24 Hours in The City of Angels (USA Day 143)
With just a day to explore L.A. on bikes, we knew we’d struggle. There’s plenty to see, but it’s very spread out, and this isn’t the sort of city with pretty interstitials. We plumped for Hollywood Boulevard to gawp at the pavement stars and avoid having our pictures taken with all the money-hungry Spider-Men, but mainly to search for Nicholas Cage (star of our favourite documentary, The Rock), and then for Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson (star of our other favourite documentary, Nicholas Cage), and then for Donald Trump (star of our least favourite documentary, Real Life) but mainly to see if it had been defaced recently. Sadly, no. Did you know that celebrities have to pay tens of thousands of dollars for the right to have a star? Takes the shine off the achievement a little, doesn’t it.
The city, while glitzy and polished, is perfuming over a toxic understench. We saw it from the moment we cycled in: two women wearing almost nothing sprawled over a brand new car posing for photos, a group of topless dudes, muscles rippling, taking it in turns to perform chin-ups on a lamp-post, street upon street of enormous homes, spread out lugubriously behind neatly-trimmed hedges, each one its own Disneyland interpretation of some historic style, garages bulging with cars of an assortment of sizes, but all polished until they glow, stately women with concrete faces parading their tiny, prim dogs along the sidewalk. None of these things can be limited to L.A., neither can any one of them describe the entirety of the populace, but each one is here en masse. It’s a city mid-performance, utterly self-aware yet method acting to a point of no-return. I can’t imagine what living here would do to me. I’d probably have better abs.
Our next stop was Korea Town, which much like the rest of LA is massive and decompressed, unlike the cramped and bustling slum that we’d naively expected. For early lunch we slurped thick and milky bone broth in a shop with no sign that sold only bone broth. Then for late lunch we cycled across to the other side of the district for a Korean barbeque performance, where you grill your own delicious meats, as much as you want for a fixed price, but if you leave leftovers then you pay a sort of fine. It’s a strange, exciting way to eat. A sort of appetite blackjack. We twisted for beef bulgogi, slices of brisket, pork belly and chicken served alongside thousands of sides that included kimchi, rice paper, fermented sprouts and pickled daikon, before gambling no further and sticking with our solid score about two mouthfuls before we’d have gone bust.
We spent our evening up at Griffith Observatory, which sits up by the Hollywood sign, amongst the rambling lanes which couch the houses of the rich and famous. It boasts great views of this vast city and some sort of indoor planetarium performance, of which we opted out in favour of seeing real celestial bodies do their own show. After jostling for position with the selfie-snapping hordes, we tried to spot landmarks (nope) and watched the colours change through gold to black as the night began.
Back down in town, after a bonkers switchback descent where street lamps would have been nice, the roads were now jammed with a billion people heading home from work or out to a movie. Every empty space had been turned into a public parking lot for this or that theatre nearby. In the mood for some relevant viewing, we popped home and stuck on L.A.-based Pulp Fiction, which didn’t much reflect our experiences of the city but was as brilliant as ever.
