It’s not that I had a bad time in the world’s second biggest city, it’s just that the city and I didn’t hit it off. LA hasn’t seemed to have grasped the idea of looking nice. Downtown is concrete and polluted, Hollywood is run-down and polluted, and the rest has been abandoned as a basket case…and it’s polluted. As a Northern Californian at heart, I have to reveal my bias here, but seriously, I was expecting more.
Only one of the many people I solicited in LA, Steven, agreed to take me as a couchsurfer. I knew from his profile that he went to school at the University of Southern California (useful for me since I am reviewing this one). What it didn’t say on his profile is that he is actually a member of a fraternity there. Thus it was that I found myself in ATΩ, a USC frat-house. It wasn’t nearly as scary as I thought it might be. It was very much like in the movies though.
The residents (inmates?) of the mansion which houses the fraternity (on a street full of similar mansions) were sons of wealthy USC alumni, with heads filled mostly with women and substances. Fortunately, Steven himself was a member of couchsurfing.com, and thus a very friendly, interesting and open-minded chap, and had a great taste in music as well. I actually had plenty of fun there, and even began to appreciate the comradely atmosphere of the house.
After getting the low-down on USC, I took the Metrorail train out to an eastern suburb of the metropolis, Claremont, where I felt like I’d just arrived on the other side of the world. Claremont was clean, peaceful, spacious and walkable, and the girls at the tiny all-female Scripps College were a jarringly pleasant and sophisticated bunch, earning themselves a big thumbs-up in their new Uni in the USA entry.
Unfortunately, I got so carried away by the lovely change of atmosphere that I misread the train timetable and missed the last train back. This had happened to me once before, when I went to an Obama rally in Fredericksburg, Virginia, back in September. At the time, I had only recently finished traveling in Europe, so the concept of there being a "last" train did not even occur to me. This time, as with that time, I had to find a motel, though the one in Claremont was not nearly as cheap or Psycho-esque as the awesome place I’d found in Fredericksburg.
The next day I found my way out to another distant suburb, Malibu, on the opposite side of the city, a journey of about three hours. Here I met up with my second host, Justin, who was wonderful and lived in a house with ten other West-Coast guys, and three other couchsurfers while I was there (from Holland, South Korea and Uruguay – what a mix!).
The location was insane. Malibu is situated right on a fantastical stretch of world-famous coast-line, and the house was perched up in the beautiful Mediterranean hills overlooking the mighty Pacific. Justin drove me the ten miles from Pepperdine, the third LA university I was looking at (equally well situated), on his motorbike, on a road that people come from the across the world just to drive on, but which caught me totally by surprise. In the evening we hiked up to the top of one of the hills and watched a magnificent sunset over the ocean.
Wrapping up in LA with an abortive trip to Universal Studios, which was altered in favour of the new Star Trek movie after we discovered that the cost to get into the famous theme-park would be roughly my budget for the next week-and-a-half, I spent the night in Ventura, a little north of LA, with my Etonian friends again at a concert of Ukrainian "gypsy-punks" Gogol Bordello, a band that would be described in British parlance as complete nutters, or in American parlance as Communists.
Up early the next morning, and I began my Tolkienesque 2-day saga of a journey into the far corner of Texas. I had decided to skip Arizona and New Mexico, not a decision I took lightly, but again I felt thwarted by US public transportation, since all the cool bits of those states are inaccessible sans auto. So I passed grimly through famous cities like Phoenix, El Paso and San Antonito, and decided to write this update a few hours short of my final destination in Houston. Texas is the first state I’ve been to that didn’t vote for Obama in November (just ponder that thought for a while) and you can see it in road signs such as "Don’t Mess With Texas. Littering Fine $1000". Also in the bus drivers that look like Terminator 2.
I’ve also passed through two time-zones to get here. Let us take a moment to consider the logistics of a country that has no fewer than four different time zones (more if you include Alaska and Hawaii), including over 10 states that span more than one. Imagine having to change your watch every time you go to a nearby town in the same state. In Indiana, the parts of the state that are in one time zone are not even continuous. My personal favourite is Arizona, which is part of the Mountain Time Zone during the winter, but in the summer ignores the daylight savings switch of that time zone, putting it back into the Pacific Time Zone. One area in the northeast of the state does observe the time change, however, apart from a little bit of that area which doesn’t. This makes it technically possible to go for a two hour-or-so drive and have to change your watch about eight times.
And with that thought, I leave you to imagine what awaits me in America’s fifth largest-city, Houston, Texas.
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