John Wise

From our 2023 update, explained below. Caroline and I dipped into Guelaguetza Oaxacan restaurant for brunch today which included a michelada.

Famous for their moles (pronounced Mo-lay), I was able to snag a sampler even though Guelaguetza was still serving breakfast.

Before we headed back to Phoenix, we had to get in one more walk at the beach. How we ended up at Leo Cabrillo State Beach, which is near Thousand Oaks and decidedly not on our way home, I can’t say. Sadly, no other photos exist of this day, and so what else we did today will remain a mystery.

Update: the above is false, though the name of the beach is likely correct. Here, on 25 December 2023, when I’m updating this, due to some circumstances surrounding Facebook reminding us of things, we discovered details of this trip we thought were lost. The photos above this one of the Pacific were taken from Facebook, as the originals are lost.

This is the elixir for the eyes of those who live in arid spaces.

With feet in the sand and head in the clouds, Caroline was about to step forward…

…into the sea so her feet would carry memories of the ocean for the best Xmas ever.

Update: in the original post, I thought that this was the end of the day and that from here we must have gone home, wrong. We had dinner reservations at Tar & Roses in Santa Monica. What follows was found on Facebook.

We are at Zuma Beach.

I don’t normally like sharing food photos, especially ones that are this poor, but considering that we thought we’d lost so many details about this Christmas trip, I’m including my yummy lamb belly in chutney with mint. Don’t forget people; blog while you can, as sooner or later, too much is easily forgotten.

The night ended in Santa Monica with a late-night walk down the pier. And to think that I thought we were on the way home.

I already lamented in the previous post that this trip to L.A. was not written about for nearly a decade after the fact. Here it is, 2023, and for no other reason than having a single location to see the breadth of our travel photos, I’m bringing this out from the dusty hard drive to share with ourselves. Around this time, Caroline and I were seeing many restored buildings in the Downtown Los Angeles core where lofts were going on sale or rent left and right, but not in a million years were we ever going to afford one. Out of curiosity, I glanced at these Sante Fe Lofts and saw that rents for a decent-sized apartment run about $2,000 a month, which, considering how much rents have risen in the rest of the country, means we could now afford one of these while having access to cultural amenities that blow anything in Arizona out of the desert. One other thing: we had breakfast at the Nickel Diner, which explained why we were in the downtown area, except those photos weren’t worth sharing.

Update: Not a great photo, but here at the end of 2023, after I shared the majority of this post, Facebook reminded Caroline of a drink she had on Christmas Day in Koreatown; well, it turned out that other details of our four-day long weekend were shared over there. So, I’m adding a few poor-quality old photos for memory’s sake and filling in some things that had been neglected, like the newly found day four of what we originally thought was a three-day visit to Southern California.

We could linger in the city for a while as our next stop in Santa Ana didn’t open until 10:00 a.m. Caroline learned of the Bowers Museum, and with the Christmas break upon us, it seemed like the perfect time for a cultural getaway weekend. This piece was part of the exhibit Heavenly Horses about equine art from China and Japan. It is titled Horse with Green Saddle and Raised Left Foreleg and was crafted during the Tang Dynasty between 618 and 907 AD.

The next exhibit we ventured into was Sacred Realms: Temple Murals by Shashi Dhoj Tulachan From the Gayle and Edward P. Roski Collection, which featured a number of Buddhist art that was almost psychedelic in its colorful depictions.

This closeup and the one above it are from a piece titled Virupaska (Dharma King of the West Direction) with 16 Attendants by Shashi Dhoj Tulachan from Nepal. It is a modern work from 1994 and was perfect in our eyes.

I can’t be sure which mural this belongs to, so it will have to suffice that it is another closeup of a painting we found especially attractive.

The title of the main exhibition was China’s Lost Civilization: The Mystery Of Sanxingdui, which opened in October and would close in March 2015. We knew that if we didn’t visit it now, we would have never made it otherwise. Regarding these bronze masks, if I had further info, I’d share it, but there’s nothing, so I’ll just take a stab: these are Chinese Lucha Libre masks from about 1250 BCE.

Hmm, did the ancient Chinese visit the Mayan people at some point in the distant past?

From the Bowers website about the exhibition:

“During the summer of 1986, construction workers accidentally uncovered an astounding cache of more than 200 ancient jades, weapons, burned animal bones, over 60 elephant tusks, monumental bronzes, and a life-sized statue of a nobleman at Sanxingdui, about 24 miles outside of the Sichuan Province capital of Chengdu…The objects date to about 1200 BC, a time when it was thought that the cradle of Chinese civilization existed 745 miles to the northeast on the Yellow River in China’s Central Plain region.”

Papua New Guinea also figured in the collection held here at the Bowers Museum. These images are from the ongoing (as of 2023) exhibit Spirit and Headhunters – Art of the Pacific Islands.

Those are human finger bones you are looking at with the pendant at the center still having the nail and skin attached; yeah, I’d wear one of those.

I can tell you that this photograph was taken for Caroline since it is a textile, and I also know that it is of Chinese origin, but that’s about it.

Possibly the most ornate chess set I’ve seen in person. And with this, we left the museum.

One of those old Facebook images that was salvaged well after the original blog post was shared.

Dinner was at a hip Downtown L.A. eatery called Bäco Mercat.

Originally, the photo of Caroline with a drink was attributed to the confusion of where we ate when and was thought to be a Kimchi mixed drink from Pot, which was actually had the night before. This photo of the restaurant’s interior is horrid, but for some reason, I thought it was good enough for Facebook, which is where I downloaded it from, as some of the photos from that weekend no longer exist in our archive.