When I think of Los Angeles, I think of it as a center for art, culture and entertainment with its popular late-night Hollywood attractions and glamorous club scenes, yet I simultaneously think of its muggy, dirty image with thick-laden smog, worn-down buildings and heavy traffic. I see it as a dichotomy of diversity and division. There are people of so many different cultural backgrounds, yet some areas seem to be severed off from the others because of culture and class niches. I even see these separations in the San Fernando Valley, where I live (a separation from the rest of the county in itself). Even within that subset of Los Angeles (seen as a “nicer” suburban area), the Valley itself has an exhaustive number of subdivisions where sometimes it is not very much distance between unattractive streets with run-down apartments and big, beautiful homes in quiet neighborhoods with property for horses. Sticking mainly to the area of Los Angeles that I grew up in, I have not explored very much of downtown or the south-central region, which makes it all seem more distant and mysterious to me. I do know it is difficult, and probably impossible, to sum up Los Angeles into a single identity, and I am looking forward to finding out the similarities and differences between these regions. It will be interesting to see how the cultures coexist and intermesh in their industrial and artistic urban setting while they also tend to polarize in certain sections of the city and county.