Los Angeles
Typical LA scene for us 8-)
Sunday July 25th - Tuesday August 3rd 1999
The city of angels, home of Hollywood, lala land, LA is all these things, but most importantly, it's a city without a proper bus system - if you don't have a car, it's difficult or expensive to get around. We arrived at the downtown Greyhound terminal, and the only way we could get to where we were staying (West Los Angeles) was by taxi - at $25 a time, it was not a viable option for getting around the city. Fortunately, Vlado, a friend from Slovenia with whom we were staying, has a swimming pool in his apartment complex, and this being LA, the weather was hot and sunny, so we decided, more through inertia than through any conscious decision, to take it easy and attempt to catch our breath from three months of solid travelling and/or partying. There was even a typical midsummer lull in the Slovene translation scene, so we had no option but to laze our way through (poor us!). Vlado has been a superb host, although our timing was unfortunate in that our arrival coincided with a very busy time for him at work, and he worked every day we were here, including the weekend. Alternatively, that may just have been his excuse for avoiding us 8-) (Only kidding Vlado!).
Sunset on Santa Monica beach
We seem to have made a habit of encountering various Yugoslavs on our travels - in Vancouver for instance we regularly heard Serbian/Croatian/Bosnian or whatever it's called these days - and LA was no exception. In fact, one of the other regular poolside couples were from Sarajevo, so I got the chance to practice my "Yugo".
On Saturday, we actually made it as far as Santa Monica (one of the constituent cities of LA), which is a wealthy (and therefore well-policed) touristy area of LA. The main attraction in Santa Monica is the 3rd Street promenade, a bustling lively mix of shops, restaurants and street entertainment, ranging from Russian folk music to impossibly energetic tap dancing, henna tattoos to plate-spinning, psychic cats (I kid you not - this *is* California) to classical pianists. It's the sort of place where they add 50% to the prices in the restaurants, and all their business is from people who don't know any better or who don't care. Still, it was an interesting walk and a lively experience.
Veronika on Santa Monica pier overlooking the beach
Further on, you get to Santa Monica Pier. Just down the shore is Muscle Beach, where all the meat-heads gather to show off their steroid-induced bulges and cancerous suntans, while a couple of miles to the north is the beach where Baywatch is filmed. The area has been in so many films and TV shows that I recognised it as soon as we saw it. On the pier itself is a funfair with a mini-rollercoaster and a bizarre Scooby Doo shooting game for kids. And all around the pier edge were hundreds of fishing rods, more than half of which appeared to be unattended. They even provided little tables where angles could bait their hooks and gut small fish to use as bait - some of these were located all too close to ice cream stands and food outlets, but it didn't seem to bother anyone else except me.
Santa Monica pier in the background. The large red lorry in the foreground
belonged to Mladen Buntich Construction - more Yugos!
After we watched the sunset from the pier, we returned to the 3rd Street promenade to check out the streetlife, and we encountered something that has become another running theme of our north American trip - strings of lights in trees. At home, they are only really used for Christmas and New Year; over here, it's quite common to have them all through the summer. I've heard a number of explanations for this phenomenon, none of them really satisfactory - one person expressed the idea that it was a laziness thing, others provided alternative explanations - answers on a postcard to ...
"Tree lights" on 3rd Street in Santa Monica