Los Angeles the way I like it

Now that's a pretentious title. It's only my second time here - the first time I was in Santa Monica for two days doing focus groups and saw nothing but our subjects through the one-way mirror, and the beach during morning runs and evening walks. Today I saw only a few miles of West Hollywood sidewalks. What I'm trying to say with the title is that I like to meet a new area this way, doing it up close on foot and working my way out from that small start. The walk would have been in downtown L.A. but as I mentioned in yesterday's post one of my guides is ill.

So after a delicious and amazingly cheap breakfast at Plaisir I climbed up La Cienega to Sunset Boulevard, walked east into Hollywood, down La Brea to Santa Monica Boulevard and back to Plaisir for lunch. That's the bare bones of a two-hour hike. If you want to know more, here it is:

Plaisir is a small bakery/coffee shop owned and run by a very cool Frenchman; they have a website but I've linked to their Yelp reviews because their menu highlights the Yelp logo - a brave move but they get five stars on that site. Breakfast was a croissant, tea and Orangina. Lunch was a spinach crêpe and iced chai. Both were amazingly delicious, affordable, and attentively served.

La Cienega from Santa Monica Blvd. to Sunset Blvd. is practically vertical. I made it all the way up with only one stop to catch my breath. Why do they spell it that way when a swamp in Spanish is ciénaga with an "a"? Wikipedia's explanation of the discrepancy doesn't explain anything.

The Sunset Strip is an interesting mix of strip clubs and music venues, fancy hotels and stores, office buildings like the International Cinematographers Guild, and small retail business signs in Russian (more about that later).

I wanted to continue down La Brea to the tar pits, but it was just too far and I was getting too sweaty. I've been a paleontology nut since I was a kid and have always wanted to see those. Next trip.

As I headed back west on Santa Monica Blvd. I was again struck by the number of signs in Russian. My friend Erin explained later that many local residents are Jews from Russia, now very elderly; she meets some at the gym who bear the tattoos of Nazi concentration camps. And they still work out!

OK, this will be today's last photo, I promise: commercial areas in the eastern part of West Hollywood are full of the architecture we all knew as Californian half a century ago, a combination of fake-Spanish, fake-Moorish, and fantasy. I saw lots of very entertaining examples but here's the most striking, a mini-mall called Crystal.

Oops, I also need to show you a health establishment just down the street from my hotel, another sight we all associate with California. You can stand one more picture, can't you?

The afternoon was all about pictures as my friend Erin whisked me off to the exhibit "Renoir in the 20th Century" at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (their publications simply call them LACMA). Delightful and in many ways unexpected because of Renoir's break with Impressionism and interaction with younger artists like Picasso, but of course cameras were not allowed.

Afterward we sat over an early dinner at Marix Tex Mex Cafe and just visited. What a delight! The food was fine, the margaritas tasty, but just talking without the need to be moving on was wonderful.