LA Galaxy!

We finally made it to a Galaxy game, and it just happened to go hand in hand with Dan's birthday weekend. Double awesome.

Our first American football game, and second game in total. It was very different than when we saw a game in Berlin. It was very fun, but there was no practical public transportation and the beers were $11!! For corona!!! Terrible. In Berlin they were about €5 and good. The food was more diverse and cheaper as well.

I automatically learned a lesson, before the game even started. Bring food, BBQ yourself, and drink your fill before hand. Sheeh. The fact that people actually buy anything at these places is crazy.

Well anyway, we ended up getting a beer (I mean, you gotta!) after a lot of resistance and found our seats.

Of course we got the seats with a pole right in Dan's view, so we moved once it kicked off and people seemed to be settled. We moved back a bit, but were able to be in a spot where no one was in front of us and I'd say it was a better view than our original seats.

Vegan Beer & Food Festival

Golden Road!

We recently enjoyed an amazing day full of music, food, and beer tasting. Did I mention it was a vegan fest?

The 3rd Annual Vegan Food and Beer Festival took place in Hollywood on Sunset Blvd. They apparently expanded the event from the previous year, bringing it across the street from the Roxy Theatre to an empty lot, instead of in the Theatre and it's small parking lot.

This was a great event. Knowing that all the food there was edible was very exciting, especially since they had a lot of yummy things, i.e., sushi, nachos, sliders, pretzels. Believe you me, I could go on.

The Getty Museum

We finally went! Dan took Friday off for his birthday and we decided to head up to the Getty Museum for the day.

Getty from the gardens.

What an amazing place. The architecture is breathtaking and is easily the best part of the entire trip. From my photographer's point of view, this place is the best! I probably snapped a million pictures of the architecture while we were there. The garden is also an experience on it's own.

Textures.

Getty's contrast with the sky.

The whole place was thought out extensively and built on two intersecting axis of Los Angeles. The walls and ground are all in a grid and cut to size in multiples of three. The masonry is very original. I don't remember the type of stone that was used, but it is from Italy and is very old. The way they cut it was done so in a way that gave each piece an individual look and feel. The rock was so old that you could often seen fossils of leaves and supposedly fish (I couldn't find any).

The architect was Richard Meier, who is well known for his love of the colour white. He believes that white embodies all colours. The funny, and perhaps ironic, thing is that one of the stipulations of designing the Getty Center was that it could not be white. Well, of course Richard Meier found away around this, by making the buildings off-white.

Close enough, right?

He did something very clever with the shades of colour when designing the center. There are areas for guests and areas for the foundation and art preservation. He used solid whites to draw people to certain areas. For instance, on the main entrance to the museum he outlined it with white, same as the tram station. Whereas, for the entrances of privates areas he did not use white. I love it.

The exhibits were interesting as well. Of course my favourite was the medieval scriptures they have. The fact that these books were handwritten and the artwork painted with expensive colours is pure craziness. If you understand the colour thing, you must be a historian!

Los Angeles

We wandered around the grounds and took both the garden tour and architectural tour, both of which I recommend. We enjoyed the views of LA and even got a good lunch. They had vegan Korean noodle salad, yes please!

The flowers naturally enhance the architecture. 

Anyway, if you live or are ever in the Los Angeles area, I highly recommend going to the Getty Center, not to be confused with the Getty Villa. We'll save that for another time. :)

Mr. & Mrs. Hochreiter Tie The Knot!

My cousin (twice removed) recently got married in Arizona, and you know what that means... Road trip!

Happy Earth Week!

In honour of Earth Day this week, many people including yours truly, like to extend Earth Day into Earth Week. Here are some photo's I've taken over the years of our beautiful Mother Nature.

Berlin, Deutschland

Davey Havok's "Pop Kids" Book Signing

So a co-worker/friend of Dan and me offered to let him interview and me photograph Davey for the book signing of his first published novel, Pop Kids. Being an avid AFI fan, Dan was really excited to interview Davey. I'm not a huge punk music lover, but I love Davey because... drum roll.. he's a hardcore vegan!!

Flashback Story: Dan actually ran into him and a band-mate after a Gilman show back in the day and asked if he and his friend could tag along while they went on a hunt for ice cream. Davey said sure, probably thought it was cute some kid wanted to hang out with him. Anyway, they were looking at ice cream and Dan kept saying, "just get that one." To which Davey replied somewhere along the lines of, "I can't! It's not vegan!" Which confused the heck out of Dan. Little did he know, ten or so years later he would be marrying a vegan.

CoDeSports Championship

As you may know, Dan works for Activision, specifically Beachhead Studios which puts out Call of Duty: Elite. This tends to be awesome. We've gone to some epic parties and of course met some rad people. Although, it is a lot of work for Dan, especially when a new game is announced/released, he loves his job which makes me very happy! It makes having to live in LA okay.

Activision recently put on an event with Treyarch and Xbox for eSports. But what are eSports?

I actually asked myself the same thing before going. Dan wanted me to come and take photos, but was worried I would be extremely bored all day. That of course put me on edge thinking this was going to be really lame. Wow, I was completely wrong.

Homebrewing with Brewers

We recently had an amazing Saturday. We signed up for a homebrew demo at Eagle Rock Brewery. There were about 15 people there and two of the brewers, Lee and Andrew. We had a blast!

Dan already has brewed a handful of times at our various homes, but was never satisfied with his beers. I enjoyed them much more than he did. He also didn't like our old kitchen, so he only brewed their once. I thought this would be a great opportunity for him to learn somethings that would give him the kick he needs to get back to brewing.

The setup at the brewery is nice. They have a taproom out front and a big window looking into the brewery, which is pretty small. It was neat getting to go back there and feeling right at home. Some fun bit of info, most of their equipment turns out to be dairy machines converted to work with brewing. Pretty awesome. They actually got most of their equipment from AleSmith when they were upgrading.