Brand New Old Shoes

On July of 1997, I moved from a small coastal city in Morocco to Los Angeles California to go to college, with anything in my mind but the idea of pursuing a career. My main reason for moving to the sunny state was to live the surfer life I have been dreaming about for as long as I could remember. The thing is, I have never met anybody that lived, or has even been to LA for that matter. So all the information I had about this city were from movies, surfer magazines, or sadly enough, the misleading college brochures. I was in for a big surprise.
After merely a month of research, I picked a college to go to for one reason only; a brochure statement bragging about its proximity to the beach. “10 minutes” away it claimed. Well, I don’t know if a lot of people know this about LA, but I sure did not. When someone tells you it will take a certain amount of time to get from point A to point B in LA, these are the questions you must ask to avoid embarking into a long frustrating journey, and to figure out if your destination is really worth the trip:

1. What time of the day are we talking about here?
2. Is it a local drive or do I have to take the “Freeway”?
3. If so what freeway? Does it have a carpool?
4. Are there any shortcuts?
5. Would it be better if I rented a helicopter?

I know this may seem like I’m exaggerating, but I kid you not, a so called 10 minutes drive in LA can turn into a nightmarish hour drive, if you’re lucky, and forget about those 16 lane highways, carpool or not, there are more cars than you could imagine.
Some may be wondering about public transportation, but I didn’t include it in the list of questions for the simple reason that: public transportation is close to nonexistent in LA, so you are going to be driving, everywhere. Yes, even to get milk. Unless of course, you’d rather spend a great amount of time waiting for in the, hardly ever, shaded bus stops. Therefore, if the college I went to wanted to be honest with its future students, the least they could have done is print at the bottom of the brochure, in hardly visible print of course, that the college is a 10 minute drive, at midnight, with a minimum 2 people in the car, and no accident or so called ‘hot pursuits’ going on in the freeway.
I hate to admit it but TRAFFIC is sadly the first thing that comes to mind when I think of LA. Unfortunately, driving there is a necessity. For someone that enjoys walking like I do, it’s a hard thing to get over not to be able to walk places. Moreover, I honestly don’t believe that you can explore a city without walking through its streets. There are only a handful of places, I can think of, where you can park your car and walk in LA, excluding the beaches of course. Most of these places are enclosed, and some of them even have moving floors, in case you get sick of all the walking you’ve been doing.

I do not want to sound like I hated it there, on the contrary, I enjoyed living there and would like to go back one day. LA is like a Pandora box,you are always surprised to find new pockets of space you haven’t visited, and sometimes, never heard of before. Most of them offer amazing experiences. In such an expanded city as LA, this shouldn’t come as a surprise. So if you can get past the fact that you were stuck reading the same license plate, with the obnoxious name, for the last hour or so, your destination is most likely to take care of that for you, but get ready for the drive back.

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