Word: trams
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Visitors board Simba One, an oversize tram (seats 32) that will take you on a safari through "the Serengeti grassland system," and as one fellow steps into the open-air vehicle, he asks, "Is it air-conditioned?" No, mate, this is reality. Real crocodiles lazing primordially below that rickety bridge. Actual cheetahs motoring their stretch-limo bodies across the savanna. Genuine loamy smell over there near the warthog. (Hakuna matata, guys--it's only nature's perfume...
...discovered by the visitor who is visually acute. Look hard for the gray elephant trying to tuck herself behind the grayish rock. Flick a peek to one side and catch a pair of two-ton white rhinos who seem to have sleepy-mean eyes to butt the tram (hatari!). And don't miss the gawky East African crowned cranes off to the right. The driver turns on a radio, a sweet Swahili tune (Hapa Dunianai by the Voices of Celebration) wafts through the air, and the cranes turn into an impromptu chorus line, stepping gracefully to the music...
...tram is more fun, the shuttle is faster," the woman in uniform shouted. Welcome to the Getty Center...
...Sarajevan refugees, joined me for a screening of Welcome to Sarajevo, we all expected to engage in a fair share of sarcastic rib nudging and eye rolling. How could any film capture what I felt in the summer of 1994, for instance, when I watched antiaircraft rounds pierce a tram like a sardine can, and then rushed to Kosevo Hospital to interview the wounded--including a man who had not yet realized that his wife was dying on a nearby operating table? And how much less could any movie mirror that couple's paradoxical stance vis-a-vis a city...
Meier, 63, has come up with a superb piece of place making. When the Epcot-style tram delivers you from the parking garage at the bottom to the plaza at the top of the ridge, you step out into a space that seems both amiable and Utopian, dignified but, despite its acreage of travertine, not authoritarian: a respite from the visual chaos of Los Angeles, but offering the best views a public could have of the city spread below...