Getty Villa

In the morning, Lizy and I drove to the Getty Villa. LA drivers seemed to honk more than Northern California drivers.

To get to the parking lot of the Getty Villa, you drive along a sort of faux-Roman road, setting the tone for the classical inspiration of the museum.

As we walked on the path from the parking lot to the museum, the Getty Villa seemed to be slowly revealing its grandeur to us. The hallways widened and we began to catch glimpses of grand gardens with reproductions of Roman and Greek statues, manicured hedges, and ornate fountains.

We walked into the museum and went straight to the special exhibition on the second floor to join a free tour that had just started. The tour guide was an elderly Bostonian woman. She kept apologizing for the way she pronounced her A’s, but honestly, the New England twang didn’t seem too noticeable to me.

The special exhibit compared and contrasted pottery from Ancient Greece, the Maya Civilization, and the Moche Civilization. I was already familiar with Ancient Greece and the Maya, but I had never heard of the Moche before. Since I assume the reader is in the same boat, I’ll repeat some of what the tour guide said about them. The Moche Civilization reached its peak around the second half of the first century AD in what is now Peru. Their pottery was distinctive because of its unique iconography and the geometry of the handles; each jug handle consisted of two cylindrical shapes that connected to the jug and joined together to form a spout. To me, they all looked like kettlebells. A man on our tour from St. Louis speculated aloud that the handle/spout design was probably meant to make pouring easy while minimizing evaporation.

The tour guide went into great detail about the kinds of repeated symbols that could be found on the pottery from the different cultures.

We ate a nice lunch at the museum cafe. From our seat outside the cafe, we had a sweeping view of the villa. Lizy said she learned her lesson from when we went to the archaeological museum in Mexico City that it’s better to eat in the museum cafe than walk around hungry—even if you overpay, it’s better than ruining your museum-going experience. Lizy got a flatbread pizza and I got a caprese sandwich. The food was tasty.

After lunch, we walked around the first floor of the Getty Villa. On the first floor, the museum had its permanent collection. The collection was composed of antiquities from classical Greece and Rome. Most of the artifacts were marble statues, but there were also bronze statues and terracotta pottery.

There was a little section themed around sexually explicit pottery. One pot had a man peeing into a pot being held by his slave. Another had a youth masturbating while looking at an old woman. I can’t imagine buying a pot with a sexually explicit image like this, although Lizy does know a woman who sells mugs with breasts on them. The mugs look tame compared to what the Greeks were into, though. Was this a niche market, or did most Greeks buy sexually explicit pottery? If you bought a pot with a sexually explicit image, did you have it in a special room or was it just in the general collection? These kinds of usage metrics have probably been lost to time.

When we were wandering the wonderful garden, we bumped into tourists from Mexico City. When they found out Lizy was from Ottawa, they mentioned they had just gone on a trip to Ottawa. They said it was beautiful but that you had to watch what neighborhood you walked into. They walked back from Rideau Hall to their hotel and accidentally ended up in an area that made them afraid.

Once we parted ways, Lizy turned to me and said, “Imagine that. Quiet Ottawa scared someone from Mexico City.”

After meandering through the rest of the garden, we walked back to the car and drove to the beach.

The Beach

We drove along the coast until we found a beach to stop at. We parked on the side of the road on a bluff above the beach and spent some time finding a path down. At the foot of the path where it entered the beach, two women were setting up a big sunshade structure, a table, and a bunch of drinking game paraphernalia. They had music blasting to get them in the party mood.

We walked around the bluff to get away from the music. The beach was about a half mile long. There was a cluster of surfers in the water, and as we were walking, more surfers were paddling out to the pack. Other than the surfers, the only people in the water were just putting their feet in up to their ankles. No one was swimming. When I stepped into the water, I realized why: it was rocky and shallow until quite far out, so it made for quite an inconvenient swimming spot.

We laid out our stuff on the beach, but right away I wanted to explore further down to see if there was a better spot to swim. I tried to convince Lizy to come with me, but she didn’t want to leave our stuff. To be quick, I ran across the beach shirtless in my swim trunks. I passed where the surfers were paddling out, then a really rocky section. At the very end of the beach, it was a little better for swimming.

The waves were calmer and it got deeper faster, so you didn’t have to walk on rocks for so long. I swam a few lengths back and forth. There was one other person swimming in the water.

I didn’t swim for too long since I didn’t want to leave Lizy alone. Once I got out, I ran back across the beach to her. When I got back, I told her about the good swimming spot I had found. She told me she had befriended our beach neighbors and told them about the Getty Villa. We sat together talking about the museum and the beach.

On the walk back to the car, our neighbors waved goodbye to Lizy. I told her she made friends wherever she went. “And you go off on your own,” she replied. Then she pointed out a giant king crab that had washed ashore. We walked back around the bluff and saw the party girls. Hours later, it was still just the two of them standing under their giant sunshade, drinking and listening to music. A party for two.

The drive back was a little tense because Lizy got really hungry while driving. She told me that I couldn’t understand what it was like to be hungry while pregnant. We had to stop by a Chinese restaurant on the way home to get takeout so she could eat something right away.

Nick’s Show

Nick was performing in a comedy show later that night, and we were going to go see it. Until the show, we relaxed at the house. Nick went ahead and we took a second car so we could get there a little later and leave early if Lizy got tired.

On the drive to the venue, I saw a homeless guy lighting a fire in a garbage can. I told Lizy not to look, but obviously that caused her to look and get freaked out. In hindsight, I should’ve said nothing.

Nick’s show was in the back of a VHS store. For posterity, I’ll say I hadn’t seen anyone watch a VHS in at least fifteen years, if not more. They only sold VHS tapes, not even DVDs. I’m not sure who still has a VHS player, but I guess there must be someone still buying VHS tapes, and at least there’s no competition.

We found out the show featured comics doing not just standup but other types of performances as well. There were some character actors, kind of like what Andy Kaufman did. One woman pretended to be a French cabaret performer. Nick did a mostly regular standup set focused around the song Night Train. One woman dressed as a green alien and did a funny routine about how in the future everyone mostly only ate turtles. She even ended with a musical number about how she loved turtle meat and that everyone should eat turtles.

I bought a beer as we entered the venue, assuming there’d be cup holders. I was wrong. In the back in front of the stage, we sat on foldable chairs. If I had known there weren’t going to be cup holders, I wouldn’t have bought the beer. I put the beer on the floor at the base of my chair, but I spilled it even before the first act started.

We left a little early because Lizy was getting tired. When we got back to the house, Lizy went straight to sleep and I stayed up a little bit to write notes on the trip so far. Nick got back from the show and came to see what I was writing. He said it was good I was writing about the trip. We sat and talked for a bit. He talked about how it was crazy I was having a kid soon. I asked him if he wanted kids. He said he pictured himself more as an uncle.