Oceanside Field Trip

We drove to the town of Oceanside as a field trip. Oceanside is a relatively small beach town about sixty miles southeast of Las Angeles.

Our first stop was the California Surf Museum. The museum exhibit was about women surfers. At the beginning of the museum they had a swimsuit on display from the early nineteen hundreds, if I remember right. The early swimsuits were much more modest than the modern swim clothing. As we made our way through the museum we came across the real surf board of Bethany Hamilton. She was a woman who lost her arm in a shark attack off the coast of Hawaii in October 2003. She survived the attack and went back to surfing in only three weeks. The board obviously has a large portion of it bitten out. After we were done looking we went back to the car.

The next museum we went to is the Oceanside Museum of Art. The theme of this museum was World War II art. The paintings were very interesting. They were beautiful, but the paintings were of tanks and anti-aircraft weapons. Still, the paintings were nicely balanced. After we were done we decided to go into the next room of the museum. The entire other room was filled with abstract paintings from only one artist, opposed to the other room with very detailed and meaningful paintings my many different artists. I actually didn't like the paintings in there very much. When we were done downstairs we began to explore the upstairs. Upstairs there were much fewer painting. My favorite paintings on the upstairs were ones of Oceanside itself. There were paintings of areas we drove past earlier on our trip. When we were all done we went back down stairs and back to the car.

I noticed the culture of Oceanside is very different from the rest of society, especially speaking of the dress code. Women can walk down the main streets only wearing a swimsuit which would be very socially unacceptable or even against the law in other towns. The city is built around the "Surf culture".

Overall the field trip was a great learning experience. We learned a lot about the community which we couldn't have done without actually being there.

-Timothy 14