LA en vie

Paris interlude: how to park

Overheard: the chauffeur

"How are you getting to your modeling jobs? Doesn't your mom work?"

"I hired a friend to drive me everywhere after school."

The first car theft

"Where are they going to get you?" asked a new friend rhetorically. "They can't mug you-- no one walks in Los Angeles. No, they're going to go after your car."

My brother's car was stolen from his San Fernando Valley neighborhood on Sunday. On Monday, the police found it in Compton, looking like this.

Luckily, it was insured.

Why is this legal? Cell phones while driving

It shocks me every time, even after months here, to see people driving with cell phones stuck to their ears. Even though 90 % of Los Angeles drivers seem to do it. You can tell they're on the phone even when you are driving behind them--because they are not paying attention to the road. It's so dangerous.

A lot of studies have shown that you drive just as badly when you are on the cell phone as when you are actually drunk.

This is illegal in France and England. I don't understand why it is legal here.

This is why you should not do it.

December 2009: Using a handheld cell phone while driving was made illegal in California starting in July 2008.

Crazy Foreigner

Les belles américaines

On Saturday morning I took N, newly arrived in L.A., over to the Farmer's Market where there is genuine Louisiana food to be had at the Gumbo Pot. We had red beans and rice (which New Orleans people traditionally eat on Monday at lunch) and gumbo.

Afterwards we wandered over to the Grove outdoor shopping mall, where we found a display of about thirty beautifully maintained old cars from the 1920s onwards. It reminded me that in France, these are always called "les belles américaines ."

The parking-lot kids

Last night late we stopped at a pharmacy, which amazingly to me was still open. I sat in the car while the others went in, and so had a chance to watch the local junior-high-school kids at the end of their Saturday evening. They congregated around the parking lot in groups of five to ten, and every once in a while, a car would drive up and one of the kids would detach himself or herself and get into the car. Until they could drive, their social life depended entirely on their parents', or their friends' parents, driving them here and there.

"A lot of people in this area," said the Triple-A man who came to fix a flat tire, "as soon as their kid gets a driver's license, they buy a car for the kid out of convenience, so they won't have to spend all their time driving him around. Then they feel guilty for not driving them, so they buy the kid a fancy car, like a BMW. It's so dumb! I got my son a second-hand pickup truck and made him pay the insurance himself. "

The Ethiopian car valet

We went out to a Mexican restaurant last night, where I peered all around hoping to see a celebrity (so far, nobody, but L did just see Beyoncé and Kevin Spacey in Las Vegas).

I was about to park the car myself, but a smiling, very handsome Ethiopian came over and I saw he was the car valet. In Los Angeles, it seems most restaurants of any stature have valet parking.

Everyone got out and I waited for my ticket. "No ticket!" said the valet. "I remember everything!" Then he enthusiastically high-fived a surprised passenger of mine, recently arrived from Great Britain.

But when dinner was over and we came back out, the valet brought me a different car.

"If you are bringing me other people's cars, I would rather have that one," I said, pointing at a black  Mercedes.

"Ah, now I remember," he said. "Have a wonderful eva ning!"

Legendary Highway One

On the way home from the north I took Highway One south, the legendary Pacific Coast Highway that I'd been wanting to drive since I was a passenger many years ago with a bird-watching driver (who kept his nose on the steering wheel and his eyes toward the heavens for several hundred miles, occasionally swerving to yell, "A red-tailed kite! I swear that was a red-tailed kite!").

It was because of him that I knew to stop at Point Lobos to look for sea otters, harbor seals and whales. The ranger lent me a pair of binoculars and I saw the seals lounging on a big rock in Whalers Cove, and sea otters with their white faces, floating in a raft of kelp. No whales, but it is the season to see them offshore.

The rest of the drive was spectacular and it felt like the right time of the year and the right direction to drive. There were few people on the road, and all the RVs (which Europeans like to rent, blocking the beautiful scenery and infuriating everyone behind them) were heading north, not south. That's good because you can only drive about 40 miles an hour without being reckless. The road winds up and down over many a filled-in landslide and past precipitous driveways on the ocean side, land posted "PRIVATE! KEEP OUT!"

It does seem strange that this land should be private. It's so obviously a public good.

Further south, I came across a large elephant seal colony. They were right by the road, and only a fence and gate separated them from us . They were making a deafening racket, honking and squealing. The males have snouts like a bobbed elephant's trunk. I watched them for a while and gradually worked out that an Alpha Male was watching over his harem. Whenever he relaxed his guard, the Beta males would make a beeline for the nearest female, trying to mate with her  regardless of any small cub in the way. In the photo, left, you can see the Alpha's wives screaming for help. Alpha is arriving off camera at right. If you look carefully, you can see a hapless cub's tail right under the Beta Male's scarred white throat. One cub was nearly smothered to death as I watched, but it managed to escape from under the behemoth, wriggling frantically. The Alpha Male heard its cries and came humping across the sand at full speed. The interloper took himself off rapidly to a respectful distance.

Right past the elephant seal colony, I saw what looked like a Spanish castle high on a hill further south. It was San Simeon, the palace of William Randolph Hearst. He was the Rupert Murdoch of his day, a main instigator of the Spanish-American war, and the inspiration for Citizen Kane.

The easy driver's license

My first year in Paris, it took me several months of sweat and tears (literally) to get my French driver's license, a miserable, expensive and hair-raising task.*  So when I went to the Department of Motor Vehicles today, it was not to get a license, which I assumed would take weeks, but just to pick up A, who had been dropped off there. I was slightly dazed when I walked out of the DMV an hour or so later with my brand new California driver's license!

I had had to produce my passport; an old U.S. driver's license, which I carry in my wallet because the French one freaks out American cops (the DMV didn't mind that it had expired when I stopped being able to renew it from overseas after 9/11) --this exempted me from the driving test; and $27. While I waited for my number to be called, I skimmed through the California drivers' booklet, but I didn't have time to finish it. Then I posed for a photo, gave a thumbprint, and winged it on the written test. There were a couple of hard questions, but mostly it was necessary knowledge and common sense.

On the back of the application, I registered to vote. I could have done it in Chinese, Tagalog, Japanese, Korean and Spanish.

* According to this official-looking site, updated in October 2006, you can now just exchange your foreign license, within your first year in France, without having to take the French driver's tests. A welcome revolution.