Balboa Park

Continuing our stay in San Diego, we decided to go check out Balboa Park. Balboa Park is an urban cultural park, which was established in 1835 and spans 1,200 acres. We decided to go after hearing about the wonderful Spanish colonial style architecture that dominates the buildings around the park, a majority of which have been transitioned into museums. 

The San Diego Museum of Man featured an exhibit that showcased human torture devices... We passed on checking that out. However, the building had amazing architecture. 

View of the San Diego Museum of Man taken from inside The Old Globe in Balboa Park.

We arrived at the park around 1:00pm and the first stop we made was Spreckel's Organ Pavilion where there would be a free organ show at 2:00pm. The organ is the world's second largest outdoor organ and attracts over 100,000 visitors to it's shows per year. I was amazed to find out that the organ itself weighs 100,000 pounds and contains over 4,500 pipes. When we first got to the organ pavilion, there was no one there. I was able to grab some shots to showcase the venue. There was a quinceañera photographer there so I had to act quick not to get in his way of taking photos before the girl's big celebration. 

I decided to skip some of the concert and take advantage of the time my family was there to explore the rest of Balboa Park. Everywhere from the Visitor's Center to the Spreckel's Organ Pavilion was packed! It was an 80 degree Sunday afternoon, so I guess all of San Diego came out to relax in the sun. It seemed like all of the buildings were constructed with utmost detail in mind. The details in the architecture blew me away.

Even the Visitor's Center was amazing architecturally.

People gathered around the fountain after grabbing an iced coffee drink to cool off from the hot sun.

I stopped over to the Botanical Building as one of my last stops in Balboa Park. Close to the entrance, a man was dressed in traditional tribal attire. I stopped to chat with him a little about the history that he was representing and he told me a bit about his attire and his spear. His spear alone was over 200 years old! (At least if I dropped it it didn't feel like it would break. Phew.) I snapped a couple pictures of him in character. (No, this is not a statue. He really was that ripped!)

I headed back to the organ pavilion in time to hear the last few songs. I'm sad to say that I missed a guest organist's compilation of John Williams' songs. The organist was doing a set that had a theme of patriotic American songs-- fitting for being Fourth of July weekend. Before the show started, the Spreckel's Organ Society was collecting donations in an attempt to regain the title of world's largest outdoor organ. In addition to the donations, they were selling umbrellas to anyone in attendance to keep them out of the direct sun. This made for a really cool photo! The umbrellas all added a splash of color to the otherwise neutral color architecture. Make sure to check out the Spreckel's Organ Society to hear more about their events.

I loved this image in particular because of the plane that I captured in the upper left hand corner of the image. San Diego is unusual in the fact that the planes fly so close to the city in their descent. Driving through town it's not uncommon to have a plane 1,000 feet above your head (or less if you're on one of the main roads closer to the airport). On the bright side, there's not much travel time to get to the airport from the city!