Welcome to LA

January 5, 2013 in port Los Angeles, CA – Visiting Cloud Cuckoo Land

Silver Whisper entered the Port of Los Angeles at 7:00am and made its way past innumerable container cranes and thousands of stacked containers. (The Chinese are coming; the Chinese are coming.  Correction – the Chinese are here!)  At 8:00am, we tied up at the Terminal Island Cruise Pier in San Pedro.  And, began immediately to disembark passengers and their luggage, take on fuel and load a total of seven containers of stores for our transit to the South Pacific.  This was exhausting work for the crew, who had already spent a goodly portion of the night collecting passenger baggage to off load.

  

Port of Los Angeles

Refueling from a fuel barge.

Because we were entering the United States from a foreign port, all passengers had to undergo US Customs and Border Protection procedures.  We were not exempt, even though we were remaining on board for the world cruise.  The US should change its motto from “The Land of the Free and Home of the Brave,” to “The Land of the Paranoid and Home of the Fearful.”  After inspection, we could not embark the ship again until everyone had been cleared and the ship inspected.  The options were to spend several hours confined in the Terminal Island Cruise Terminal (which reminded you of Ellis Island with a fresh coat of paint), or you could take a Silversea-provided bus to visit Beverly Hills and shop on Rodeo Drive.

Harry Bridges Park, Terminal Island, Los Angeles

Files revealed that Harry was a colonel in the KGB – only in LA.

Whether spending the day on Ellis Island West or going by tour bus across LA to Beverly Hills, neither option appealed to J and E.  However, no other choices presented themselves.  So, we elected to visit that temple of Mammon, “Rodeo Drive.”  There were about ten passengers who made the same choice.

At 9:00am, we were collected into a group and were shepherded by ship’s tour staff through Customs and Border Protection onto a tour bus (yet again), and off for a 45-minute freeway ride across LA.  It was only a 45-minute trip because it was Saturday morning, and Angelinos hadn’t woken up or got their cars started yet.

Beverly Hills, although less the home of movie stars, is still one of the wealthiest cities that make up greater Los Angeles.  It looked like it did in the Beverly Hills Cop movies.  (That is strange.)  You were left with the feeling of stepping back in time to 1930s LA and the world of Dashell Hammett.  Every lawn appeared to be cut with scissors, and no tree would dare to drop a leaf to the ground.  How Beverly Hills’ appearance is maintained in the post-illegal, immigrant era is difficult to explain.

Beverly Hills

Reality stopped here.

Beverly Hills City Hall

1930s Spanish Colonial revival lives on.

We were discharged from the bus next to the Louis Vuitton shop at the intersection of Rodeo Drive and Dayton Way.  It was an easy place to find because of the statue of a nude, headless woman in the median (it’s LA, what did you expect; and it was probably created by a Taliban terrorist!)

Welcome to Rodeo Drive

Headless women statue -- no more needs to be said.

Off we went to spent four hours in the land of the super-affluent.  Actually, when we arrived at our bus stop, it was 10am; the shops had just opened; and there were only a few scraggly tourist and homeless people on the street.  You could tell the homeless.  They were the ones with shopping carts.  After walking several blocks away from Rodeo Drive, we found a Rite Aid drug store and bought some greeting cards and other sundries.  With the exception of coffee and dessert, that was all we bought in the Mecca of capitalism.

 

Rodeo Drive before Traffic and Tourists

Come early, miss the rush!

Rodeo Drive in the Early Morning (10:00am)

Only people moving are shop workers and the homeless.

We walked down Rodeo Drive and played “look pigeon, see,” but we only entered Brooks Brothers to see about a formal dress shirt, which they did not have in J’s size.   We stopped at Escada in the Beverly Wilshire Hotel to look at a dress for E; however, the sales staff was right out of “Pretty Woman,” and so we departed without further ado.

Beverly Wilshire Hotel

Not an architectural masterpiece.

By 1:00pm, Rodeo Drive was congested with a traffic jam of the world’s most expensive cars, and the sidewalks were crammed with tourists gawking at other tourists hoping they would be movie persons.  Strangely enough, there were not even many overdressed women carrying yappy little dogs in their oversized purses.  This was sad to J, who was contemplating dog napping as the first step in having the ship prepare that wonderful Kung Pao dish.

To avoid the tourist mob, we walked up Beverly Drive and found a wonderful chocolate shop (Vosges Haut-Chocolat) which featured numerous chocolate delicacies.   We declared lunch “dessert.”  J had a cappuccino with a chocolate chip cookie the size of a pancake, and E had hot chocolate and a brownie about the same size.  This “lunch” was our one concession to Beverly Hill’s decadence!  Afterward, we continued our walk about the area, visiting Barney’s New York.    We returned to the designated bus stop at 3:00pm for the freeway trip  back to Terminal Island.

After passing again through Customs and Border Protection, we boarded the ship.  Because of the extensive provisioning required for the world cruise and the South Pacific, Silver Whisper did not depart Terminal Island until 6:00pm.