...Is that I'm really not going to finish what was originally looking like a four-part epic around the holiday my girlfriend and I took to the States earlier in the year. I had good intentions, and had it planned out reasonably well - one post about the two theme parks we visited (Disney and Universal), one about the shopping and eating out we did, and the final one being a more general thing about the transport, accommodation, pool, and our last half-day in LA before getting a plane back home and suffering jet lag for about a week.
While I still remember it well enough, I just can't bring myself to write about it in the sort of detail I'd originally intended. Suffice it to say, then, that it was an excellent break, I didn't get too nervous about the prospect of navigating a strange city using frankly terrible public transport (let's be clear: the buses are pretty great - they're quick and cover a lot of ground - they're just not frequent enough and some routes are quite patchy). The food was excellent, though we both ended up skipping some meals as there was so much food in each one we had. We didn't do as much proper sightseeing as we'd intended, largely because of the trouble with public transport. We didn't get to see as much of my girlfriend's best friend as we'd have liked due to her work commitments. On the upside, while my girlfriend's anxiety and depression symptoms - particularly lethargy - did manifest themselves quite strongly on a couple of occasions, the effects seemed - to me - to be very much short term, and didn't hinder her overall enjoyment of the holiday. And it's not as if Griffith Park or the observatory are going anywhere anytime soon.
A few things deserve honourable mentions, however:
The day at Disney was absolutely awesome, though the queues are terrible. Just getting into the park took longer than it needed to due to comparatively short queues for tickets that took ages to move. Seriously, I do not understand how it can take some people upwards of ten minutes to buy tickets - even for a family group - when all it takes is announcing how many tickets you wish to purchase, whether or not you want the optional extras (tip: yes, you do want the front-of-queue passes) and, at least if you sound foreign, telling them whether or not it's your first visit (which gets you a badge to display proudly as you wander around the park). It took my girlfriend and I maybe two minutes to get our tickets after at least half an hour of queuing, with only three or four groups ahead of us.
Weirdly, there are LA street gangs that associate themselves with Disney characters. It sounds like a joke one of the locals might play on a tourist but, sure enough, you'll see groups of extensively tattooed people wandering round the park, dressed in stereotypical street gang style, but with Mickey Mouse (for example) embroidered on their jackets or tattooed in strategic locations, where any other gang might have something a bit more traditional/threatening...
Both my girlfriend and I felt that the best ride of the day was the Indiana Jones Adventure though, even in this day and age, more sedate experiences like Pirates of the Carribbean (with its somewhat incongruous and obviously hastily-added Captain Jack Sparrow animatronics) are still pretty cool and enjoyable. I'm a little upset that we missed every single opportunity throughout the day to meet Honda's Asimo robot, but it's not as if we were ever idle. There is honestly so much to do there, let alone just wandering around and observing the many actors portraying famous characters, that one could easily spend a few days just at Disney... and the daily finales of fireworks and shows could probably stand up to repeat viewings from different vantage points.
By contrast, Universal is pretty tiny... and the newest ride - TransFormers: The Ride-3D - is probably the best of the 'traditional' theme park experiences (or perhaps I show a bias here?). However, the studio tour mixes in factual stuff about the studios and more motion ride shenanigans, including a 360° 3D section based around King Kong and some first-hand experience of practical special effects. If you're efficient in your planning - and have the VIP passes - you can almost certainly see everything it has to offer in one day. We ended the day watching the Waterworld show, which had a brilliant bit of pre-show audience participation, though it did lead to a couple of English tourists of the sunburnt variety getting very vocally upset when a bucket of water got chucked at them. Not sure I understand why, considering the seats they'd occupied were so clearly labelled "SOAK ZONE". While the show is very well done, the most impressive thing for me was that, at 20 minutes, it was far more efficient at telling its story than the movie it's based upon.
Weirdly, I ended up buying more TransFormers toys at Universal (three) than I did at either Toys'R'Us (one) or Target (one), and we were advised against going to Walmart, so I can't say much about them.
Even more weirdly, my girlfriend and I were mistaken (for the second time in our two-year relationship) for father and daughter. As we entered the theatre for the Despicable Me Minions ride, we found ourselves in different blocks of seats (each row has twelve seats, with an aisle between each group of four, and we were preceded by a group of three). An older couple - also English, if I remember correctly - offered to move back one seat, suggesting that I could "sit with one of your children". More than a little embarrassing... not that it stopped me taking them up on the offer.
One of the biggest advantages of staying with my girlfriend's best friend was that her appartment complex has two swimming pools. I haven't been swimming in decades, and had to buy a pair of swimming shorts before we went out there since it's been so long. I think my last pair of trunks had my first/middle school swimming badges sewn onto them. Swimming was a great way to start the day and, once I'd plucked up the courage to join my girlfriend in her morning swim, I began to regret not getting to it sooner. That said, considering how wheezy I got after a short time in the pool, never even completing one full length, it seems I'm completely out of practice. God only knows when I'll next have an opportunity to swim... It probably won't be in the sea at Skegness, though...
The flight home wasn't as pleasant as the flight out there. For starters, we were sat apart - each on the end of a row of seats, either side of an aisle - and both of us were sat behind people who dropped their seats back without warning, which meant the in-flight entertainment was at an odd angle and our breathing room was a little restricted. The food wasn't as good, either, though the service was still very good. Next time, I think we'll upgrade to business class, if not first...
My girlfriend has hinted at some surprise that we didn't break up as a result of the holiday but, while our relationship may not be plain sailing, we've yet to argue about anything significant (and frequently fake arguements about whether she's 'Northern' (she's not) or whether I'm a Cockney (nope). Our sense of humour still tends along the same lines, though her anxieties occasionally cause a more severe reaction to some of my 'practical joking' than I had anticipated. Since the holiday, we've celebrated our second anniversary (a quick meal out and an evening of awesome improvised comedy at The Comedy Store), so our relationship is certainly still going.
Getting back to work after the holiday was easy enough, though I had to come home early on my first day back due to jetlag. Things have been unexpectedly hectic since then, with one of the year's largest products taking right up till the last minute to come together, and our regular deadlines compressed to ensure the products were delivered before Christmas.
There was also the office Christmas party, which I decided not to attend due to my experience of too many office Christmas parties with my last full-time job. I dodged out of most of them over the years, but felt more-or-less obliged to attend others. The company I worked for back then was basically banned from returning to every venue they used over about a five-year period for one reason or another (generally the foul behaviour of the younger members of staff), and the way they were organised never really suited me. Sit-down meals tended to descend into drunken binging, and those parties that offered only finger food were little different, except that I tended to leave hungrier.
My current employers insisted they'd be different whenever I told Christmas party horror stories from my past, yet they turned out to be much the same based on the stories I heard on Monday. My boss got paralytic and did several embarrassing things some of which, had she been male, might well have resulted in the loss of her job. One of the girls in Sales was desperately trying to chat up the gay designer. One of the guys in Sales was desperately trying to chat up anything female with a pulse. One might think there was the opportunity for a crossover there, but she apparently wasn't interested in anyone but the gay designer. It sounded as though some people had a good time, to be fair, but there was vomiting and, if the MD (who left early, and so was reporting second hand news and could easily have been joking) is to be believed, some fighting as well.
Nevertheless, we met all our deadlines... though the schedule wasn't especially well considered as it transpired that our distributors closed a day earlier than us, and so were unable to receive the last couple of magazines. We only received next year's schedule (beyond April) this week, and several dates look rather dodgy... Hopefully there will be some discussion about it in the New Year.
And so, here we are, on Christmas Eve. All our presents are wrapped, but we're having a quiet Christmas Day together in my flat, then heading to my folks on Boxing Day. After a day back home, we're heading off to Lincolnshire for a few days with my girlfriend's family, then returning before New Year, since I return to work the following day... The biggest thing we're doing is baking some Christmas cookies to take with us... Our Christmas dinner will be decidedly non-traditional.
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