California Trip (Part 6) - The Queen Mary

Our last two nights in California were spent on board the Queen Mary in Long Beach. I had been to the Queen Mary several times before, but never stayed overnight on the ship. It always used to be too expensive, but now, because of the recession, and the declining tourists, it was more affordable, around $90 per night.

For most of the time there, it seemed like we had the entire ship to ourselves. I think I counted maybe 10 other cars in the parking lot. It didn't surprise me when I heard, later on, that the Queen Mary was about to be under new management, and plans were underway to turn the ship into a floating casino. I guess that's the only way to make it profitable again.

I think it would help the Queen Mary considerably if they rethought some of their prices in other areas as well as the hotel. The parking, for example, costs $15 per day for hotel guests. They don't include it in their room package. There are no discounts for any of the guided tours, and the tour I was the most interested in "The Paranormal Shipwalk Tour" was $50 per person.

The family seemed to enjoy staying on the ship, but Christy told me that she got a very "creepy" vibe from it. They say that parts of the ship are supposed to be haunted, so feel free to check out the pictures I took and see if you spot any ghosts.

(Pictures: 1. Christy and the kids in front of the ship. 2. The Queen Mary. 3. Sara and Kyle bouncing on the bed in the room. 4. The interior of the ship. 5. Sara next to the bathtub, which allows you to choose between salt water and sea water. 6. The front of the boat.)

California Trip (Part 5) - Long Beach

Long Beach is a nice city, and I lived there for almost 10 years. It has a lot of picturesque streets, nice restaurants, museums, generally friendly people, and not nearly as much traffic as the more popular "beach cities." It has almost everything you could want from a beach city, except for the actual beach itself. Long Beach has a brick wall out in the ocean, which they call a "breaker", that keeps the ocean calm and motionless. There are no waves at all, and it's because of this the beaches of Long Beach have not become popular. That never bothered me in the past, because I rarely go swimming in the ocean anyway. What I always liked about Long Beach was the price. It was always cheaper to live there than any of the other beach cities. Whereas Santa Monica and Venice Beach were charging over a thousand a month for rent, you could get by with paying maybe seven or eight hundred in Long Beach.

Now...all that has changed.

The rents in Long Beach have skyrocketed. An apartment that I once paid $675 a month for is now $1400. And this seems to be the norm there throughout the entire city. This is a big mistake. This past weekend when I was out there visiting, I drove around many, many streets of Long Beach, and I literally saw hundreds of "FOR RENT" signs. People are leaving in droves. Why? Because it's too damn expensive. Long Beach is trying to become another Santa Monica, even building a new pier and a ferris wheel, and expanding the shops near the Aquarium and Queen Mary. The only problem is that people are not coming. The place is turning into a ghost town. Perhaps if they removed the "breaker", as many residents have suggested, and cleaned up the beach, then people would come. But right now Long Beach doesn't really offer a lot to entice tourists, with the exception being the Queen Mary and the Aquarium.

Once the economy improves, and if rent prices come down in Long Beach, I'd be happy to live there again. It's the lack of tourists and big crowds that attracted me to the city to begin with. But for now, I'm content with Austin, the #1 Best Bargain City to Live In (says Forbes Magazine.)

(Pictures: 1. The Long Beach skyline. 2. One of my old apartment buildings in LB. 3. Sara at El Dorado Park. 4 & 5. Two streets of Long Beach. 6. The "Potholder" Cafe.)

California Trip (Part 4) - Downey

For most tourists visiting Los Angeles, Downey isn't the sort of city you'd want to stop and visit, unless you were staying in L.A. for several months and you've run out of stuff to do. The only "tourist attraction" in Downey is "The World's Oldest Operating McDonalds." That's it. Ok, it's also the city where the Carpenters and James Hetfield (of Metallica) were born, but they've long since moved away (or died.)

Having grown up in Downey, though, I still visit the city regularly just to see what's new and what's changed. I took the family to see the old house I grew up in. The new owners have painted it and added a strange brick wall around the side yard. I have to admit, it's hard to look at your childhood home with new owners living there. It's kind of sad. I had always hoped my mom could live there until the day she died. But unfortunately that's not the way things turned out.

Downey has changed quite a bit since I was a kid. It's now become a primarily Hispanic, working class city. A lot of the old restaurants I used to go to are gone. "Salvatores," an Italian restaurant that was there since I was a kid, went out of business, as did the 70's style "Foxy's" restaurant. No great loss as far as Foxy's is concerned, but I did enjoy Salvatores. The grocery store "Beach's" (the place where I got my first job) is still there, but when I went inside, it was pretty empty. I don't expect it to last much longer either.

As for Downey's one big attraction, the old "McDonalds", the city doesn't seem to be taking good care of it. The museum next to the restaurant is filthy, and the bathrooms were totally disgusting. If this is your biggest tourist spot, at least try to keep it clean.

The one thing that Downey does have going for it, though, is its location. It's only a 13 mile drive to downtown Los Angeles. This is why my mom's old house sold for nearly half a million dollars. Location, location, location. But would I buy a house there? No way.

(Pictures: 1 & 2. The Oldest Operating McDonalds in the World. 3. The house I grew up in, now painted blue. 4. The street I grew up on, Puritan St. 5. Beach's Market, my first job. 6. One of the better restaurants in Downey, the South Pacific Thai Restaurant.)

California Trip (Part 3) - Santa Monica

Of all of the beaches in Southern California, the one in Santa Monica is probably the best. It's definitely the most famous. The pier there is historical, and it's been featured in a lot of movies. Santa Monica is the city that Long Beach is trying to be, but failing miserably (more on that later.)

In the past, our family has always traveled to California during Christmas, so it's always been cold. This time was sunny and warm, so it was the kids first real experience at the beach. They really enjoyed it, but they seemed to like the sand more than the water.

On the day we were there, there was some sort of art exhibit displayed on the beach. Over 4,000 crosses were put into the sand to represent the soldiers who have died in Iraq. (see picture above) They were also displaying photographs of dead and wounded Iraqi civilians, some of them extremely gory. I understand and appreciate what the artists are trying to do, but since this is a beach filled with small children, I'm not sure this is appropriate.

(Pictures: 1. The famous Santa Monica sign. 2. Sara in the sand. 3. The art exhibit on the beach. 4. The pier. 5. Christy and Kyle walking in the sand. 6. Santa Monica)

California Trip (Part 1) - Disneyland

We just got back from our five day trip to California. One of the first places we went was (naturally) Disneyland. It was Sara's third time there, and Kyle's first. Sara loved it, as always. Kyle just gets excited at everything. I think we could have taken him to the post office, and he would have been equally as excited.

Sara is now 40 inches tall, which allowed her to go on more rides than the previous years. However, we now had to pay for her to get into the park (unlike Kyle).

Admission to Disneyland is currently $69 for adults, and $59 for kids. So for the three of us to go, it cost us nearly $200. Once Kyle is a couple of years older, then he will be $59 as well. Food is also ridiculously overpriced there as well, and it's not very good.

So...there's a reason we only go to Disneyland once a year.

(Pictures: 1.) Christy, Sara & Kyle at the front gates. 2.) Mickey Mouse's house. 3.) Sara and Kyle meet Mickey. 4.) Sara & Kyle meet Pluto. 5.) The Materhorn (which Sara was finally able to ride.) 6.) Sara in New Orleans Square.

Movies With the Wife

My wife Christy and I recently decided that we would try to make Saturday night our "movie night." Once the kids had gone to sleep, we would watch either a movie we had rented from the local Blockbuster, or we'd watch something that I already own that she hadn't seen before.

Watching a movie together without the kids interrupting it every few seconds had been a challenge. When we were first living in a one bedroom apartment, the kids slept in the living room, so we really had no opportunities to watch "grown up" movies. If we wanted to watch a movie, it had to be a Disney movie or some other cartoon. We now, finally, have some freedom.

The challenge I face now is trying to find movies that have Mandarin Chinese subtitles. Christy can watch movies without the subtitles, but she often has no idea what's going on. Imagine someone whose primary language isn't English, trying to watch a Woody Allen movie without subtitles. You're just better off not watching it at all.

We have a blu-ray player in our house, and many blu-ray discs now feature Chinese subtitles, but not every one. And sometimes the movie is mis-labeled. The disc will say it has Chinese subtitles, but it will actually be either Cantonese, or "simplified" Chinese, which Christy hates.

It's really hit and miss to find something with Chinese subtitles. "Batman Returns", for example, has Chinese subtitles, but the sequel "The Dark Knight" does not. Why? It's bizarre. I wrote an email to Warner Brothers and I told them that they need to include the subtitles on more of their movies. Of course, they didn't reply back. On a "Region 1" blu-ray disc, Taiwan is listed as one of the territories, so why not include Chinese subtitles on every disc?

Sometimes, even when we DO have the subtitles, Christy still doesn't share my taste in movies. I tried to get her to watch "A Clockwork Orange" and "2001: A Space Odyssey" and she couldn't make it through either one. And she hated "A Clockwork Orange", even though she only watched about 40 minutes. Then last night we watched the James Bond classic "Goldfinger", and she didn't like that either.

"Oh, this is so bad. The acting is bad. The story is stupid. And he just treats women like they are his toys." Christy said. "I like the new James Bond movies better."

To some extent, I agreed with her. "Goldfinger" has some surprisingly banal dialogue. The villain, Goldfinger, keeps James Bond alive for FAR too long, just so he can kill him in the most dramatic way possible. What is the benefit of blowing up James Bond in Fort Knox when he could have been offed much sooner? And Goldfinger just lets Bond walk around his compound leisurely, drinking martinis and having sex with his pilot. What the hell? Then the pilot, Pussy Galore, suddenly has a change of heart at the end and decides to join Bond to defeat Goldfinger. Why? Because they had sex together? Give me a break.

We printed a list of Yahoo's "100 Movies to See Before You Die", and "Goldfinger" was on that list. Personally, after just watching it, I prefer the new "Casino Royale" with Daniel Craig. "Quantum of Solace", the newest one, is not quite so good. Our next movie together will most likely be "Blade Runner", another movie listed in the top 100. I have a feeling Christy won't make it through that either.

A Year in Austin

This month marks the one-year anniversary that our family arrived in Austin.

Austin was never one of our top choices of a place to live once we arrived in America. I knew very little about this city, other than it being the capital of Texas, and I've never been fond of Texas. I had always dismissed Texas as a state full of too many gun-totin', cowboy-hat wearin' rednecks. Those people do exist here, but not in Austin. Thankfully, Austin is different.

As luck would have it, we live in the most liberal, open minded city of Texas. The wide cross-section of people who live in Austin is probably its best feature. It's just too bad there aren't more interesting things to do here. Weekends are a challenge to find something that our family can do for fun. We often have to drive far outside the city just for some excitement. Also, it seems like most major concert tours seem to bypass Austin completely. Yes, we did have Bruce Springsteen here last month, but what about The Eagles, AC/DC, Coldplay, Green Day, Metallica, Elton John & Billy Joel, Fleetwood Mac, ZZ Top, and many others? All of these bands are playing (or played) either in Houston, Dallas, or San Antonio, but NOT Austin. Austin is the "music capital of the world", so what's going on? To give the city some credit though, they DO have "Austin City Limits" (ACL), which will feature Pearl Jam, in early October.

Like I had mentioned before, I grew up in Southern California, so it's tough to compare Austin to L.A. I do miss the beaches and the palm trees. I miss the 3rd Street Promenade in Santa Monica, The Getty Center, the Griffith Park Observatory, the shops and restaurants on 2nd street in Long Beach, and so much more. Maybe if I had grown up in Emporia, Kansas, I would think Austin was the greatest city ever, but that's not the case.

The only major city we have yet to see here in Texas is Houston. I expect there is probably a lot to see and do there, since it's the biggest city in Texas. However, I have heard only negative comments about Houston from people who live here in Austin. They seem to think it's an overcrowded city that has no charm whatsoever. We'll find out pretty soon. My wife Christy just discovered that one of her old friends from Taiwan lives in Houston, so we'll be going out for a visit within the next month or so.

A lot has happened in the last year. Our family went from living in a studio sized room at the "Extended Stay America" hotel, with no jobs and an uncertain future, to a pretty decent, two bedroom apartment. Christy and I both still have jobs, but the future is still uncertain. It's just not quite as bad as it was. In this economy, though, our luck can change very quick.

As long as we're still making (and saving) money, we'll stay in Austin for a while. It's inexpensive here, and there are far worse places we could be living (Detroit, anyone?)

(Picture: Austin at night)