Once I talk with them and explain the new surroundings, that not everyone is trying to be a movie star, and basically that the perception they have of “LA” is actually “Hollywood” and my life consists of avoiding Hollywood, they start to see the light. I tell them about the “beach communities” – Santa Monica, Venice, Marina del Rey, Manhattan Beach – all cities unto themselves that are very relaxed, laid back towns with everything you need. Compared to Boston, each one provides a unique flavor- kind of like the Cambridge, Brighton, Brookline suburbs of Boston- but much bigger. And with better weather.
Spending a few days back in Boston this week, the differences came rushing back. So I thought I’d try to identify a few of the key differentiating points between Boston & LA. And why the obvious differences – weather, traffic – are really much bigger points than I had originally thought.
Weather
So yea yea yea, the weather is “nicer” in LA. That’s an easy one. But what first caught me last summer was the consistency of it. I’ve been in Boston for 5 days now, and it was 75 on Wednesday, 92 on Thursday, 95 on Friday, a nice 73 and sunnyish on Saturday. Then yesterday was the best. Started off sunny and humid around 80, then a huge thunderstorm complete with hail rolled through, turned the street into a river, then went back to sun an hour later. That’s what you call “weather”!
LA was sunny & 75 all summer last year. No crazy heat, no erratic swings in temperature, no crazy thunderstorms. Wait, I should preface this by saying Santa Monica was sunny & 75 all summer last year. (As I learned on the ski slopes at Mammoth Mountain this winter, Californians hate it when you say “I’m from LA” – like the seemingly nice lady next to me on the lift told me “that doesn’t tell us anything! LA is huge!”) Which is actually a worthy point, because Santa Monica is right on the ocean, and stays the perfect temperature. Not too hot, not too cold. You go 10-15 miles inland, to “the valley” and you’ll get 100s. As I said, I avoid Hollywood, and will now extend that to, I avoid Hollywood and the valley.
I was looking forward to the lack of extreme cold in the winter, I didn’t realize I would also get the lack of extreme heat in the summer. I had started joking about this with friends before I left Boston- isn’t it a sign of the apocalypse when the city you live in is uninhabitable without heat/air conditioning for all by 2 months of the year? All winter you’re freezing your butt off, running from the heat in your house to the heat in your car, cursing wildly hoping the car’s heater will somehow start thawing your fingers just 10 seconds sooner than normal. Then finally there’s 1 month in the spring around April / May when you can drive with the windows down, don’t have to heat the car or the house- it’s beautiful.
That quickly moves to stifling humidity and feeling like you’re walking in a sauna. Which lasts through the summer and forces you to rush from the air conditioning in your house to the air conditioning in the car to the air conditioning in the office. Around September / October you get another 1 month stretch where the fall leaves change and you don’t need heat or AC. That changes by mid-October and you’re bundling up again and wearing a jacket for the next 6 months.
So I ask… isn’t that the sign of the apocalypse? The city is uninhabitable without heating/cooling intervention for the vast majority of the year.
I had a great little taste of that this week… Thursday and Friday were “too hot” then by Saturday night at the Red Sox game, sitting outside, it was “too cold”. The temperature swing are unbelievable. When you live here, you deal with it because you have to. When you get to LA, your eyes are opened to a whole new reality!
Santa Monica is the perfect climate. It might have jumped to 80 degrees a few times, but it always dipped down to the 60s at night. You could always sleep with the windows open and it was great. Quick story- when I was looking for an apartment, I couldn’t believe the units didn’t come with central air. I was convinced the real estate agents were trying to trick me when they said “you don’t need it, it doesn’t get that hot here”. I was so convinced that after I found an apartment, I went to Best Buy and bought one of those free standing AC units- which was used exactly 3 nights all last year. 2 of which were in October! (Don’t ask, weird heat wave.)
But the consistency of the weather really amazed me. I wore a jacket to work, maybe, 5 times all “winter”. People said I would miss the seasons, I didn’t. People said I would miss the snow, I didn’t. I went up to Mammoth twice, got my fill of snow, skiing & winter, then happily drove back to the sun and 75. You can be comfortable outside all year long. I really don’t know how weathermen survive in LA. It must get so boring! The same thing every day. Great for living, bad for meteorologists.
Traffic
This is the next big one. People complain about LA traffic. And you won’t hear any rebuttals from me. It’s awful. No two ways about it. But more than just “it’s awful”- and what does that even mean?
The first thing that struck me was the volume of cars. There are so many of them. 22 million people live in Southern California. (LA, Orange Country, San Diego) I’ve never seen such lack of correlation between where people live and where they work. A 30 minute commute is considered great. An hour is routine, and an hour and a half is not quite common, but not surprising. So “rush hour” is bad- but not in the way that Boston has predictable patterns that you can work around. Or how one side of the highway is bad in the morning, and the opposite side is bad in the afternoon.
I’ll never forget when I was visiting my dad about 10 years back, and we were driving up to LA from Orange County in the afternoon and we found ourselves dead stopped on the highway. There were 7 other lanes headed in our direction- all dead stopped- and I glanced across the highway and the opposite lanes, all 8 of those, were also dead stopped. 16 lanes, both directions, all stopped. It was amazing. And it happens all the time. My best theory is that there are just so many people, that one slight incident (someone driving too slow, someone not merging, or God forbid an accident) has a massive ripple effect that gets magnified because of the car volume.
You kind of get used to the traffic (I now know to plan at least 30 minutes even to go 7 miles) but you also avoid highways at all costs during peak times because the traffic doesn’t move. On Route 128 in Boston, even in rush hour, you’re usually at least creeping along. Even if it’s 20-30 mph, you’re moving. In LA, you stop way too often on the highway, and will often creep at 5 mph. It’s awful.
The bad part about that is it confines you to your area a lot more. I like the “Westside”- the immediate area around Santa Monica. I have friends in the “South Bay”- about 15 miles south- but rarely see them because that’s usually an hour drive. In Boston, friends would routinely drive 20 miles from north of the city to my place for a BBQ. Minus getting stuck in Sox traffic, that was an easily doable commute. In LA, you don’t do that unless you really have to. Kind of unfortunate, because it’s such a great city, and it would be even better if you could explore the neighboring communities more without worrying about it taking so long.
And a tangent of traffic – pedestrians.
Luckily Kevin warned me about j-walking when I first got to LA, because a friend of his had warned him about it on an earlier visit. People don’t j-walk in LA. They wait patiently at crosswalks for the light to change and to receive the “walk” signal. And if they don’t think they can make it because there’s not enough time in the walk signal- they wait for the next walk signal. Took me forever to get used to this.
Back in Boston this week, I was quickly reminded about what I had previously regarded as the typical way. Driving down Beacon St towards Coolidge Corner, I had 2 green lights ahead of me, a few hundred feet ahead, at each light, I saw people quickly darting across the road to cross. One of which was an older couple in their 70s, one was a mid-20 year old. It’s the norm in Boston- if you can make it, go. Makes for much more interesting driving. I found myself paying a lot more attention, especially in the downtown area where people just hop out from behind parked cars and look to cross.
Another offshoot of traffic – honking and aggression.
I had forgotten what honks sound like! I was driving with my mother, and she had the audacity not to immediately step on the gas when a light turned green because she was looking for something in her purse. Luckily, the kind gentleman in the car behind us was nice enough to alert her by laying on the horn 1 second after the light changed. I started laughing in the car. I hadn’t heard someone do that in a year.
Which leads immediately to the aggression. In Boston, people want to get where they’re going with as few delays as possible. And they’ll make that happen by honking at you, cutting you off, running yellow lights, turning left across oncoming traffic when it’s questionable if the oncoming cars will be able to avoid you, swerving around you if you slow down to take a left turn, continuing through an intersection even though you’ll be stopped halfway through thereby delaying crossing traffic and so many more. Those things rarely happen in LA. It really annoyed me at first, but I’ve come to be ok with it. People are just more mellow.
Oh, I forgot, the mellow comment reminds me of another aspect of the weather that amazes me and I am convinced leads people to be in a better mood- it’s always sunny. Always! I swear, must be 350 days a year- if not more. On the rare days it’s overcast in the morning, it’s sunny by the afternoon. So not only is the temperature always perfect, it’s always sunny. No rain, no snow, rarely wind- it’s amazing. For a long time I didn’t want to go see a movie during the day on a weekend because I was afraid I would miss out on a sunny day. I quickly realized that every day was a sunny day, and if I wanted to go see a movie, I just have to go.
Now a few non-traffic & non-weather related differences…
The ocean… in LA / Santa Monica, the ocean is a much bigger part of my life than it ever was in Boston. Both cities are on an ocean, but only in one can you walk next to it year round without feeling like your fingers are going to fall off. The outdoor lifestyle is much more alive in LA due to the aforementioned great weather. You see people walking, running ,roller blading, biking all year round. People aren’t obsessed with fitness and health (as a lot of people would have you believe) but it is a more noticeable part of people’s lives. I think the sheer fact that you wear short sleeves most of the year causes you to want a nicer body. There’s no winter hibernation where a few extra pounds from November to March are easily concealed by your winter coat.
And check out this picture of the coast. You don’t get cliffs like this around Boston. Just beautiful. It allows restaurants to be set up right on the water, where you can see dolphins, seals and the occasional whale offshore. It’s a bigger part of your life, which I welcomed.The starting times of sporting events… this is just weird. The 3 hour time difference takes some getting used to when all your friends are back east. Calling people has to be planned, and I quickly learned there was about a 1 hour window post-workday that I could talk to my old friends. Other than that, the east coast starts to go to sleep and you’re catching up over the weekend.
When I sat down to watch my first NFL game in LA- at 10am Sunday morning- everything was normal enough. Apart from waking up and basically turning on the game right then, instead of waiting until 1pm like back in Boston, it was all pretty normal. When I got up to grab a snack, though, halfway through the 2nd quarter, I glanced at the clock and did a double take when it said 11:30am. I started at it for a second and had to remember that the game started at 10am, not 1pm. I was so used to my ritual of Sunday football beginning at 1pm that it took me a few weeks to get used to it.
Beyond football, though, it’s annoying to miss the majority of Red Sox, Celtics & Bruins games that start at 4 or 4:30pm LA time. The big upside is never having to stay up until midnight to watch the end of a game! Watching the end of the Lakers game the other night as the clock passed 11:30 I was reminded how great it was that even the World Series, notorious for going late into the night on the east coast, was over by 9pm in LA.
Now in fairness, let me mention the biggest negative of LA- earthquakes. As I got older, my experiencing truly unique “firsts” dwindled. I knocked out riding a bike for the first time around age 4, swimming at age 5, driving a car at 16- you don’t get many firsts as life goes on. But being in my first earthquake- wow, totally different. I was in my office last summer on the 10th floor in one of our conference rooms overlooking the streets below. A consultant who had flown in from San Francisco was talking, and all of a sudden the floor shook. After about 3 seconds, I glanced at a co-worker, who had similarly moved to LA 6 months before, and we both had the same look- oh crap, the ground is still moving- this is an earthquake!
After about 20 seconds or so it stopped, but I was freaked out. My first instinct was to get out of the building. My mind immediately went to 9/11 and not wanting to be in the middle of a collapsing building. That’s how freaked out I was. My colleagues who had been through earthquakes before were laughing, thinking it was hilarious that I had just lost my earthquake virginity. They said we now have to play a game where we guess how big the earthquake was on the Richter Scale. I wanted no part of that. It took me a few hours to really feel back to normal, and in the months since there have been a few smaller quakes, but I still can’t say I’m “used to it”. The ground isn’t supposed to shake.
I guess every region has their natural disasters – hurricanes, tornadoes, nor’easters, earthquakes – so you kind of have to deal with what you have. And I’ve had lifelong LA-ers tell me they prefer earthquakes because you don’t know it’s coming. I don’t know if I agree with that – I think I would rather have the chance to leave in the face of an oncoming hurricane – but it’s definitely a lingering thought in the back of my mind about when the next earthquake will hit.
Now, if you want to make things really interesting and spice of the lives of meteorologists, add earthquake predictions to their job descriptions. Have them put a little challenge in their day. I want to know not only if the temperature will be 71 or 73 tomorrow, but also if there will be an earthquake.
When people ask me about my time so far in LA, I always relay my overwhelmingly positive experiences. I tell them to judge for themselves. And after one year, I can point to my first fellow convert. A friend who came to visit on a Wednesday, by Sunday had decided he needed to move to LA. He’s moving in July. If you’ve never been, come visit LA & Santa Monica to judge for yourself before condemning it as the land of silicone and muscle beach.
