Dinner with Michelle

Day 2
Sunday - A cultural tour of LA
Today we went to the The Cathedral of our Lady of the Angels, the Disney Centre, home of the LA Philharmonic, an amazing Frank Gehry building, and then to the Getty Museum, another wonderful building with an eclectic range of exhibitions...all free for the people of LA. We also stopped at the Mexican market and ate enchiladas for lunch. All of these buildings reflected a different architectural style but each of them stunning in their own way.
Sunday evening - Dinner with Michelle
However, the highlight of the day was the dinner at Lucques on Melrose Avenue. We arrived at 8.30 to find we had to wait in a queue to get into the restaurant, (something I really hate) but then I realised that customers were all having a full body scan and handbags searched by some very attractive young men in suits (something I don't hate). Turns out Michelle Obama and her daughters were there for dinner as well. We sat on a table just across from them, the place was full of security but no one seemed to mind.
Day 3
Today we got down to the serious business of looking at libraries and visited the Central library in downtown LA as well as two of the LA branch libraries. The LA library system looks after 11m people with 72 branches, all of which are either new or have been refurbished in the past 15 years. The central library covers a city block and is 5 floors, a fantastic building built 17 years ago following a fire gutted the existing library. The other two libraries we visited were Silver Lake, the newest branch, which is an environmentally sustainable design and the chinatown branch. Was blown away by the main library but underwhelmed by the branches. There was nothing I would take from them to bring home that we aren't already doing, however, they are going through some tough financial times (as is all of LA) and will have to lay off 100 or so staff this week and then reduce opening hours!
Some of us then popped into the Beverly Hills library which is not part of the LA library system but still a free public library for the residents of Beverly Hills.
Off to Seattle very early in the morning so here's hoping there will be something fabulous there.