Category Archives: California

A Perfect Travel Day In LA

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A Travel Day in LA

“One’s destination is never a place, but a new way of seeing things.” Henry Miller

There are days that I miss traveling so I  decided to have a travel day in Los Angeles.  This would be my perfect travel day.

It is always a traveling day in my car.  I listen to a Canadian radio station that only plays French music.   I am usually driving on the streets of Paris. There are cds in my car from my trips – most recently Turkey, Argentina and of course Grouplove (LA band who met in Crete).  I am always going somewhere much more exotic than the market or yoga in my head.

For breakfast I have Greek yogurt (the not nonfat kind) with fresh honey and either a latte or cappuccino with whole milk (not soy or almond). Another option is  a croissant from Tavern and a Spanish Latte from Urth Café. Truthfully I drink this several times a week.  Carnation condensed milk in coffee always reminds me of being in my early twenties in Greece.  This was all they used until they became weight conscious and got Starbucks.

I go to a museum on a weekday morning.  There are mostly tourists and schools there.  It is just like exploring a foreign city.   I love modern art so LACMA and MOCA are good choices for me.

For lunch, there is sushi. I pick a place where the clientele is mostly Japanese and I feel like I am in Japan. Some good places are Mori Sushi, Hama Sushi and Sushi Gen. Or you can have a real travel experience and take an interesting guess .  Walk into a place on the street in Little Tokyo or Sawtelle Blvd. They both have Japanese markets , bakeries, stores and restaurants.

I stop off at Travelers Bookcase  to get books for my next trip.  There is always some fabulous conversation going on about somewhere in the world that I never heard of or want to go to.  Natalie has a ton of book recommendations, interesting friends and customers and loves talking about everywhere!!  Isnt that what books are for anyway? To travel without packing? Here are some of the books they love -me too.. https://travelwellflysafe.com/2012/12/18/byob-bring-your-own-books/

In the afternoon I see a foreign film. Now we have many in LA to choose from. They play at the Llaemmle theatres or the Landmark. I have pop-corn (French for popcorn).  I love going to the movies in the afternoon anyway.  The theatre is empty and it feels like sneaking out of school to go to the movies.  I think it is ok to admit that now.  There are two blogs on foreign films if you want to see some of my favorites. (https://travelwellflysafe.com/2012/12/05/favorite-foreign-documentary-films/ and https://travelwellflysafe.com/2012/09/23/favorite-foreign-films/)

I have some Thai iced coffee at Chan Dara and  head out to Venice, Santa Monica or Malibu for a beach walk at sunset. If I am anywhere in the world and there is a beach, I am walking on it. This is followed by Tapas and Sangria at Bar Pinxto.

Dinner is somewhere like  Angelini Osteria  or Osteria Mozza for fresh pasta and traditional  Italian dishes.  Bar Ama is great for Mexican food – not so traditional but so delicious.  My favorite restaurant is Hinoki and the Bird for Asian ambiance, amazing food and green tea donuts.

I am dating someone from Mexico City so we spend the whole day speaking Spanish.   I pretend I understand just like I do on a real trip or with men in general.

At home I start reading the books I have bought and plan my next trip – one where you take a plane. Tomorrow I will have a diet day.

What are your favorite  places in LA?

Fly Safe,

JAZ

www.grouplovemusic.com/

www.tavernla.com/

www.urthcaffe.com/

www.lacma.org/

www.moca.org/

morisushi.net/‎

hama sushi 347 E 2nd St, Los Angeles, (213) 680-3454

sushigen.org/‎

http://www.travelbooks.com/‎

www.laemmle.com

http://www.landmarktheatres.com

chandararestaurants.com/‎

www.barpintxo.com/

www.angeliniosteria.com/

www.osteriamozza.com

www.bar-ama.com/

hinokiandthebird.com/‎

Grand Silence In Santa Barbara Or How To Meditate

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Grand Silence in Santa Barbara or How to Meditate

“Three monks decided to practice meditation together. They sat by the side of a lake and closed their eyes in concentration. Then suddenly, the first one stood up and said, “I forgot my mat.” He stepped miraculously on  the water in front of him and walked across the lake to their hut on the other side.

When he returned, the second monk stood up and said, “I forgot to put my laundry out to dry.” He too walked calmly across the water and returned the same way. The third monk watched the first two carefully in what he decided must be the test of his own abilities. “Is your learning so superior to mine? I too can match any feat you two can perform,” he declared loudly and rushed to the water’s edge to walk across it. He promptly fell into the deep water.

Undeterred, the monk climbed out of the water and tried again and again, only to sink into the water. This went on for some time as the other two monks watched.

After a while, the second monk turned to the first and said, “Do you think we should tell him where the stones are?”

I have just returned from a  silent meditation retreat at Casa De Maria in Montecito, California.  Casa De Maria is the perfect setting for a retreat. It originally belonged to the Order of the Sisters of the Immaculate Heart.  Nuns lived and worked here in silence. During the day there was gentile silence and at night there was grand silence.  The grounds are beautiful with  paths, woods, organic gardens, orange groves and the San Ysidro creek . There are fountains , sculptures and memorials to the children of Hiroshima and gang violence. There is a swimming pool,  meditation chapel and a simple beautiful church.

It is said that with meditation comes clarity and insight. There are studies that twenty minutes of meditation a day will change our brains. We can have less anxiety, stress, depression and hopelessness and more focus and peace.

Sounds good to me. I have attempted to do it for the last seven years. Sometimes I am better than other times . Mostly I am in the other times. I take classes in mindfulness and meditation at UCLA Mindful Awareness Research Center  with Diana Winston. It keeps me on track.  At least on the days I don’t meditate, I think about doing it. It’s amazing how many things I can find to do instead of meditating.  When I do it, I feel great.

Meditation did not come easily to me. It took me three six-week sessions to understand how to do it. I used to come late on purpose for the mindfulness training and skip the meditation.  I was definitely meditationly challenged.   I also have the active busy mind that is hard to shut off.  One day, for whatever reason, it clicked. I got it. Meditation wasn’t sitting in blissful silence. It was sitting “with a lunatic in a phone booth trying to get  out.” Even the most advanced meditators living in monasteries in Tibet or caves in India had bad days when they couldn’t quiet their minds. But when you learn  and apply the techniques of meditation, you can find out where the stones are.

if I can sit  and meditate when I am stressed, afterwards I feel better. So, I was ready for a weekend retreat. This was a year ago.

My first experience with a weekend retreat involved flies. The first morning,  I  had done a walking meditation to the creek. In the next sitting meditation session, I had a fly in my ear. I dealt with the fly exactly how I dealt with every problem in my life.

I start with – it’s my fault  because I shouldn’t have walked to the creek.  I brought the flies in. Everyone else is having a peaceful meditation and I am miserable with a fly. Then I go to the worst case scenario. The fly with get stuck in my ear and lodged in my brain. I will never get rid of the buzzing.  This continues with, someone help me solve this problem. I will ask Marv and Diana what to do and they will help me. But Diana just sat with mosquitos in Burma, I don’t want to do that. I will ask Marv.

It turned out that the flies were bothering everyone. I hadn’t brought them back from my walk. I was the person that said something and once I did everyone chimed in. People even thanked me when they were leaving for bringing it up. (  We had a few question periods. ) There was no way a fly could get lodged in my brain. My choice was to mindfully swat them away or sit with them and see what happened. By the end of the weekend, I sat very still, with the fly walking up and down my glasses in front of my eye.

I understood for the first time what it meant to sit with pain and uncomfortable stuff. There is some inner strength you get from sitting with something uncomfortable and knowing you are ok. Life has pain and can be uncomfortable also.  I couldn’t learn that in twenty minutes.

So I was ready to come and do battle  with the flies and tap into my inner strength once  again. This time they announced that there would be flies as one of the meditation obstacles. But the flies did not choose me. Flies keep you in the present moment. Apparently so does counting.  I began to count. Counting is a meditation tool.  You can count your breath  for a bit and stay centered . I was counting everything  -the leaves, the trees, the flowers, the stones, my footsteps, my breath. By  dinnertime , I was sure I had become Jack Nicholson in As Good As it Gets. I must have OCD. Who knew?.

After dinner,  I have nothing to do for a half hour. The meditation is pretty structured – a bell rings, you wake up, a bell rings, you do sitting meditation, a bell rings for  breakfast and mindful eating, a bell rings for walking meditation etc. This goes on  throughout the day. I knew I would hike on the break. But I had a half hour without a planned meditation or hike, and so I went to a bench by a fountain and began to meditate and I stopped counting.

I had somehow given myself permission to do nothing – to stay in the present and be with what is – both the good and the bad. My mind did not have to be doing a job.  The counting never returned for the rest of the weekend.

What we do with our time, is what we are doing. We spend our  lives by how we spend our days. We need to always be present,  stay focused and notice everything going on around us to have the best possible lives and make the right decisions. I wish I had learned this when starting my adult life. I looked at the UCLA undergrads there this time and thought how lucky you are that you are learning this now. But I still have plenty of time, so I will keep trying. Now, if only I hadn’t used my meditation time today to write this.

Fly Safe,

JAZ

Weird Things I Have Learned In Los Angeles

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Weird Things I’ve Learned In LA

“You’re not going to see people like this again for a long time, he said and I said I always saw people like this & he looked at me for a moment and said, You’re not from around here, are you?” Brian Andreas, Story People

You can drive one block in Los Angeles. In fact most people do.

Parking meters in Venice can only be used for their allotted time. If you try to put more money in, you have to move your car and come back. Is this something new?

The bus system in Los Angeles is a lot like a third world country.  The bus is on a major street and for no reason makes a turn to go down a quiet residential block and then come back. I picture the driver saying “Hm that looks like a nice street. I think I will go there.”

The subway system goes no where that I need to be.

Every few blocks in LA  is a different city or named something different. Ex Beverly Hills, Beverly Hills Adjacent, Beverly Hills Post Office. Beverly Hills Flats.

Los Angeles is the most populated city in  California and the second most populated in the United States, after New York City.

It is illegal to manufacture pickles in the industrial zone of downtown Los Angeles.

When Los Angeles was founded in 1781, 44 people (14 families) lived in El Pueblo de Nuestra Senora la Reina de Los Angeles de la Porciuncula (Town of Our Lady the Queen of the Angeles of the Small Portion). The population grew, but the name shrank to simply “Los Angeles.”

Animals are banned from mating publicly in LA within 1500 feet of a tavern, school or place of worship. It is a big problem for my dog.

The citizens of Los Angeles are called ‘Angelenos’, which  rhymes with casinos.

The Shirley Temple, a non-alcoholic cocktail, was invented in Los Angeles.

Los Angeles is home to over 1.2 million college graduates. Many of them are actor waiters and their parents are not happy.

There are lots of beautiful people in Los Angeles – highly concentrated in upscale nightclubs and expensive shopping areas . There are also lots of ordinary people who make the effort to look their best. Sometimes too much effort leads to scary.

It is not a great place to grow old. I picture plastic surgeons who look at these women who try so hard and say after the anesthesia” Ok, let’s have some fun.”

Los Angeles is considered to be the world’s entertainment center. Here, on an everyday basis, there are over 100 movie and television production crews shooting for their respective soaps/films on location.

Los Angeles is not filed with beautiful blondes. It is 70 per cent non white with Hispanic being the largest percentage. Orange County is filled with beautiful blondes.

There are sixty-five people in Los Angeles who have the legal name Jesus Christ.

The Summer Olympics have been hosted twice by the city of Los Angeles, first in 1932, and then again in 1984.

Jeans and flip-flops go just about everywhere in LA.

The most important industry in LA is manufacturing.

Most of your waiter and waitresses are actors, models, dancers and comedians.

It is illegal for human beings to marry rocks in the City of Los Angeles. But it is not illegal to marry rock stars.

The Rams came to L.A. from Cleveland in 1946. The Dodgers arrived from Brooklyn in 1958, the Lakers from Minneapolis in 1960, and the Kings were an NHL expansion team in 1967. Prior to the Rams’ arrival, the L.A. sports scene centered on UCLA, USC, and two minor league baseball teams

You rarely get a straight answer when asking people in LA what they do for a living. They are between projects or a life coach or a pet psychic etc. 

Every year, about 100,000 women in Los Angeles County have their breasts enhanced.

Someone in LA will always tell you when mercury is in retrograde. Someone from NY will never know this.

In LA, they know how to make a great salad but not bagels, chinese food or cannoli.

In LA most people do not come to a complete stop at a stop sign. It is called the California slide or roll.  I learned that it is illegal. Long day at traffic school for trying to fit in.

There are four times more hamburgers eaten in Los Angeles County than in the rest of California. Is that because we have more In and Out Burgers?

Fly Safe,

JAZ

Leap Of Faith

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“Sometimes  your only available transportation is a leap of  faith “

Margaret Shepherd

I am  the first one to get on a plane to go anywhere I have never been. But sometimes you can travel without ever leaving your hometown.  Every big city has its ethnic neighborhoods with interesting restaurants,  markets, specialty shops, massages, acupuncture, threading,  henna ,fortune tellers , museums, theatres, music and dance programs,  herbalists, houses of worship etc.  There is always an opportunity to learn something new.

That was the experience I had  with the New Grounds Muslim Jewish Fellowship put together by Temple Emanuel and King Fahad Mosque.  In our first meeting a group of women walked in wearing hijabs  (head coverings) and traditional blouses in beautiful colors. The men came in with somber faces . ( I probably had one as well) We stopped to have a break  for them to pray .  It felt strange to stop a meeting to pray. Prayer isn’t so easy for me anyway.

We got to know each other through special exercises. We had to really break down our own barriers to talk about issues.  Slowly, we became friends. Our last meeting was in the mosque. All the women wore the hijabs and everyone had to leave our shoes at the door.   I was inspired to put together a beautifully colored outfit with matching head covering as well. (not my usual black) .

I had seen the blue dome of the King Fahad Mosque in Culver City many times.  As I pulled into the parking lot, a man approached me. He was wearing a black skull cap  and  a long-sleeved white cotton shirt  that came below his knees.  He said,” Are you  one of our guests today?”  He directed me to the women’s entrance.  I watched the men greet each other as they prepared to pray.   It didn’t look strange at all .  It wasn’t  a scary place filled with terrorists.  It was beautiful and welcoming and peaceful.   The blue and white tiles reminded me of the Alhambra in Spain.   I remember learning that blue is a protective color and I look forward to seeing the Blue Mosque in  Istanbul .  I understand more about praying now. Praying five times a day doesn’t seem weird to me anymore. . It is about taking time during your day to think about  something bigger than yourself – to step back and remember what is important.  I am trying to find the time to meditate everyday – also to step back.

I know that we are all Americans. If we had met in a mall, a museum or at a UCLA class, we would have been brought together by similar interests.  This time, we were brought together by our differences.  This is what happens when you travel. The differences are obvious. The similarities are later revealed.

I have learned that a complete stranger in a country so different from yours can become your friend.  If you spend five minutes getting to know someone from another culture, chances are you will find much more in common than you thought.

Leaving the mosque felt exactly like leaving a foreign country.  It feels strange when I arrive and it feels comfortable when I leave.  I ‘m always leaving new friends, and I always want to return.

Fly Safe,

JAZ