Julie is here! The exchange program San-Diego-Montreal got intensified and since the 28th of December Julie from the famous „Triplette de Montreal“ surfs my beach-couch.

Yesterday and after a mind-blowing New Year’s Eve in Arizona with some Marines, Couch-Surfers, Mexican strippers and a shisha lounge, we convinced Johanna to drop her law books and hop into the Panmundo-Mobil.    

The Getty Center in L.A. was waiting for us! Mr J. Paul Getty (J. for Jean, but he didn’t like that part of his name) was once the richest man in the world. He made oil-money, founded the Getty Oil Company (later bought by Texaco and some of it by Russian Lukoil) and, not being a play-boy, was generally unknown until the Fortune Magazine had the splendid idea to tell the world “hey, look here, that’s the richest man among us”.

Getty didn’t quite like that and modestly explained, that he was only among the 10 or 12 richest men in the world and that nobody could know for sure who really was the richest since the stocks of each of the guys (and queens) in question would go up and down all the time.

However, next to being rich, he also was a collector of contemporary art (contemporary in his case means between 1900 and 1970). In his biography he explained that he loved art but that he never grew too affected to one painting or sculpture not to sell it when the price was right.

When he died, there still must have been a lot of open deals and therefore the Sarah Getty Foundation opened a superb art museum in the hills of Los Angeles. The architecture is breath-taking… Like this I imagined the house of “The Great Gatsby”… Everything is elegant, white, transparent… The walls are going to seemingly nowhere… endless… The gardens are of breathtaking beauty. I loved it.

Well, now we are back in San Diego, Julie is on her plane to New Zealand, David is getting ready to join in for Latin America and I should work on my PhD thesis. 12 more days to go before we hit Middle-America!