Breakfast at the Comfort Inn on Vermont Ave. where we were staying. Then off to a rendezvous at the Getty Center with George Ingram, a childhood friend of Leonard’s. A lovely guy. He was retired now, but had been an analyst and a programmer at Systems Development Corp, a Rand spinoff. He also had two friends meeting us there, Virve and Ants ___. They were originally from Lithuania. Ants had been teaching at a film school — teaching how to make documentary and instructional films. Lovely people all.

We parked at the bottom of a hill and rode up to the center in a tramway operated by the center.

The Getty Center was fantastic. The architecture was at least as interesting and imaginative as the collections. We dashed through some of the collections. I was particularly taken with an exhibit of building an example of an exquisite marquetry desk. It took us along the steps from choosing the wood, the tools one would use, the methods, the raw cutting and planning, the fine cutting, the tiny marquetry cutting and slight shadowing with hot sand, the hot glue pasting held on with clamps and hot sand bags, and the final finishing. Amazing!

We also saw an exhibit of illuminated manuscripts, including a Bestiary and a textbook containing the 7 liberal arts: The trivium (3 roads) of grammar, rhetoric, and logic, and the quadrivium (4 roads) of mathematics (pure numbers), geometry (numbers in space), Music, Harmonics, or Tuning Theory (numbers in time), and astronomy (numbers in space and time). Wish Ben and Mia could’ve seen that!

We also saw and exhibit of stained glass and learned that the painted lines were done with ground up glass in a slurry that was painted on and then fired, and the fired paint would end up shades of brown and black. Glass could also be painted with a silver nitrate that left a yellow when fired. We saw some French Impressionist art — but not much in the way of newer works.

I loved this urn in the garden. Water trickled down from above, and sunlight reflected in the little pool of water underneath to form shifting silvery lights -- sort of virtual water -- in the (virtual) urn itself.

Drove back through Bell Air and on Wilshire Blvd. Past the La Brea Pits Museum where we will try to go tomorrow morning. I was really done in at this point and begged off for a nap, but Kerstin, Leonard, and Arthur took the Metro back into town to walk around. They found a wonderful 3-block-long ethnic market area that Arthur says reminds him of the Thai markets. They also got to the new Ghery-designed Disney Concert Hall and looked around the outside.

Then out for dinner. We tried to go into an interesting looking Armenian-Russian restaurant, but when I went in one door it was apparent that there was a private wedding party going on. We tried another door, thinking it might be a separate dining room, but encountered only heavy-set Armenian? Russian? Waitresses who spoke no English but brought a mustachioed man who told us in a combination of extremely broken English and expressive arm and hand movements that they were closed. So we went to Palermo’s, another Italian place, not as good as the Dresden, though.