Day 3: Los Angeles

Saturday's event was great. 

Before the tour stop event at the Culver City Peace Center in LA, we visited Arlington West Memorial at the Santa Monica Pier, where volunteers from the Santa Monica Veteran's for Peace chapter have constructed the memorial every Sunday for the last ten years. This weekend being the ten year anniversary of the memorial, volunteers are keeping the memorial up through the weekend. No doubt it is pretty emotionally heavy work. We really appreciate the crew's diligence to reminding the
 pier's visitors of the cost of war.Here is a film about the project.


LA traffic challenged us but we made it to the Peace Center just in time. The support of the stops sponsors, LA Veterans for Peace, March Forward! and ANSWER LA, made this stop a good success. After our presentation we had a lively discussion about current military developments, including Obama´s "Pivot to Asia," the increasing US military presence throughout Africa, and the building of a deep water naval base at Jeju Island, strongly resisted by the local population.

Picture Wikipedia (we didn't get to see the ballroom
because it is sooooo protected that residents are 
not aloud to see it.)

Mike Prysner provided us with a home stay in the historic Alexandria Hotel in downtown LA now turned into low income apartments. The Alexandria was built in 1905 and its iconic Palm Court ballroom is a protected Los Angeles landmark. It  also is known for being the most haunted hotel in LA. Unfortunately we did not run into any of the ghosts
of two former Mafiosos, Larry and Gus, an angry young man in Charlie Chaplains old suite or a mysterious partially transparent woman in black wandering the halls around Rudolph Valentino´s chambers...