Yay America
Posted by Janka
Ok, time for a crazy confession: I actually like Los Angeles. I am not sure if I like it enough to actually want to live here, and I definitely do not like all parts of it (see case highways), but I like a lot of places in it, and I like the atmosphere. Despite the fact that I could not stop bursting into giggles every time someone local opened their mouth when I was here for the first time, on account of everyone being hyper and speaking in a movie-accent, I’ve adjusted since. LA gets a worse rep than it deserves. Yes, it is a sprawl, and yes, the smog is terrible at worst, but then again, doesn’t that go for almost all big cities? At least the people are friendly here, and the sprawl has a lot of green bits in it.
One specific thing about LA reputation is the public transport. It gets terrible comments from everyone – you cannot take the bus anywhere, you just have to have a car, etc etc. First time I spend a couple of days alone in the city I figured that Santa Monica must be an exception to this. Second time over, and I think the reputation is just bullshit. The buses are clean enough, and cheap, and run on schedule, and those schedules are very nice—frequent enough for a tourist to not bother checking timetables. I am sure there are commuter routes that are not covered by public transport (isn’t there always?), but the situation is not nearly as bad as you are lead to believe. The trip planner is unable to give me all routes that provably exist, and in general totally sucks compared to the Helsinki area one, but, well, considering the quality of the latter the comparison is unfair to everyone else.
The USA is its own charming self, and some things have me giggling still, such as the fact that you get frigging potato chips with your sandwich in the University cafeterias, or that the locals consider income tax rate of 25 percent “high” (though considering what they get for it, it might actually be), or that practically every public building in California seems to have a sign somewhere by its front door warning that the location “contains chemicals known to the State of California to cause cancer”.
But I giggle less and like it more every time I visit. And this time, I did not even instantly die when temperature passed 30 degrees C, at all. Apart from it turning out that thin-sole shoes on hot pavement are a bad, bad idea (in the “blistering heat is blistering” sense), I quite enjoyed myself walking around in that heat for hours. If you have a day to kill in LA, The Griffith Observatory is a nice place to see, and I especially recommend taking the trail (on your right when exiting the observatory via the main entrance) down to the Ferndell / Griffith park, which is a very relaxing place. (Thanks to the locals for the hint.)
(What? Oh. I was working. The vacation is in August/September, and yep, I will be back in the region then. Burner readers rejoice.)
