Cultural Exchange

We are doing a cultural exchange with families from South Carolina, Ireland, South Africa, and Turkey!  I figured this blog could add to it. :-)

CA exchange ideas: http://berrynature.com/2012/04/27/greetings-from-california/

Package items:
1. Poppy seeds
2. Raisins
3. CA magnet ??
4. Beach sand, leather cord, starfish craft
5. CA flag
6. Letter/day in the life/photos/recent field trips (whale watching, Olvera St., NHM)
7. Map of LB/LA/CA (LB/LA for US exchange; CA for cultural exchange)
8. Fun facts about CA
9. Long weekend itinerary
10. Postcards/brochures
11. Surfing/skateboard/ocean item
12: What is our town known for?
13. US currency (international exchange)
14. Mickey/Minnie mouse craft
15. Coloring pages
16. History of CA
17. UCLA/USC souvenier
17. Recipe?

- letter/picture of your family
- a map of your state or city
- a few fun recipes for dishes that are special to your region
- some fun facts and historical tidbits about your state
- something edible that is per-packaged (so not to spoil)
- a few postcards or photographs of interesting sites/things from your state
- a fun souvenier from your state, maybe even a refrigerator magnet
- a weekend itinerary of "Fun things to Do/Visit/Eat" in your town (sort of an insider's guide)

Links:

• Map of Long Beach: http://maps.google.com/maps?oe=utf-8&rls=org.mozilla:en-US:official&client=firefox-a&q=map+of+long+beach&um=1&ie=UTF-8&hq=&hnear=0x80c2cae84099d759:0xa1003afac42a8faa,Long+Beach,+CA&gl=us&ei=sOq1T8_SKMjhiAKjkrCoBw&sa=X&oi=geocode_result&ct=title&resnum=1&ved=0CBMQ8gEwAA
• https://www.facebook.com/earlylongbeach 
• Port of Long Beach activity book: http://www.polb.com/community/education/activities/default.asp 
• Aquarium of the Pacific http://www.aquariumofpacific.org/teachers/buildafish/ 
• The Queen Mary http://www.queenmary.com/
• Olvera Street 
• Then & Now: http://lang.presstelegram.com/flash/thenandnow/index.asp 

Did You Know?

• More millionaires live in California than in any other state.
• The first McDonald’s restaurant was opened in San Bernardino.
• Fallbrook is called the Avocado Capital of the World.
• The longest runway in the world (7.5 miles, or 12 kilometers) is located at Edwards Air Force Base and is used for space shuttle landings.
• The National Yo-Yo Museum in Chico has the world’s largest yo-yo, weighing 256 pounds (116 kg) and standing 50 inches (127 cm) tall.
• There’s enough water in Lake Tahoe to cover the whole state of California in 14.5 inches (37 cm) of water.
• During the Gold Rush, miners shipped their laundry to Honolulu because the prices in California were too high.
• California records about 500,000 detectable tremors or quakes each year.
• San Francisco was established in 1776, the same year the United States declared independence from Great Britain.
• At almost 300 feet (91 m) below sea level, Death Valley is the lowest point in North America and one of the hottest spots on Earth.
• More turkeys are raised in California than in any other state.

Fun/Historical facts about CA:
1. Hollywood - movie stars
2. Disneyland, San Diego Zoo, Golden Gate Bridge, Yosemite
3. California is subject to floods, droughts, Santa Ana winds, wildfires, landslides on steep terrain, and has several volcanoes.  37,000 earthquakes are recorded annually.
4. California's diverse geography ranges from the Pacific Coast in the west, to the Sierra Nevada mountains in the east – from the Redwood–Douglas-fir forests of the northwest, to the Mojave Desert areas in the southeast.
5. California has the largest trees, the tallest trees, and the oldest trees (Redwoods/Sequoias).
6. San Francisco, Los Angeles, San Diego, Silicon Valley
7. Beaches, warm weather, surfing, skateboarding
8. State flower: Poppies, Nickname: Golden State, Motto: Eureka! (Greek for "I have found it!" referring to the Gold Rush)
9. Los Angeles Lakers, San Francisco Giants, SF 49ers, Oakland Raiders
10.California contains both the highest and lowest points in the contiguous United States (Mount Whitney and Death Valley
11. Freeways/traffic
12. Most populous state in the US: 37,691,912
13. Admitted as the 31st state on September 9, 1850
14.  The Beach Boys
15.  If California were a country, it would be the eighth-largest economy in the world
16.  The center of the state is dominated by Central Valley, a major agricultural area. - at least half of the fresh fruit produced in the United States are now cultivated in California
17. The name California came from the story of Calafia recorded in a 1510 work The Exploits of Esplandian, written as a sequel to Amadis de Gaula by Spanish adventure writer Garci Rodríguez de Montalvo
18. About 45 percent of the state's total surface area is covered by forests.
19. Initially, travel between California and the rest of the continental U.S. was time consuming and dangerous. A more direct connection came in 1869 with the completion of the First Transcontinental Railroad through Donner Pass in the Sierra Nevada mountains. Once completed, hundreds of thousands of U.S. citizens came west, where new Californians were discovering that land in the state, if irrigated during the dry summer months, was extremely well suited to fruit cultivation and agriculture in general. Vast expanses of wheat, other cereal crops, vegetable crops, cotton, and nut and fruit trees were grown (including oranges in Southern California), and the foundation was laid for the state's prodigious agricultural production in the Central Valley and elsewhere.
20. UCLA, USC, Stanford University

Weekend itineray of fun things to do/see/eat in our town (an insider's guide):
Hmmm...I think you would need a week. :-)
Disneyland and the beach could take care of the whole weekend, but maybe I will make a week-long guide:

1. Disneyland
2. The beach: Huntington Beach may be the most famous, but Bolsa Chica allows fire pits.  Nothing says summer in SoCal than a bonfire on Bolsa Chica.
3. The Aquarium of the Pacific
4. The Queen Mary
5. Take a boat ride around the harbor - our city's best vantage point
6. Take the Catalina Express to Catalina Island, about 20 miles off the coast of Long Beach
7. Take a drive down PCH (the Pacific Coast Highway).
8. Shopping on Belmont Shore
9. Take the Blue Line into downtown LA
10. The nation’s skinniest house, according to Guinness World of Records, makes its home on Gladys Avenue in Long Beach. Built on a lot measuring 10 feet by 50 feet by Nelson Rummond, who bet that he could build a habitable residence on the lot. The Skinny House is located a 708 Gladys Avenue. 436-3645

Items to include in package:
1. Letter from our family
2. Beach sand
3. Disney souviener
4.  Photo album: our family, neighborhood, day in the life
5. Surfing/skateboard/Pacific Ocean item
6.  Map of LA: where we live
7.  Earthquake item
8. Poppy seeds
9.  Hollywood/movie
10.

And I found this link from the New York Times about our fair city, Long Beach!
http://travel.nytimes.com/2012/03/18/travel/36-hours-long-beach-calif.html?scp=1&sq=travel%2C+long+beach&st=cse

AT the mouth of the Los Angeles River, shipping cranes flex across the skyline — an industrial panorama that suits Long Beach’s gritty reputation. But while the city’s maritime character remains, its rough edges have been smoothed in recent years — the downtown waterfront transformed by redevelopment, the busy port now welcoming both cargo vessels and cruise ships. Along with its sandy shore, a compact downtown of low-rising Art Deco towers, and unassuming neighborhoods where Craftsman bungalows are ringed by tropical gardens, Long Beach has excellent museums, ethnic enclaves and a tangle of Southern California subcultures. Layered, urban and unexpected, it is a city apart from the sprawl and strip malls that define the outer edges of Los Angeles.  

What is Long Beach known for??
1.  The Queen Mary
2.  The Long Beach earthquake of 1933 was a magnitude 6.3 earthquake that caused significant damage to the city and surrounding areas,
3. The Port of Long Beach is the US' second largest container port which welcomes both cargo ships and cruise ships.
4. The city is the 36th-largest city in the nation. The seventh-largest city in California.  Population of almost half a million people. 50,000 square miles.
5. The Pike was the most famous beachside amusement zone on the West Coast from 1902 until 1969, it offered bathers food, games and rides, such at the Dual Ferris Wheel and Cyclone Racer' roller coaster.

6.  In the 1950s it was referred to as "Iowa by the sea," due to a large influx of people from that and other Midwestern states.
7.  The City of Long Beach was officially incorporated in 1897.
8. Oil was discovered in 1921 on Signal Hill, which split off as a separate incorporated city shortly afterward. The discovery of the Long Beach Oil Field, brought in by the gusher at the Alamitos No. 1 well, made Long Beach a major oil producer; in the 1920s the field was the most productive in the world.
9. Toyota Grand Prix
10. Used for filming.  Long Beach Woodrow Wilson was also the focus of the movie Freedom Writers. One of the most famous Long Beach movie locations is the home of Ferris Bueller in Ferris Bueller's Day Off. Though the film was set in the North Shore suburbs of Chicago the actual house is located at 4160 Country Club Dr.^[44]


History of Long Beach:
Indigenous peoples have lived in coastal southern California for at least ten thousand years. By the time Spanish explorers arrived in the sixteenth century, the dominant group were the Tongva people.
In 1784 the Spanish Empire's King Carlos III granted Rancho Los Nietos to Spanish soldier Manuel Nieto. The Rancho Los Cerritos and Rancho Los Alamitos were divided from this territory. A portion of western Long Beach was originally part of the Rancho San Pedro.
In 1843 Jonathan Temple bought Rancho Los Cerritos, after arriving in California in 1827 from New England. He built what is now known as the "Los Cerritos Ranch House", an adobe which still stands and is a National Historic Landmark. Temple created a thriving cattle ranch and prospered, becoming the wealthiest man in Los Angeles County. Both Temple and his ranch house played important local roles in the Mexican-American War.

Long Beach pier, 1905

In 1866 Temple sold Rancho Los Cerritos for $20,000 to the Northern California sheep-raising firm of Flint, Bixby & Co, which consisted of brothers Thomas and Benjamin Flint and their cousin Lewellyn Bixby. In 1880, Bixby sold 4,000 acres (16 km²) of the Rancho Los Cerritos to William E. Willmore, who subdivided it in hopes of creating a farm community, Willmore City. He failed and was bought out by a Los Angeles syndicate that called itself the "Long Beach Land and Water Company." They changed the name of the community to Long Beach, at that time. The City of Long Beach was officially incorporated in 1897.

Long Beach boardwalk, 1907

Another Bixby cousin, John W. Bixby, was influential in the city. After first working for his cousins at Los Cerritos, J.W. Bixby leased land at Rancho Los Alamitos. He put together a group: banker I.W. Hellman, Lewellyn and Jotham Bixby, and him, to purchase the rancho. In addition to bringing innovative farming methods to the Alamitos (which under Abel Stearns in the late 1850s and early 1860s was once the largest cattle ranch in the US), J.W. Bixby began the development of the oceanfront property near the city's picturesque bluffs.

Oil field in Long Beach, 1920

The town grew as a seaside resort with light agricultural uses.^[4] The Pike was the most famous beachside amusement zone on the West Coast from 1902 until 1969, it offered bathers food, games and rides, such at the Dual Ferris Wheel and Cyclone Racer' roller coaster. Gradually the oil industry, Navy shipyard and facilities and port became the mainstays of the city. In the 1950s it was referred to as "Iowa by the sea," due to a large influx of people from that and other Midwestern states. Huge picnics for migrants from each state were a popular annual event in Long Beach until the 1960s.
Oil was discovered in 1921 on Signal Hill, which split off as a separate incorporated city shortly afterward. The discovery of the Long Beach Oil Field, brought in by the gusher at the Alamitos No. 1 well, made Long Beach a major oil producer; in the 1920s the field was the most productive in the world.^[5]
The Long Beach earthquake of 1933 was a magnitude 6.3 earthquake that caused significant damage to the city and surrounding areas, killing a total of 120 people.

The new Ford assembly plant in Long Beach, 1930

First Christian Church of Long Beach was the site of Pacific Bible Seminary (now called Hope International University) in the early 1930s

The city was the site of "The Los Angeles Air Raid of 1942" during World War II, when observers for the Army Air Corps reported shells being fired from the sea. Anti-aircraft batteries fired into the night sky, although no planes were ever sighted.
The nonprofit Aquarium of the Pacific, located in downtown Long Beach, opened to the public in 1998. It has become a major attraction visited by more than 13 million people since its opening. The Aquarium was rated #2 Los Angeles area Family Destination in the most recent Zagat U.S. Family Travel Guide, second only to Disneyland.