""We Love LA....We Love it!"" a Los Angeles Travel Page by spartan

The rambling metropolis of LOS ANGELES sprawls across the thousand square miles of a great desert basin, knitted together by an intricate network of high-speed freeways between the ocean and the snowcapped mountains. Its colorful melange of shopping malls, palm trees and swimming pools is at once bafflingly strange and startlingly familiar, thanks to the celluloid self-image that it has spread all over the world.

LA is a young city; in the mid-nineteenth century, it was a community of white American immigrants, poor Chinese laborers and wealthy Mexican ranchers, with a population of less than fifty thousand. Only on completion of the transcontinental railroad in the 1880s did it really begin to grow. The old ranches were subdivided, and the enduring symbol of the city became the family-sized suburban house (with swimming pool and two-car garage), set amidst the orange groves in a glorious land of sunshine. The real boom came after World War II with the mushrooming of the aeronautics industry – which, until the recent post-Cold War military cutbacks, accounted for one in four jobs.

The first-time visitor may well find Los Angeles thrilling and threatening in equal proportions; it’s a place that picks you up and sweeps you along whether you want it to or not. Sure, it has its fine-art museums and so on, but what people really come here for is to experience the city that has come to epitomize the American Dream – most obviously in the fantasy worlds of Disneyland and Hollywood, but also in the half-flaunted, half-concealed opulence of Beverly Hills and Malibu <font color=purple>(Text courtesy of Excite/Travel)</font>.