Los Angeles

I had braced myself to dislike Los Angeles. I am a European; I distrust cities you cannot walk, and everyone had warned me about the traffic and the sprawl and the emptiness behind the palm trees. Then on our first evening Lia and I drove up into Griffith Park with the windows down, the city unrolled below us in a grid of lights stretching to the black line of the ocean, and something in me quietly surrendered. LA does not announce its beauty the way Paris does. It just waits until you stop resisting the light, and then it has you.

Griffith and the Hills

We spent our mornings in the hills, which is where I finally understood the city. From the Observatory the whole basin spreads out, downtown’s towers small and far off, the Hollywood sign white on its brown slope, and on a clear day the ocean glittering at the edge of it all. We hiked the trails behind the Observatory early, before the heat, passing runners and dog-walkers and the occasional coyote trotting unbothered across the path. Lia liked it best at dusk, when the sky went pink over the reservoir and the city began switching itself on below us, light by light, until it looked like something spilled.

The Beaches

Down at the coast, LA becomes a different city entirely. We rented rickety bikes at Santa Monica and rode the path south toward Venice, weaving past skaters and muscle-bound men on the outdoor gym and vendors selling everything imaginable. The Pacific was colder than it looked and Lia shrieked when she went in, then dragged me after her. We ate fish tacos with sand on our feet and watched the sun drop into the ocean behind the Santa Monica Pier, its Ferris wheel lighting up against the dusk. It was gloriously unserious, exactly the tonic a Frenchman’s dignity needs.

Tacos and Neighborhoods

The real Los Angeles, the one I fell for, is in its food and its neighborhoods, and you find it by getting stuck in traffic long enough to get hungry. We ate our way across the city: al pastor sliced off a spinning trompo at a Boyle Heights taco stand, Thai noodles in a strip mall, Korean barbecue where we grilled our own meat in a haze of smoke and laughter. Each district felt like its own small country, and the drives between them, which I had dreaded, became the way we saw the city change from block to block. Lia kept a list of everything we ate. It ran to two pages.

Getting There

Los Angeles International (LAX) is one of the busiest airports on earth and the obvious way in, though the smaller Burbank and Long Beach airports are far gentler if your route allows. Once here you will need a car; the public transit is improving but the city was built around the automobile and still runs on it, so brace for traffic and plan drives around the notorious rush hours. We based ourselves near Silver Lake, central enough to reach both the hills and the coast without living on the freeway. Give the city more days than you think you need, pick two or three neighborhoods, and resist the urge to see everything.