a room with a view

 

I’m staying in downtown LA at a place that I could never afford if I was paying for it, and the first thing I’ve done is spread out my clothes on the floor, chuck all my paperwork on the bed, have my ipod and the tv running at the same time and leave the toilet door open and most of the lights on. It’s wild.

I had a pretty short time to do all the stuff on my LA bucket list (lu’s favourite movie), so after walking around in the nude in my room for a bit – because I could – I headed
off to the famous Farmer’s market, which has been running since 1934, then MOCA
– a few Pollocks, Mondrians and Lichtensteins and a lot of pretty awful local
art – and the Disney Concert Hall, which is one of the most beautiful buildings
I’ve ever seen. I’m sure when Walt defrosts, he’ll be very happy.

Ok, first off – theFarmers Markets are not purely nostalgia-driven, there are heaps of  people that shop there for their groceries. Secondly, the fruit is ridiculously cheap. I
bought a huge container of strawberries (maybe 4x our normal punnet size) for
79c! I just gave him a dollar, because what can you buy with 21c?…

SPOILER ALERT:

Two bananas!! I immediately wanted to whinge to anyone I could about how expensive bananas are in WA at the moment. I told the guy who swiped them through that people
reported missing bananas in Australia, and neither he nor the lady behind me
found this amusing. Then I hovered near a pile of bananas at another stall and
kind of rifled through muttering, “so cheap, too cheap, how cheap” hoping that
someone would bite. Everybody just ignored me like you do a crazy person, but I
was not going home without a sympathiser.

On the very cute, very cheap, ‘donation’ train to the art gallery I sat next to a lady who had also come from the markets. My props long digested, I had to reference hers and ask if the fruit was always so cheap. “These? Cheap?” She says. “I don’t know. What
do they usually cost you?”

Softly softly catchy monkey.

My last stop on the
way home was at a rare book store. It wasn’t on my list of things to do, but I
can never resist going in to places like that, so I had a browse and then asked
the owner whether or not he had any Sylvia Plath. No. He didn’t.

Any Somerset Maugham?
No.

Roald Dahl? No.

Evelyn Waugh – yes, he
did, but only a first edition.

And then he just kept
on reading.

I felt like saying “and what,
about this, makes you think I can’t afford a first edition?” It could have been
the strawberry juice that I’d dribbled down my shirt from the farmer’s market.
I bet I had some seeds in my mouth too. That was probably wot done me in.

……

I’m at a hot hot hot bar on top of
the Standard hotel. There’s a beer garden and a pool and amazing topiary
donkeys and a stunning 360 view of LA. It’s perfect apart from the guy on the
phone next to me dropping the f-bomb every second word. I think he’s thinking
that this plus the snakeskin shoes – brrrr – plus the fact that he’s on a
rooftop bar, is making him cool. I have been sending him esp messages countering
this for the last ten minutes.

I’ll keep you posted.