Los Angeles has always occupied a weird place in my consciousness. Having spent the bulk of my adult life in Chicago, Philadelphia, and New York City, my mental image of LA consisted primarily of east coast stereotypes and whatever I had seen on movies and television. That said, the city certainly has a mystique to it. Given that many of my favorite movies (Pulp Fiction, Blade Runner, Mulholland Drive, The Big Lebowski, and L.A. Confidential, among others) are set in LA and prominently feature the city itself as a major character, I figured there was something out there worth checking out.

That opportunity came this past week when my employer sent me and some others out to LA to take field measurements at a Macy’s store in Orange County. Most of the week was spent counting light fixtures and floor tiles inside the store, but at the end of the week I finally had a free evening before flying back to Cincinnati.

The skyline of downtown Los Angeles is somewhere off in the distance. Throughout the week I kept seeing this bright thing in the sky that Californians apparently call the "sun".

I met up with an old high school friend who has a small post-production company in Hollywood (www.5thwall.tv), and he gave me a quick driving tour of Los Angeles. Two of my favorite activities in the world are catching up with old friends and exploring new cities, and this evening offered the opportunity for both. Unfortunately we ran out of daylight before I could take many photos, but here are a few of them anyway.

My first impressions of Los Angeles: Dorothy Parker supposedly described LA as “72 suburbs in search of a city”, and the description seems apt. But among that vast patchwork of sprawl are some surprisingly fascinating urban places. And of course, the weather didn’t suck at all. It was nice to be in a place where I didn’t find myself living in fear of the outdoors. A few days after returning home to Cincinnati, I think I finally realized what I liked so much about Southern California: It had most of the things I miss about living in Florida (palm trees and the casual semi-tropical beach culture), minus most of the things I don’t miss about living in Florida (stifling humidity, boring topography, the post-Confederate collective chip on the shoulder, and the right-wing political/religious culture).

Large swaths of Los Angeles apparently look like this. (In fairness, so do large parts of New York and Chicago, minus the palm trees.) But the nice weather makes up for a lot of the LA cityscape's shortcomings. And like New York and Chicago, the scenery improves drastically once you get off the commercial avenues and start exploring the side streets.

I was barely able to scratch the surface on this trip, but I was there long enough to see the appeal LA holds in the popular imagination, and I’m sure I’ll find a reason to make a return trip out there at some point. Would I actually consider moving out there? Maybe. In a couple years I’ll finish up my M.Arch. degree in Cincinnati, and where I end up after that will largely depend on where I can find a job. My primary passion is transportation and infrastructure design, and there simply isn’t much of that type of work here in Cincinnati. But despite being the poster child for automobile-oriented sprawl, Los Angeles has actually been taking some aggressive steps to expand its public transit system. Before this trip I probably would have ruled out applying for positions in Los Angeles, but now I’d be willing to consider LA is a possible destination if the right opportunity came along.

The fact that you can buy liquor at your local CVS or Walgreen's is almost reason alone to move out there.

The full photo gallery from my Los Angeles trip can be found here.