I was sent off to San Diego for a business conference from March 7-9 this year. Usually this conference is on weekdays; I wasn't best pleased at losing a weekend and having to miss a couple of dance events to go. I took my new digital camera along and managed to figure out how to use it. It then took me two more weeks to make time to figure out how to get the pictures out of the camera and edited, which is why I'm just now mentioning this trip.
The hotel was the Horton Grand, located in the so-called Gaslamp district, which is in fact an old bars-and-brothels district called the Stingaree. For tourist purposes, gaslamps apparently sound more romantic than brothels. The problem is that San Diego never actually had any gaslamps. That hasn't stopped civic leaders: they simply installed fake ones along the streets. We had a conference-sponsored walking tour on the Friday night, with a guide full of historical trivia like this, much of it concerning how artificial the downtown district is. It's not just the gaslamps; many of the historical buildings have been moved around too. It was getting dark pretty fast as we strolled around, so I don't have many other pictures from this, though I went back and took a few of the same sights on Sunday. I did get an okay one of the convention center itself, home of San
Diego Comicon. This was when I realized that San Diego reminded me of
Yokohama. Buildings like sails! Unfortunately, this completely walls
off any ocean view from street level.
The hotel was a century or so old and consciously quaint in its decor. I was particularly amused by the bathroom, which featured a toilet with an overhead tank (wood!) and pull-chain, and a decorative hanging vanity rack. Training their maids must be an amusing experience: not only did they tie the washcloths in decorative bows around the towel racks, they pleated the tissues daily. This intensity of maid service must be why they refuse to do extended checkout, which is a real pain with a conference running through early afternoon.
Also in the realm of overly-quaint interior design was that all the pictures and mirrors were hung from ribbons. Hanging pictures using hooks over the molding is a very valid Victorian practice. My friends Patri & Barbara Pugliese followed it scrupulously - no nail holes in their walls, just wires hanging down to support the pictures. But the Horton is not hanging these from the moldings. The bows are just attached to the wall, and may not even be providing any actual support to the pictures. I didn't take one off the wall to look. So the wallpaper is going to be full of nail-holes anyway. Really, if you're going to do Victorian decor, you need to mind the details.
I was suffering badly from jet lag and excess people the whole trip and didn't get out much in the evenings, but the conference shipped a few of us off to the amazing San Diego Zoo on Friday morning, where I photographed funny-colored lizards and adorable pandas. I set up an album of the trip for anyone who wants to follow along virtually.
This wasn't the sort of conference where corporations show up and give you fancy swag, but one of the academic/professional organizations that wants us to recruit for them showed up (providing one of the more skillful and hilarious presentations of the weekend) and handed out t-shirts and small, glowing lava lamps. Sadly, they were total fakes. They glow nicely, but the lava doesn't actually move! It's just lumps of plastic sculptured to look like a real lava lamp. Fooey on them! I was amused to once again be figuring out how to pack a rocket safely for airplane travel, though.
On Sunday after my conference ended I had a little bit of time to walk around San Diego. I was determined to get to the San Diego Maritime Museum, a harborside attraction which had several tall ships, among them the much-missed Rose, which was formerly homeported in Connecticut but was purchased for the film Master and Commander and moved to California. The hotel desk clerk seemed to think non-Californians were pretty frail and tried to convince me that I needed to take a cab the mile or so to the harbor. With several hours to kill and beautiful sunny weather to enjoy I thought he was insane. I spent a pleasant few hours strolling through downtown and along the harbor area (which had no place to swim or even wade, much to my frustration), scrambling over a couple of tall ships, and wandering through maritime exhibits before heading back to my hotel and off to the airport. You can follow along on my stroll in my San Diego Sights photo album.
I ended up with two little souvenirs: a palm frond flower handed out as a gift by an enterprising vendor, a sort of waterfront version of the pixel-stained technopeasant. He was doing a bravura business in tips and larger purchases from pleased tourists, and I bought from him a small bouquet of blue roses that pleased me immensely by being made of curled wood shavings (by genuine peasants in Indonesia). Since I'm allergic to roses I can't enjoy the real thing - not that anyone is prone to send me roses anyway - so I was pleased to have a really good-looking substitute. I also bought a couple of dance music CDs and a really good book on a Napoleonic Wars-era mutiny at the museum shop.
San Diego doesn't have nearly as many interesting sign graphics as Japan does, but I spotted this one on my way to my gate. Apparently in San Diego, visual paging involves inserting a popsicle stick in your ear.
What an interesting trip you had! I'm envious about the weather, since it's been snowing and hailing where I am.
You seem to have hit one of the things that I like least about Southern California - the impulse to fake everything up. Taking a genuine Victorian hotel, moving it, adding period details like the picture ribbons, and getting them wrong. Sigh.
Even the wooden roses are an example of that, no matter how delightful. And the fake lava lamp (though a really real lava lamp would use real lava, of course) is just excruciating.
On the other hand, the faked-up landscapes of the zoo gave the real animals a good showcase, and the reconstructed costumes on the ship were good.
Maybe I'm just being harsh because I'm from Northern California, and we aren't generally charitable to our near neighbors.
Posted by: Abi | March 29, 2008 at 05:23 AM
What? Not only was the Gaslamp District fake, but so were the lava lamps? That's terrible. It sounds like DisneyLand without the fun rides. (Yes, I love DisneyLand because that's where Sue and I basically courted each other while attending the 1984 worldcon down the street.) On the other hand, the idea of buildings that move around reminds of Miyazaki's animation films.
Posted by: Serge | March 30, 2008 at 12:56 AM
Yes, the fakeness was a real problem for me. It really turned me off the downtown. The idea that the whole Gaslamp District is a complete fiction just astounds me. Why not go with the city's (interesting) actual history? Serge's right about it being like Disneyland. But the roses solve a real problem for me, and I deliberately got the blue ones because they looked more fake than the various pink and red ones. I will put them in a vase with colored stones or something.
The lava lamps shouldn't be blamed on southern California - they were brought in by the representatives from a national organization that probably buys them in bulk and takes them everywhere.
Serge:
Somewhere in my two disks full of pictures from Japan, I have a picture of the building used as the model for one of the builings in Spirited Away. It's in Kyoto. Eventually I will get around to sorting and editing and posting all of those pictures. Someday.
Posted by: Susan de Guardiola | March 30, 2008 at 08:13 PM
It's been a year or two since I saw Spirited Away, but do show us the Kyoto pictures when it's convenient. Then I'll watch the film again. (I wonder if I should do that with my 6-year-old nephew. It might scare him though. Well, we'll see how things go.)
Posted by: Serge | March 31, 2008 at 09:35 AM
The red-headed lizard is almost not-real.
(Picture 35: an agave of some kind. And that is bird of paradise. There's also giant bird of paradise, where the flowers are black and white instead of red and orange. About six feet off the ground, minimum, and scaled to match.)
Posted by: P J Evans | April 11, 2008 at 10:51 PM
Birds of paradise? Well named indeed. We've got lots of those in our backyard. In the photo I link to below, it's the big red & orange plant to the right.
http://pics.livejournal.com/serge_lj/pic/0000w55s/g13
Posted by: Serge | April 12, 2008 at 12:13 AM