Fourth of July
Parking near the beach is extremely expensive on a holiday. Only slightly less expensive on weekdays, but you gotta know where to park. Parking anywhere in LA is usually a bitch, but that’s the only good reason for not having a car.
Had lunch at the Seafood Cafe on the King Harbor Pier. $3.99 specials, not including drinks. And my stomach is still not used to American-sized portions, so I spend the rest of the afternoon full. They have good calamari and clam platters too (which we had a month ago, the first time we went there).
Fireworks show at 9 pm, which meant we get to enjoy the beach for six hours. Coming back from the restroom I trip over a sign, half buried in the sand:
WARNING
Water is contaminated with
runoff from sewage and storm drains
Swimming may cause illness
Good thing we took one look at the brown gack that passes for seawater on this beach and decided not to take a dip.
Anyway, it’s too cold for swimming for someone who’s lived most of his life in the tropics (although there were a LOT of people in the water). Most days I can’t even get into the pool outside our apartment door, and that sucker’s HEATED.
It starts to get dark around half past seven or so. Twilight in the tropics takes about fifteen minutes… one moment it’s bright and sunny, the next - BAM - it’s the dark of night. Not much in between.
Here dusk is a long, drawn-out process that takes a couple of hours or so. Takes a little getting used to. It doesn’t get really dark until about a quarter to nine.
And we settle back for the fireworks, and we realize that the fog has rolled in. About fifty feet or so above the pier. Really low cloud cover.
So the fireworks are going off - you’d see this gorgeous red or blue or white trail of sparks go up, disappear into the low-hanging clouds, hear a loud BOOM, and see nothing except a patch of cloud momentarily light up blue or red. Sometimes we’d get lucky, and see the lower half of a burst, but mostly it was dull thumps and clouds flashing different colors.
Ah, well. My brother’s going on about the fireworks he’d watched last year over the Washington Monument - Don and Bench say they enjoyed the display last year at the Angels Stadium in Anaheim. I’m a little disappointed, after freezing my butt off for several hours, to watch this slightly soggy display of American patriotism.
But then I realize that I’m not that patriotic to America yet (not like the flag-waving college students we kept running into, wearing shirts Magic-Markered "Fuck Osama"). So it’s probably a pretty good indicator of how I feel about the Fourth of July.
Cold and slightly damp. At least I’m not going hungry. Not yet.
