We started out our first day in sunny Los Angeles by taking a tour of CBS studios, specifically the set of Entertainment Tonight, where we met the friendly crew and host Mary Hart. We had lunch in a trendy little part of Santa Monica, where a few of us enjoyed an excellent slice or two of New York style pizza. We drove around Santa Monica, and then walked to the beach to enjoy a long afternoon of relaxing beach time. We then went down to Huntington Beach for some classic Californian fish tacos and check out the Surf City Nights festival. As we were leaving, we stopped to watch a very unique street performance, where a diverse group of young men were doing flips and tricks, as well as good-naturedly teasing the audience. They made all sorts of somewhat politically incorrect jokes about the “kinds of people” who would perform on the street, joking that if only they could earn enough tips they could stay off the streets and make it to college. It was interesting to watch the crowd look around a bit uncomfortably at each other and conclude that the joking was all in good humor. The juxtaposition of the crazy LA traffic we encountered and the rushed feeling of downtown next to the very relaxed surfer vibe of Huntington Beach and Santa Monica was really interesting. And then there were the more industrial, barren parts of town and I know there are all sorts of impoverished neighborhoods we did not get a chance to see. I got the feeling from our first day in L.A. that you could be in this city for months and months and never see all of its many faces.
Day 12
Disneyland. I’m going to be honest upfront- I love Disneyland -- all things Disney hold good memories for me, and I still enjoy going to the park and getting to ride rides and see my favorite characters from the movies I loved as a child dance around in a parade and the whole shebang. It’s more than just the fact that I had fun there when I was a kid- I actually still have fun when I go. However, I was definitely in the minority in this group. We did the whole waiting in lines for silly rides thing and the paying too much for a meal thing (though I had a delicious Monte Cristo that was almost worth the exorbitant amount I paid for it – you could actually feel your arteries clogging). Lunch was actually interesting, because we ate in the part of Disneyland called New Orleans, and having just been to the real thing last week, I can tell you that Disney’s New Orleans is a lot cleaner and quainter than the actual city. Disney’s New Orleans is this idealized beautiful town with Victorian-style houses, French music playing in the background, and all the waitresses and waiters are dressed in what appeared to be costumes hailing from the late 1800s. Needless to say, I did not see any of this in the real New Orleans, which gives this whole idea of Disneyland/world as an alternate reality an interesting perspective. Disney’s New Orleans has never seen a hurricane, or poverty, or strip clubs.
Going on the It’s a Small World ride as an adult was interesting, to see how Disney has created stock characters for countries around the world (and curiously enough, Hawaii as separate from America) which could possibly be responsible for forming many children’s first conceptions of people from different countries. All French women are can-can dancers, all Swiss people herd sheep, all Africans ride giraffes, etc. Strangely enough, Disney’s conception of your stock American characters consisted of a Caucasian farm boy and a Caucasian farm girl, a Caucasian cowboy, a Native American and the Toy Story characters of Woody and Jessie. That seems a rather strange interpretation of the land called the “melting pot”. All in all, our day at Disney was interesting, and for my part at least, enjoyable. We finished our day by driving around downtown L.A. and eating dinner on Hollywood Boulevard. I found Hollywood to be a bit anticlimactic, not much more than a main road with shopping opportunities that I couldn’t afford, and not much different than the main streets of other big cities. L.A. traffic was a nightmare and on the whole, I don’t think it was my kind of town. But I would certainly be willing to give it another shot, because like I said before, I don’t think we even came close to seeing all that this overwhelming city has to offer.
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