Hillel AronIt's February. It'll be 24 degrees and might snow tonight in New York City as frigid Canadian wind sweeps the East. It's 30 degrees in Boston, Chicago is dropping soon to 14 degrees (sweet Jesus), and even in San Francisco it's 50 degrees and oppressively gray — naturally. In Los Angeles, it's 73 degrees and it feels like perfect — the air is silky cool and the sunshine is like a wet kiss.
Some people say Los Angeles has no seasons. They're wrong. We have seasons. We just have perfect effing weather 300 days out of the year. Suck it, rest of the world. The weather is Reason No. 10 to Love Los Angeles and never, ever leave. Here are the nine others:
9. Parades
Los Angeles is famous for many things, but one stands high above all others: It's the world capital of moving large objects slowly through the streets.
Credit: Coco Mault
The road trip of the Space Shuttle Endeavor, the giant rock dragged to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and those vast structures covered in flowers and powered through Pasadena by what sound like lawnmower engines.
8. Everybody Must Should Can Get Stoned
Weed isn't legal in L.A., but it may as well be. Type “marijuana pre” into Google and the third suggestion is “marijuana prescriptions los angeles.” The second is “marijuana pregnancy,” surely a phrase people start Googling once they've gotten the prescription.
Credit: Torben Bjorn Hansen
That'll get you to online mentions of the names and phone numbers of roughly 600,000 actual doctors (warning: not actual doctors) who will prescribe medical kush for whatever ailment, real or imagined, you may have. Advance directly to any number of pot shops in Los Angeles (latest rough LAPD count — about 1,000), where you'll be treated to what is surely the greatest dank in the history of mankind.
Even better news: In May, Los Angeles voters will vote on three different ordinances that seek to regulate medical weed dispensaries, something the L.A. City Council has managed not to do for 15 or so years. That means more pot shops will start to resemble businesses, not your buddy Dale's college dorm room.
Credit: photographerglen
7. Day-Trippin:
Is there another city on earth that is a reasonable driving distance away from the desert, snow-capped mountains, beach and the happiest place on earth, aka Tijuana?
We're no Rand McNally, but we seriously doubt it. Throw in slightly less reasonable medium-sized journeys from Los Angeles to Catalina Island, San Francisco and Las Vegas (OK, fine, Disneyland too), and you have to admit: Not only is L.A. great, it's close to a lot of great shit.
6. Round, Round, Get Around
OK. Real talk. Traffic in L.A. is horrible, L.A. roads are crumbling, and it's so goddamn big that getting around seems like an impossible vision quest.
But you no longer have to drive! We've got a Los Angeles subway system now (sort of), and light rail that actually runs from downtown L.A. to the Westside (in a manner of speaking), and the fantastically successful San Fernando Valley Orange Line busway and other buses that aren't that bad (so we hear). Not to mention a whole lot of Los Angeles bike lanes, and another 43 miles of bike lanes coming to L.A., thanks to Mayor Antonio “I'll Be in D.C. If You Need Me” Villaraigosa.
Orange Line sleekmobile.; Credit: fredcamino
Getting by sans car is becoming an actual, plausible option, and by 2050 it might actually be preferable (when we run out of gas and have fracked the last of the Baldwin Hills).
Also, in case you haven't heard, the Los Angeles River has been fully designated a real river again! Can steamboat trips from Van Nuys to Boyle Heights be far behind? (Probably.)
5. It's Not New York
New Yorkers can't take L.A. It's just too chill for them. People here aren't sprinting to catch the subway or desperately striving for success like they are over there. Here we take the long view. Sure, we want to be famous, we want our screenplay to sell, we want to bang that hostess/waitress/girl waiting at the counter at Mozza.
Credit: prayitno
But it's like, hey man, slow your roll, there's always time for some yoga, and an 80-minute coffee sesh at Intelli, and like, who knows, maybe tomorrow will be like, whatever?
4. Cults
Life is hard. Sometimes, you need the loving embrace of a group of people that will take you in, wash you up and control your actions for the next six months until you run away screaming to a policeman and/or journalist. That's where cults come in, and Los Angeles is the cult capital of Xenu's great universe. Scientology, Mormans, Kabbalah, Atkins diet, AA … heck we're pretty sure there might even be some Jews left. Los Angeles is like the Las Vegas buffet of cults — just watch out for the shrimp (aka Christianity). It's been sitting out for a few days.
3. Diversity
You know who annoys us? White people. Lazy, overpaid, entitled, very little knowledge of soccer. Who needs them? Fortunately, Los Angeles is the most diverse city on the planet, according to at least one website we saw once.
More than 200 languages are spoken here, and you can hear all of them at once if you wave a $20 bill outside the Home Depot on Sunset Boulevard.
Soccer dudes and their fans are hotter.; Credit: ynnil
2. No Football
Nowhere are Americans more ugly and obnoxious then when watching, talking about or standing in close proximity to football. Los Angeles residents are seemingly inoculated against the sport (which takes three hours to watch but comprises 12 minutes of actual play, as found by the Wall Street Journal) as if by Pasteur himself.
Despite being the second-largest city in the U.S., and the core of the seventh-largest economic center in the world, football teams have a history of fleeing Los Angeles like it's a hick backwater. The NFL treats L.A. like a stepsister on prom night. And after a company declared it would build a stadium in the heart of downtown, the company was put up for sale by its reclusive owner. Months later, L.A. is still the land that football forgot. So far, no protest marches.
San Fernando Valley backyard Nirvana.; Credit: Roger4336
1. Neighborhood-pouri
The top misconception about Los Angeles is that it's a city. It's not. It's like 12 cities awkwardly stapled together, bisected by a bunch of freeways and a mountain range. Check out how many U.S. cities fit inside L.A.: Boston fits snugly inside Echo Park/Silver Lake/Los Feliz (the Tri-Hipster Area); St. Louis is swallowed up by just the West San Fernando Valley; and tiny little Manhattan is a mere fraction of City Council District 15, which most Angelenos couldn't even find on a map.
The point is, L.A. has something for everyone. Looking for your suburban box house, oak tree and picket fence? There's a Los Angeles neighborhood for that due north of the Hollywood Hills. Want to drink hard and hook up with a leather daddy? There's a very close-in L.A. dining-and-partying suburb for that. Want to buy an “artist's loft” that's really just a small apartment worth a fraction of what its current owner paid? There's a bustling, skyscraper-dominated Los Angeles neighborhood for that.
You can move from one end of the city to another and none of your old friends will ever run into you — they'll think you died or got cast in a serial.
So see? You never, ever have to leave.
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