A Visit to Los Angeles . . .and then the world

It’s 2016, and just days before we leave once again for Los Angeles where we’ll catch a flight to London and then travel to Southhampton to board the Holland American Rotterdam for its 89-day Passage to the Far East.

As usual on our journeys, my husband Robert and I will be making frequent joint postings on what we see and encounter. Previous readers will know that I tend to focus on the sights and history, while Robert’s piercing prose captures the foibles and eccentricities of the folks along the way. So stay tuned.

As a warm up, just before Christmas, we spent a few days in Los Angeles before flying to Texas for a family holiday. That stop provided a preview of what will likely be two themes in the months ahead.

The first is that we sometimes feel like the members of the Last Generation—the last group of people who still like going to theater, dressing up for dinner, reading the newspaper and being courteous. We went to a matinee of a traveling musical called If/Then starring Idina Menzel. The theater at the Pantages Theater in Hollywood was packed. But even though we are now in our early sixties, we definitely felt among the youngest and spriest on the floor. Do you need to qualify for a senior discount to be able to buy an orchestra seat?

Well, we better get used to it. People who take long cruises have to be free of jobs, children and other day-to-day responsibilities, so like the Pantages crowd, the average age on the Rotterdam is going to be in top quintile.

We can accept aging, but another observation in L.A. really smacked us in the face. Where we’re headed, we expect to see poverty and suffering, but we never expected to see it so visible on the streets of our former hometown. Along Beaudry, which runs parallel to a freeway going through downtown L.A., the sidewalks for a mile or more was lined with tents erected by the homeless—a shantytown set among skyscrapers. The modern subway was crowded with people, but the cars were dirty and we saw people literally sleeping on the seats, completely covering themselves with makeshift blanket tents. When we moved out of our loft in downtown L.A. just three years ago, neither such sight existed.

As usual on our city jaunts, we wanted to visit a new restaurant. This time we chose Neal Fraser’s Redbird, nestled in the peaceful courtyard of the former St. Vibiana Cathedral in downtown L.A. It was a jarring transition to move from the decrepit streets of the central city to that elegant interior, where a crowd of Millennials drank expensive craft cocktails and dined on exotic entrees even as a third-world scene co-existed in the surrounding blocks.

We’ll keep that observation in mind when we hear Americans on the cruise ahead tut-tut about the extremes that we will no doubt encounter along the way. We’ll remember that there’s a lot of work to be done at home.

Our next post will be from England after we board the ship.

 

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