straight outta compton (well sort of)
for someone bought up on cliches of america as a place of excess, la is definitely the place to start. it's a city designed for cars, meaning that it's intersected by scores of huge, eight lane roads, bigger than our motorways, densely populated with cars the size of planets: all a bit much for someone used to the tranquility of the south pacific.wilde wasn't wrong when he said that england and america were two countries separated by a common language, and i soon discovered that communication here was to be more tricky then any backwater i had visited so far: these guys live such an insular life, any foreign accent (i am not australian!) and they are completely flummoxed. having arrived tired and hungry, floydie and i sauntered into a local fast food mexican place. having ordered, the server asked me 'fur'er'? what? 'fur'er'?! what? she kept shouting this at me as i got progressively more perplexed... i thought she was asking me if i wanted four burritos, so i kept replying, perfectly reasonably i thought, that one would do for starters. eventually her colleague turned round and asked me 'are you high'? to which i could only reply 'no, i'm english'. confusing times: she was actually asking if i wanted the food for here, a simple question apart from to jet lagged brits.
noone really has much good to say about la but i actually had quite a good time there, living out my boyz'n'da'hood fantasies, constantly ducking behind trees to avoid fictional drivebys, meandering through venice beach and hollywood, and having much jolly japery with the guys in the hostel. it was nice to have floydie around, and dre, mel, and marie were also an absolute pleasure: so much so that i didn't make it to bed before 4am on either of my nights there, the first night because of an impromptu game of black jack to prepare us for vegas, and the second because of sheer alcoholic silliness.
the second night's excess was a bit of a budget decision as we were heading to vegas the next day, and as floydie still can't drive i had eight hours behind the wheel. when we picked up the rental car, the friendly man upgraded us from compact to mid size: our dodge stratus was the size of a tank! the sheer size of the vehicle, coupled with a mild hangover and the fact that the yanks drive on the wrong side of the road (same as the french, it can't be good) meant that the first few miles were a bit sketchy. once i got used to motion, la entrapped us in it's suburban fly trap, as we moved from traffic snarl to pile up whilst i nervously peeked up at the gargantuan suvs and pick up trucks that surrounded my already huge car.
still, we made it out ok, and, after a brief stop for lunch at the oc (if tv wanted to truly depict newport beach, they should have less beautiful people and more freakishly large sea gulls), began the cruise to vegas. the thing about the us is that it's huge: even steaming along at x miles an hour, most journies in this mountainous, barren, hinterland take hours. the trip was not aided by the fact that us radio is diabolical: it's all hispanic (noise) or country (bad noise). you could tell you were getting close to vegas however when the adverts became more and more preposterous... my personal favourite was for 'buckwild', an erotic western. yee ha. 'erocktica' sounded pretty good too.
as night set we were driving in virtual darkness through the vast uninhabited plains. every now and then a couple of casinos would appear in the distance, like beacons in the night... nothing could prepare us for vegas however. it's the luminescense it generates that's amazing: it lights up the clouds in the night sky. as we drove through the strip, the glorious tackiness of vegas was evident everywhere: it's a monument to bad taste, awash with fake pyramids and eiffel towers. we arrived quite late and had a brief wander, but saved our vegas experience for the following day, to top off the arduous return drive to the grand canyon.
posted by bicrom @ 8:20 pm
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