Balboa Park

Today we went to Balboa Park, which besides being a giant park is also home to a variety of museums, gardens, theaters, and the famous San Diego Zoo. It's neat in that a lot of its buildings were originally built for the 1915 California-Panama Exposition, and are still around even though a century has passed.

Museum of Man

Random cool building

Ben has a new smartphone, and the high concentration of cool buildings gave him a good opportunity to play with its panorama feature:

Click to enlarge!

We didn't really have a plan for the day other than to wander around the park and its buildings, and that ended up working out swell. First we saw the Botanical Building, which was built for the expedition and is still one of the largest lath structures in the world. It also has a sweet lily pond in front of it.

Ben in the main atrium

The bonzai trees were his favorite

The orchids were my favorite, because I desperately want to have one but keep killing every one I buy.

It turns out today was some sort of Dahlia festival, so we ended up seeing lots of really cool flowers.

They look kind of like Truffula Trees from the Lorax

You know the weather is nice in San Diego because the park has a giant outdoor organ, which was hard for us to even understand given what happens to things that get left outside for a long time on the east coast. Apparently tomorrow is an organ festival, so today various folks were rehearsing on it, and we got a free mini-concert.

Thanks, Ben's phone's panorama feature!

We decided that since we were there, we might as well be full-fledged tourists and go to the zoo. It was pretty great as far as zoos go - they even had a double-decker zoo bus you could take around, and a "skyfari" gondola lift that crossed the park.

The polar bears were Ben's favorite

The gondola lift was my favorite

Giraffes!

Flamingos!

The zoo is so big they have those conveyor belt people-movers in case you get tired of walking, which was kind of disheartening.

America!

Also, I am a child and thought this bird's name was hilarious:

I proclaim day two of vacation a success!