Thursday, July 15, 2004
Tales of California
Gosh everybody! It was so nice to come back from a week away and see all those comments from you! It makes me want to go away for a week-long vacation after every entry I blog :P.
It was definitely good to out of the house and see some new places, new faces, but now that I'm back, I don't miss California too much. Aside from two days in San Diego, we stayed in a small, cheap (by CA standards I suppose) hotel on the border between Los Angeles and Hollywood. I've been to California before, but I don't think it ever made me feel so uneasy as it did this time.
Not to be so black and white, but to almost every story there's more than one side. So even LA, the city of stars and angels, has a dark, dirty flipside. If you're looking for some balance, LA is not the place to find it. It's like an intense roller coaster ride that rushes you from one extreme to the next. You've got the glitzy, exclusive shops, the multimillion dollar homes, the commercialized, commodified beaches, and the beautiful people who look like they've walked straight out of a movie set meshed with so many homeless people all dirty, wearing layers of old, ripped clothes, and begging for pennies from the drivers behind the Mercedes Benz, the BMW, and the Lexus.
So now that I'm back home, I'm saying goodbye for a while to Los Angeles and its double-deckered streets, and seven-lane highways that still aren't enough to relieve the mammoth traffic jams. I won't really be missing the hazy, yellow, polluted skies which, on a good day, obscure the rugged mountains that engulf the city. It's going to be good to get away from the mad-rush of tourists hoping to spot a celebrity, or all the young wide-eyes hoping to become one.
I don't know the whole city made me so dizzy I can't even figure myself out anymore.
It was definitely good to out of the house and see some new places, new faces, but now that I'm back, I don't miss California too much. Aside from two days in San Diego, we stayed in a small, cheap (by CA standards I suppose) hotel on the border between Los Angeles and Hollywood. I've been to California before, but I don't think it ever made me feel so uneasy as it did this time.
Not to be so black and white, but to almost every story there's more than one side. So even LA, the city of stars and angels, has a dark, dirty flipside. If you're looking for some balance, LA is not the place to find it. It's like an intense roller coaster ride that rushes you from one extreme to the next. You've got the glitzy, exclusive shops, the multimillion dollar homes, the commercialized, commodified beaches, and the beautiful people who look like they've walked straight out of a movie set meshed with so many homeless people all dirty, wearing layers of old, ripped clothes, and begging for pennies from the drivers behind the Mercedes Benz, the BMW, and the Lexus.
So now that I'm back home, I'm saying goodbye for a while to Los Angeles and its double-deckered streets, and seven-lane highways that still aren't enough to relieve the mammoth traffic jams. I won't really be missing the hazy, yellow, polluted skies which, on a good day, obscure the rugged mountains that engulf the city. It's going to be good to get away from the mad-rush of tourists hoping to spot a celebrity, or all the young wide-eyes hoping to become one.
I don't know the whole city made me so dizzy I can't even figure myself out anymore.
