USS Midway + Air & Space Museum

On Friday, I woke up around 9 and then headed to the USS Midway shortly after. On the way, I grabbed some breakfast from the free breakfast. They had bagels and fruit. I threw away the bagel after one bite because it tasted awful and felt like cardboard. So I only had a small mandarin for breakfast. It took me about half an hour to get to the USS Midway, an aircraft carrier built towards the end of World War II, named after the Battle of Midway, and now serving as a museum. There were two levels that you could explore, the hangar and the cabins below deck, and the upper deck with the landing/takeoff runway.

I started with the cabins below deck. The path I followed led through the stern of the ship where you could also see the anchor chain, which could reach speeds of up to 80 km/h when lowering the anchor. Each link weighs 70 kg, and the two anchors weigh 2 tons each. The ship is truly massive, and it's hard to imagine that something like this was built by humans. What you could also see well was how little space the people working on the ship had. No privacy, a small bed just big enough to lie in, and a compartment for storing uniforms and personal belongings. This was accompanied by a podcast, a small device with a speaker that you could use to scan various stations and get information accordingly. After I sat in a cockpit and looked at a model of the ship, I went up to the upper deck. The entire area was filled with airplanes and helicopters that were used during the operational period. It was really interesting, especially because of the additional information from the podcast. There were reconnaissance planes, fighter jets, transport helicopters, and more. You could get close to the planes and look at a lot of the technology. I found it particularly interesting that some of the airplanes could fold their meter-long wings, so they didn't take up more space than some of the helicopters.

After about 3/3.5 hours, I left the USS Midway and walked across the city to the Air & Space Museum. There, I first went into a small special exhibition where there were a few attractions to try out, such as a Formula 1 race where the goal was to pedal as fast as possible or a MotoGP simulator. Since everything was more geared towards young children, it must have looked pretty funny when I tried everything out anyway.

I particularly liked an old Sega car racing simulator that I spent a good half hour on because no one else wanted to play. After that, I looked at the rest of the museum. It mainly featured airplanes from different eras. However, it wasn't quite as interesting as the USS Midway since I already knew some of the airplanes from before. Plus, I lacked the attention span. But since I probably won't come back to the museum, I decided to start over and read and look at the most interesting facts again. In the end, I got caught up in a small race in a racing simulator with three screens, pedals, and a steering wheel, which didn't go so well because I read km/h instead of mph and therefore was speeding everywhere.

After that, I returned to the hostel because I was a bit tired and San Diego didn't seem as interesting as LA. San Diego was generally a smaller city, compared to LA the streets were deserted and the weird people on the street stood out even more. It smelled even more like weed than in LA and the skyscrapers were not as impressive.

For dinner, I got a burrito because my roommate pointed out the influence of Mexico on the area. That was the right decision because the burrito was really delicious.

The next day, I took the bus back to Los Angeles, where I watched the sunset from the observatory in the evening. This time it was even more beautiful because the sun looked like a big red fireball, which unfortunately doesn't come across as well in the pictures.