G'Day, Sydney

On Mon­day night, we packed our bags again and returned to LAX to catch our flight to Syd­ney. The entire secu­rity process took about 5 minutes:no immi­gra­tion con­trol, no pass­port stamp, the bags were sim­ply x-rayed and we didn’t have to go through the body-scanner non-sense. Morale of the story: get­ting into the U.S.A is hard but get­ting out is piece of cake.

The Rich L.A

I was curi­ous to see the other side of L.A, the glam­orous one. So far, I wasn’t too impressed: houses looked nice but noth­ing out of the ordi­nary. I cer­tainly couldn’t pic­ture all these movie stars and socialites liv­ing here, in Korea Town or in Lit­tle Armenia.

Venice Beach

We headed to Venice Beach and had break­fast in a small side­walk restau­rant, from which we could observe peo­ple com­ing and going. This is one of the best spot I have ever seen for can­did por­traits and street photography—locals seemed obliv­i­ous to what was going on around them and sim­ply kept on rollerblad­ing, run­ning, singing or what­ever activ­ity they were into.

Hollywood Boulevard

After Hol­ly­wood Hill, we headed back to Hol­ly­wood Boule­vard for a much-needed dose of tacky sou­venirs and postcards.

Being in L.A was very fun for me, the same way it is for an Amer­i­can going to Paris, I guess. I read so many mys­tery and thriller books tak­ing place in that city, includ­ing Jonathan Kellerman’s books, that I felt I knew it. Yet it sur­prised me.

Hollywood

We didn’t sleep much on Sat­ur­day night and get­ting up at 4:30 a.m. on Sun­day was bru­tal. I can barely remem­ber what we did at the Ottawa air­port, but we must have got it right because we landed in Toronto at 8 a.m., trans­ferred to another flight and landed in Los Ange­les six hours later.

The Runaway

Many years ago, as I was head­ing to Aus­tralia, a friend of a friend tried to psy­cho­an­a­lyze me. “But, don’t you think you are run­ning away?” she said, wisely, at the ripe old age of 20. “Trav­el­ing so much… what are you escap­ing from?”
I quickly brushed her com­ment away, both because her supe­rior air of wis­dom annoyed me and because I quite didn’t know what to say.

10 More Things I Can’t Travel Without

The first list I made was by no means the last one. The more we travel, the more we learn. Times change too: up until our Latin Amer­ica trip two years ago, I car­ried… a Walk­man and a few home­made tapes. I finally bought an iPod nano and it lit­er­ally saved my san­ity dur­ing these long bus rides!

Down Under

We need to travel badly, like two junkies look­ing for a fix. We need to escape Canada and the cold win­ter. We need the free­dom and the care­free life of those who hit the road. I don’t know where this trip will take us. We have no plans, as usual.
We just bought the tick­ets a cou­ple of weeks ago, almost on a dare. It took us the whole evening to fig­ure out the best itin­er­ary and we decided to fly the Pacific route through L.A.