☆paging doctor gorgeous☆

Man, I've had a day.

Yesterday it was ungodly hot, and of course, they don't run the AC here either (thought I would escape that hell when I moved out of my old roommate's house? NOPE!) and so at night, my room was upward of 80 degrees and it was almost impossible to sleep. I had to get up at 8am to catch my train to Los Angeles, and I ended up with maybe three hours of sleep under my belt by the time my alarm went off.

I could have postponed it. I didn't. I knew it was going to be hot today too, and I didn't want to be stuck in this house. I'm glad I went. It was in the low 90's walking around in LA, but it was 100 degrees here where I live, so I can only imagine how hellish the house must have been, especially upstairs. It was rough out there, it was damned hot, but it would have been worse if I had stayed.

And I had fun!

I love taking public transit in LA, I know that might sound odd. I love riding the trains. I love lookin' at the maps and navigating. I like tapping my little card on the scanner. Plus it's cheap! I zipped all around LA for roughly 10 hours and it cost me all of five bucks.

My first stop was the Natural History Museum, with a short detour through the Rose Gardens. My main reason for wanting to visit the museum was that a wildlife photographer, Ronan Donovan, is someone I really admire. I love his work, especially with wolves. There's a wonderful documentary about them called Kingdom of the White Wolf, if you're into that sort of thing. There's an exhibit there, a gallery of his work and some educational material about wolves, their place in the ecosystem, and details about the particular wolves he had spent so much time tracking and documenting.

Other than that, man, the place is so big I got lost. I took SO many pictures. Dioramas, dinosaurs, gems and minerals. Then, of course, the gift shop. I do love a gift shop.

There was an exhibit about P-22, a famous mountain lion that lived in Los Angeles' Griffith Park and was one of the most-studied mountain lions in the area. He's widely known and beloved to the people of Southern California (the people of Los Angeles in particular, for obvious reasons). They had P-22 merch, and I couldn't help it, I bought a P-22 plushie and a shirt.

Next, I went to Little Tokyo. I got lunch, poked around in the shops, got myself some matcha softserve, and went shopping in not one, but two Japanese grocery stores. I was lucky enough to find the seasonal sakura green tea pocky, whee. It was very crowded today, people just standing around in huge groups everywhere trying to stay in the shade, and all the shops were so packed it was hard to move inside.

My last stop was The Last Bookstore, a really cool, indie book store. They have a vault, they have a rare books room, used books, new books, records, dvds and vhs and even cassette tapes. It's decorated in a really unique fashion and has several installations inside that have gone quite viral in the past. It's a big place, with a huge bottom floor and then a winding wooden staircase upstairs, an art gallery, and some shops that have been rented out by local artists selling their wares. It is a very cool place.

I don't know how I made it, sweating to death, walking and climbing stairs for hours and hours in the heat, on three hours of sleep, but I sure enough did it. I came home and took a cold bath, cold as the water could get, and now I'm downstairs with all the windows open waiting for it to hopefully cool off a little, at least enough to get some sleep, because I am exhausted. I'm so happy I don't have to do anything tomorrow (except for call my mom).