrød” (sandwiches) were Danish, but the coffee was the same, see-through dishwater. This was the cleanest city I have ever seen. I actually saw a man vacuum cleaning the street by hand. |
