shewasavisitor

In spite of this which began yesterday, I took an 8-minute shower instead of the recommended 5.

I posted some photos on Facebook of my new locale.

I am making blueberry ice cream later.

Getting used to Center, flavor & color… it seems like such small stuff but it always makes me look at the sign twice.

Observations:

Americans are really really nice. Bus drivers, strangers at Trader Joe’s, Texan tourists (I love that I know this place well enough to give directions). I’ve heard Americans are mean or avoid conversation and that Canadians are the nice ones, but so far it’s fair game.

The dollar stores here have a produce and frozen meats section.

There’s a soda called Fruit 66.

If you have just given birth but are unable to keep your baby for any reason, you can drop it off at a fire station. There’s a sign on our local Hollywood Way unit: “Safe Surrender”, with an image of two sets of hands passing a baby between them.

The News:

On first moving here, all our TV stations were updating the news way more frequently than our 6pm and 10pm Canadian broadcasts… there’s news every two hours on ABC for instance, YET it is always news about Southern California. At first, I was mad, thinking, “isn’t there a war? What’s happening in other countries?”… CBC always updates a global day’s worth of news, whereas here, It’s only regional. I now know why. It’s because crime is SO everywhere. Every day, someone in LA is dead. Or missing. Or shot at, or at-large. A man in a high-speed chase has smashed into three parked cars in Studio City and the helicopter is on the scene, reporting every 5 minutes. A son killed his mother who was a teacher at a nearby school. A kid died in a car accident enroute to prom. A bus hit a cyclist in Westwood. And this is all news from the past week! It’s amazing.