Los Angeles, California

Of all the places I've been to on this JetBlue trip, Los Angeles is the first place I regret coming to.

To get from Long Beach airport to Hollywood was a $70 cab ride (alternative being 3-hour metro ride through sketchy parts of Los Angeles at night). Arriving in Hollywood on a Saturday night is like stepping into a zoo - pan-handlers and overly-pretentious party folk galore. I walked up and down Hollywood blvd just to take in the (rather cheap) culture before heading back to the hostel (not particularly nice) for a good night's sleep.

The next day I had to do laundry and ended up finding a laundromat on Sunset Blvd, which of course was completely vacant on a Sunday morning but already scorching hot. On the way back I walked around Hollywood blvd again to see how it was during the day: completely overrun with tourists. Shutting down half of the road for a movie premier at Kodak theater didn't help much either.

After getting some lunch at a Japanese restaurant on Hollywood blvd I joined a walking tour with the hostel up to Hollywood hills to catch some great (though smog-filtered) views of downtown Los Angeles and even the Hollywood sign.

The next day I set out for downtown Los Angeles via the metro and was surprised just how much of a dump it was. There's a small business district with nothing but large buildings; outside of that were crappy, borderline unsafe, areas. I did, however, make a visit to Little Tokyo, which was charming though very small.

After walking around Los Angeles, I got back on the Metro for a one hour metro ride to Long Beach, south of Los Angeles. Taking the above-ground metro ride made it obvious how dumpy the communities outside of Los Angeles were; I certainly wouldn't want to go back there.

Arriving in Long Beach left no obvious way to walk to something of interest. One of the piers was "off-limits to pedestrians". I did eventually find the beach, which was rather unimpressive (and dwarfed by the absolutely enormous parking lot), with no shops or food places like Mission Beach in San Diego.

I took a ($30) cab ride back to Long Beach Airport (which is probably the worst airport I've been to in the United States, though I knew that from last year) and departed on my red-eye to Washington, DC.

In summation, my characterization of Los Angeles is: uncultured with crazy traffic/smog, a crappy downtown, pretentious and out-of-touch people, and trashy suburban sprawl. I definitely won't be coming back to LA if I can help it.