My town

Before coming to Los Angeles, I lived in Cameroon for two years.  I've lived for three months in Santiago and Temuco, Chile and traveled through Patagonia.  I've visited Mexico City and Oaxaca.  I've traveled from one end of Gabon to the other.  The cities of the developing world were, to me, places to be avoided.  Noisy, dirty, full of rude people, poorly planned, dangerous, ugly, sad testaments to the ways the modern world has gone wrong and places that people usually come to out of necessity or circumstance instead of by choice.  I've always thought of Los Angeles in the same way.

While collecting the pictures for my slide show, there were two pictures that I saw but couldn't get.  The first was coming up from South Los Angeles.  I drove up to the Coliseum on game day, after getting pictures I had hoped would convey an American version of tribalism, and crossing the street in front of me was a group of white, black, hispanic and asian people, all dressed in Trojan colors, all walking together to the game.  The picture I didn't get.  It could have only happened at a sporting event.  At least a dozen times, while living in Cameroon, people told me that the only thing holding their country together is soccer.

The other picture that I missed, this time because I couldn't get the camera back out of my bag quickly enough, was a man burning a bit of trash in the gutter in front of his store on Beverly Blvd.  Burning trash in the gutter is standard practice in Cameroon, and there it was, right in front of me in Los Angeles. 

I know I shouldn't talk about the pictures I didn't get.  But I just couldn't resist including those two.