Van Gogh

August 27, 2023

I've been enjoying my work in the gardens, and on Friday they held a potluck for all the staff (which is only about 15 of us). I got to meet everyone I hadn't met already and we shared a BBQ at lunchtime.

The weekend kicked off with some Karaoke in Riverside. On Friday night we all went to Marine's for some dinner and drinks before heading out. There were quite a few of us, but that was ok as her house is massive! She has two roommates, one of which is also French and who joined us for the evening.

When we were ready, we went to the bar for some singing and had a lot of fun, even when Bruno tried to order a long island iced tea and just got regular iced tea. It worked out though, as one of the Germans had a bit too much Jager and needed something plain to drink. Like before, we had songs in all sorts of languages, and it was very fun.

On the Sunday, we were up early to go to an immersive art exhibit in LA called Bubble World. It was a series of rooms, each with a different bubble experience. There was a room where all the sides were screens and you walked through an underwater landscape.

There was a room where you could pull a rope and it would pull a soap bubble up around you. There were two giant ballpits, one with regular sized balls set up to look like a giant bathtub, and another with giant balls! They also had a hot air balloon parachute which you could stand under while the walls displayed a projection of your basket flying over rooftops and into space.

The best room was the one with hanging lights. There were streams and streams of lights hanging from the ceiling, and because all of the walls were mirrors, it looked like they went on forever.

After we left this exhibit, we walked over to the bathrooms and passed the immersive van Gogh exhibit. I'd wanted to go for a while and didn't realise it was in the same place until then, but we decided to go as we were already there! We got a discount because we'd been to one already that day which we didn't know we'd get, and they had free tea samples as we entered.

There were less rooms in this one, and it started like a normal gallery, with reproductions of his artworks and background about his life. There were a couple of sections where they'd created his work as life size and you could stand inside it for a photo.

The main section was two rooms which had animations of his works projected onto the walls and floor. They cycled through his paintings and made them move and come alive. Each of these videos lasted about 20 minutes and there were benches and deck chairs you could sit in to watch. It was very cool, although not quite what I had expected.

After our art excursion, we stopped off at Porto's bakery on our way home. We'd been told about this place a few times and it's very popular in LA with a few locations, all of which are very busy all the time.

The car park was very busy and we had to stalk pedestrians to find their spots and steal them from other drivers. Inside, their were three sections; a cafe where you could get hot sandwiches and salads, a coffee spot where you got all your drinks, and a bakery where all the baked goods were.

We queued up at the bakery section, and looked at the all the cakes on display while we waited. In the end we ordered a guava cheese pastry, two cheese puffs (which were sweet like cheesecakes) a spinach and feta empanada, a neopolitan slice and a chocolate cream slice. I was expecting to pay a lot for famous LA pastries, but all that only came out to $12!