LA Story

It was nearly three weeks ago that I was in Disneyland and I have been almost too busy with all the action of starting a new job, my birthday and the weekend day tripping Laura and I have taken since to write about it.

My trip to LA started on a Tuesday. Over the month of March in Calgary most of the built-up snow and ice has been melting but about once a week we seem to get a substantive dump. This is to remind everyone that the calender might say that Spring is coming, but The Fat Lady Winter is not singing yet. So the Sunday and Monday before I left, it had snowed. The Tuesday morning I left my suitcase inside my front door, laced up my hiking boots and wrapped up well to do my walk to work in a good 8 cm of snow.

It was unreal. In less than 19 hours I was going to have completed work and be in California on Santa Monica beach looking at the Pacific Ocean.

I had been temping in a family law firm who had wanted me to stay on, but had accepted the job offer with the firm I'm now at. This left me with 5 days break over the St Patricks' Day weekend. One of the ladies from my work lived near the airport but always took the bus to work because you generally need to sell an organ to pay for all day parking in the city, it's up there with Sydney. So we'd arranged for her to drive in that day so she wouldn't have to take the bus in the snow and I would pay for parking if she could drop me at the airport, rather than taking a cab. So after work we swung by my house, picked up my suitcase, dumped the hiking boots, grabbed the sunglasses and I was ready for LA.

I left plenty of time but departing Calgary is a longer process than I thought. Whereas when I arrived in Calgary from Winnipeg, the arrivals hall has huge technicolour murals of cowboys and rodeo riders (My favourite has a hot pink ten gallon hat- very New Vogue), departing is strictly business. You go through US arrival customs and immigration at Calgary, not LAX, to avoid congestion at LAX. So after passing through all that you are quarantined into a different part of the airport to try and choke down your last Canadian muffin (bran- who puts bran in a muffin? might as well bake shredded cardboard) and await your flight.

The flight itself was nothing to report on. The movie was ordinary and the seats were half empty.

Arriving at LAX at about 9/ 9.30 pm I had found that I had neglected to bring the piece of paper with me that actually had the address of the Santa Monica YHA where I was staying. No worries, I still had cash from Hawaii including some quarters so I found a phonebook and called from the airport. A lot of signs I see around public spaces in the US says "No solicitors" which initially confused me, and I'm still not sure whether it applies across the board to all people selling something, or just beggars and hookers. Or maybe they just don't like lawyers. Given America is the Land of Revolution, I'd like to see some signs saying "No dentists" or "No telemarketers" instead which would make more sense.

After phoning the hostel and working out I needed a shuttle bus, I did a few laps of the arrivals driveway outside the airport before locating the right ones, run by two black guys, one in dreadlocks and the other with a stack of electrical gadgetry hanging around his neck. They were very friendly and thought the level of travel that Australians do is amazing. I was pretty tired (but have been worse) and they took good care of me, keeping up a steady patter on Santa Monica, laughing at the idea of me "movin' from tha Kan-ga-roos to tha Roc-kee" of Calgary and telling me you're never to old for Disneyland though "we like it but we don't go there".

I think the concept was that they are proud of Disneyland being in their town but that they were too cool to go. They were also too cool to explain to me how cool they were because that would be uncool. That was fine by me. I had already worn my housemate down, who initially said, "Disneyland's for kids" with my enthusiasm over the preceding week and he'd eventually caved to the idea of me in Disneyland and volunteered that he would accept plastic mouse ears if I brought them back as a souvenier.

The shuttle driver seemed to drive on endless ribbons of highway before slowing into the Santa Monica area, which reminded me a lot of Manly, with the beach (no surf though and much wider), a plaza area and lots of late night shops and lights. It is a really lovely area and the hostel was wedged prominently in the street one block from the beach one way and one block from the plaza area the other way. It was one of the best locations I have stayed in, central but not dodgy. In LA there a lot of homeless people and ironically out of all the homeless folk in the world, the ones in LA look most like the ones on the movies. Maybe they don't use extras after all. When the shuttle bus pulled up, there was a large old black woman in rags picking something out of a bin. She looked exactly like the Southern Voodoo woman who plays opposite Kevin Spacey in Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil.

They have renovated the hostel over the past few years and the best part is the Mexican- inspired stucco archways from the dining rooms to the secure courtyard where people hang out at night, drink beer, smoke and talk. I got sorted, decided that I would go to Universal Studios the next day on my first day tour, and hit the pillow.