Thursday, October 28, 2004

11/10/04, San Diego: Coronado

Over on the island floating in the middle of San Diego bay, is a region called Coronado. It’s a basically a beach resort most famous for the Hotel Del Coronado, a sprawling wooden building on the beach front. It’s a grand old hotel decorated in a grand old style. Layers of dark oak on thick, plush carpets.
It is a place famous for temporarily housing some of the country’s litarary grates (is how I believe they spell it): Mark Twain, Henry James, etc. Many Presidents have stayed there. But the hotel is most famous as the one in the film Some Like It Hot. That makes it instantly recognisable.
I hung around on the beach for a while and tripped up three girls, apologising in the strangest English accent I could muster. The first two hit me, but the third took my telephone number and told me to expect a call. It was her lawyer.

After the fun of the beach, an excursion was made into San Diego downtown. San Diego is one of those sprawling cities. The centre, or downtown, features a few tall buildings and the old town. The rest of the city is relatively low suburbs.

There’s not so much to see downtown. An old town in the US isn’t really old, just not new. We spent some time in a hardware store that contained the biggest collection of doorbells and hinges I have ever seen. Every style you could ever think of was there. Doorbells that looked like doorknockers are big. Especially doorbells that looked like doorknockers that looked like animals: butterflies, frogs and beetles are common.

After this educational experience we took ourselves to another American centre of lerning, the Cinematoscope. Here we watched a talkie (in kolor) entitled Napoleon Dynamite.

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