Friday 3 (30/07/10)

This has definitely felt like the longest week so far, although now it’s over it doesn’t seem a week since last Friday. I went into Downtown again today, but this time managed to find the real shopping areas. I started off at “LA Live”, which is a new development on the South edge of Downtown, not far at all from the campus. But it turns out it’s not a shopping centre, just a series of restaurants, bars, hotels and entertainment venues. So I wandered further North and Eastwards, hoping to stumble upon the shopping streets Josh and I had driven past the week before. And I did manage to find them.

It has always made me laugh that in American movies people generally know what direction things are in, and seem to use the points of the compass for most of their navigation. But it really is the simplest way to understand where you are in a city that’s based on a grid. Most of the streets in LA run approximately North-South or East-West, and the buses and trains can generally be categorised that way as well. The surprising thing is that it actually works, because in most UK cities you can quickly become disorientated by the curving roads.

So this area is, as I think I described last Saturday, quite downmarket. It’s all cut-price electronics, jewellery, clothes and accessories. And theatres - there seems to be an old Vaudeville theatre on every street. Josh tells me that because of building regulations, people generally find it worth their while only to let the ground floor of the old buildings. Renovating the upper floors to the required level would involve too much investment. It’s incredible to think that it isn’t worth turning any of these buildings into clubs or bars, given how quickly this happens in the UK. But then, in a city that’s practically closed over the weekend, I suppose the usual rules don’t apply. I saw a sign outside a bar in LA Live that said “Count down to the weekend with our Happy Hour specials” – presumably there’s no point having a weekend special, so they have it during the week.