Sensible Sandals

Summer is here again and once more it’s time to play one of my favorite games—spot the tourist. Living where I do, a short walk from the beach in a tourist destination like L.A., there’s always a healthy smattering of tourists wandering around. You can always tell them; they wear fewer clothes than the locals, are usually paler and tend to walk with their mouths open gazing at the sights.

I have a knack for guessing where tourists are from. I can’t pinpoint the details of my technique; sometimes it’s clothing or hair color; sometimes it’s a mannerism or a face shape. I can pick out a mid-westerner against a southerner and can always tell a Northern European from their Eastern European cousins. My specialty, of course, is British tourists.

British people have a distinct look that separates them firmly from their continental neighbors and labels them clearly as “not from around here.” Of course, I’d be stereotyping horribly if I said that every British tourist shares the same characteristics, but if you’d like to play “Spot the Brit” in your neighborhood, here’s an example of what to look out for.

Today I passed a couple of older ladies strolling by the marina. From 50 yards off, I pegged them as British. They each had complexions that hadn’t seen the sun for a while and both had practical, no-fuss haircuts. They carried sturdy nylon shoulder bags, undoubtedly with numerous handy pockets for organizing their tourist paraphernalia. They wore comfortable cotton three-quarter-length trousers and loose t-shirts in pretty flowered prints. But the telltale sign, the one that truly defines the British tourist, is the pair of sensible walking sandals. These ladies had those, too.

While Californians are often seen clipping around in flimsy flip-flops or (heaven forbid) bare feet, Brits love to walk, so sensible shoes are essential and if the sun is out (as it always is here in the summer) those sensible shoes have to be sandals.
As I walked by the two old girls, I craned my neck to listen for an accent and verify my assumptions. Sure enough, I heard the soft lilt of a northern accent, probably Lancashire. I smiled to myself at how clever I was and how honed my powers of deduction had become. It pleased me too that they couldn’t apply the same reasoning to me and guess that I too was British.

I’ve lived here for long enough now that to the untrained eye I look like just another American. (I hear a distant roar from everyone I know yelling, “That’s what you think!) But seriously, I have a year-round bronze to my skin and I wear sporty but not slovenly clothes. I have a hairstyle, rather than a haircut, and (let me say it before someone else does) my teeth are relatively straight.

As I walked past the two ladies, I checked myself out just to see how far I’d really come. I had a bad hair day today and I’m due for a haircut, so I’d scraped the rats tails that were my hair back in an Alice band and stuck an extra hair tie in my bag in case of a dire hair emergency. I looked at the bag slung across my shoulder. It was a hip, practical thing that Jose bought me one birthday, but on closer inspection it proved itself to be a sturdy nylon bag with multiple pockets. It went nicely though with the outfit I’d chosen that morning—comfortable three-quarter-length pants and a coordinating t-shirt.

It dawned on me then that perhaps I hadn’t actually evolved at all in my thirteen years here. There was only one way to know for sure. I looked down at my feet, clad today in a pair on Tevas. The shoes were rugged and cool, meant for leaping boulders and wading through rivers. They had natty clip-in straps and vents for draining water. There was no way I could deny it; they were very sensible sandals.

Mind the Gap

If ever a city needed an inexpensive, efficient system of public transportation, it’s Los Angeles. Our roads are clogged, our air is polluted and while, for many of us, our standard of living is high, for those who commute to work or school, quality of life is the pits. A 20-mile commute from my home to UCLA—a trip that Mapquest says should take 29 minutes, in reality can take as long as 80 minutes and that’s on a normal day. Even a local drive of five or six miles takes 30 minutes or more in many parts of the city. Add to this the frustration of staring at a never-ending line of brake lights and thinking of all the productive ways you could be spending your time. Then there’s the stress of making a left turn or even going through a green light and wondering if the cellphone wielding lead-footed idiot coming the other way will decide to stop today. Pretty soon public transportation seems very appealing.

Having traveled by public transportation in many different cities, I can appreciate a well-planned system. In London, it’s plain foolish to own a car; parking is non-existent, traffic is often at a complete standstill, and the city itself recently implemented tariffs for driving into Central London to further discourage drivers. Between the Tube and the bus system, a person can get within a very short walk of anywhere they might want to go. Mexico City charges its Metro riders the equivalent of two cents for a one-way trip anywhere in the city. That system has the added benefit of roving entertainers and vendors; we bought toothbrushes, chocolate and a map all from the comfort of our seats. Washington D.C., San Francisco, Paris and New York all provide clean, efficient and affordable transportation for their citizens.

And then there’s L.A.

In all fairness, building a new light rail network in a well-established city, especially one covering as wide an area as L.A. is no mean feat. Throw in an earthquake and a couple of dozen skyscrapers with deep foundations and you’ve got yourself a big engineering headache for an underground system.

The MTA, in its infinite wisdom, opted for a radial system, with a Downtown hub centered at Union Station. This would be fine for a city like Paris or Washington D.C., but L.A. is not a typical city. Between the entertainment and aerospace industries, as well as commercial centers such as Century City and the Wilshire corridor, only a small percentage of commuters actually work in the downtown area. One only needs to spend an hour or so in bumper-to-bumper traffic on the 405—a freeway that passes no closer than 10 miles to Downtown—to understand that. Oh, and the Blue Line actually stops 10 blocks short of the hub, forcing commuters going anywhere north of 7th street to change lines!

And let’s not forget the Green Line, the sleek, elevated line designed to provide easy access to Los Angeles International Airport. Except it doesn’t actually go to LAX, but stops about two miles away requiring travelers to take a shuttle bus into the terminal. But hey, it’s better than the nothing we used to have and having commuted to downtown for years by Metro, I’m really hard-pressed to find too much fault.

But now, the MTA has decided to raise its fares. Not just by a quarter or even 50 cents. By 2009, the cost of a daily or weekly pass will more than double and monthly passes will go up to $120! For some bus riders, $120 is the cost of a monthly gym membership or a nice dinner out, but for the majority, it’s a day’s or more likely two days’ pay. What better way, even with the price of gas, to send people scurrying back to their cars.

But Angelenos love their cars and most people I know here wouldn’t even consider taking public transportation. For the most part PT riders are those who have no other option. But there are those of us (like me) who love public transportation, despite its foibles. I’d rather sit on a bus and read my book any day than sit in traffic yelling obscenities at my fellow drivers. And at a time when even our blinkered President is acknowledging that pollution might just be a tinsy problem, I can look down smugly at all the SUV drivers and know I’m doing my bit for the Planet.