Los Angeles: Famous Car City

Everyone knows Los Angeles is a car city. Steve Martin memorialized it by driving down the block in the movie LA Story. I’ve actually heard someone speak of their car as their place of worship. And of course, life here is almost defined, for good or ill, by the freeways, which are important enough to be prefaced with their own article: the 405, the 10, the 60.

No one walks in Los Angeles. Except me. I moved here at the end of December to take a job at Corazonas Foods, and I began to explore the city on foot. The reaction of friends and acquaintances was not exactly positive, but was something like “Go ahead, kid, knock yourself out.”

In February I started taking pictures with my cell phone on my travels around West LA and posting them to my own blog. These are just random impressions of the city, and having lived a lot of places, I know that I’ll never see the city quite the same way again as when it’s new to me.

Traveling on foot means I don’t get that far – my whole world is a tiny corner of a mammoth sprawling city. But I also see more than I would from a car – intriguing shops, flowers I’ve never seen before, signs in languages I don’t read, and people I haven’t met – yet.

As far as walking in LA goes, it may not be popular, but as usual, I march to my own drum. Nowadays, I have a pedometer to measure how much marching that actually is!