"LOS ANGELES - ON FOOT" a Los Angeles Travel Page by JohnnySpangles

You don’t walk anywhere in Los Angeles, it’s against the law. So is smoking and talking to women in anything other than a purely professional manner. If you fly into Los Angeles at dusk, and look down from your cramped aluminium sarcophagus, all you can see for miles and miles are twinkling lights marking out grids of rectangles on a huge expanse of printed circuit board. It’s so spread out that it makes you wonder where they got all that space from, and also why don’t they sell some of it to New York. That’s why they drive everywhere. Even popping down to the local off-licence entails filling up the gas tank for a five hour drive.

I was staying in a place called Marina Del Rey, which is not far from Santa Monica. My hotel was about two hundred yards from the nearest restaurant and on my first evening I took a leisurely stroll along to see if American food gets any better on the West Coast. It doesn’t. Food in America is on a par with that in the UK in terms of being stunningly inedible. I could count on one hand the number of decent meals I’ve had in the USA, actually I could count them on one finger. The only difference between food in the USA and the UK is quantity, there’s more of it in America. Unfortunately it’s usually smothered in some gloopy sauce that’s been made with ingredients that you wouldn’t even expect to be on speaking terms, never mind be sharing the same saucepan. Still you have to give them full marks for trying even if Anchovies, Mangoes and Gravel will never get along together no matter how much you beat them.

When I’d finished my meal, I had a drink at the bar and ended up staying there until the small hours chatting to the barmaid. I was only chatting you understand, not flirting inside her personal space and thus threatening her right to be a person by metaphorically beating her with my overbearing male phallocentricity. When it was time to go she offered to call me a cab. I dismissed the idea of such a thing, as I was only staying a mere cough and a spit away. She was most insistent though, as she claimed that the police would probably arrest me. You see the only reason that anybody would ever walk along a pavement in LA is that they are too drunk to drive.

For a city that lives on two axles you would think that the Taxis would be the best in the world. They’re not. They are usually driven by Eastern European drivers who have just driven all the way from Minsk. If your destination doesn’t include the word ‘Airport’ then you’re buggered, as that’s more than likely where you’ll end up. I wanted to go see the La Brea Tar Pits, which are world-famous. They were to me anyway. I had an Aurora plastic construction kit as a child. It was of the tar pits and featured a struggling woolly mammoth being watched by an eager looking vulture as it was sucked into the sticky, black tar, which actually sounds like quite a nice sauce to go with a steak. I promised myself that if I ever went to LA then I’d go see these bubbling pools of black stuff. The taxi driver had obviously not been the sort of boy to have his bedroom ceiling festooned with Spitfires, Messerschmits and Flying Fortresses as he looked somewhat vacant when I mentioned my model, and the tar pits it purported to represent. I did eventually get there, via the airport. It’s actually on Museum Avenue, and it’s a fascinating place. It’s no theme park, and there’s a sign over the door to the little museum stating that there were never any dinosaur remains in the tar pits. Despite this there was one little brat stamping his feet and demanding that his ‘pop’ summon up a T.Rex out of thin air.

If you want to see a real theme park, then go to the Getty Centre in Malibu. This is an art theme park masquerading as a gallery. All the artworks are labelled in words of one syllable to give Mr and Mrs Middle America an idea of what it is they are looking at. I’m surprised the labels didn’t mention the current market value as well, just to put it into a really understandable context for them. As well as giving us Europeans another opportunity to look down our noses at our less historically advantaged friends from over the pond, it’s also free.

Another quirk unique to California is the attitude to smoking. This is a crime worse than walking, flirting or mass murder. You can’t smoke in bars or restaurants and I even got tapped on the shoulder when I lit up in a car park. You have to be twenty-eight to buy cigarettes in LA, which is nearly twice the age you have to be to buy a gun. For all its crackpot attitudes I did rather warm to California. It looks and feels a little like the South of France, sadly without the food, but fortunately without the French as well.