Things I Miss:
1. Pickle relish, canned pumpkin, ground turkey, chili pepper flakes
2. California Wine!!!
3. Toilets that don’t have little plateaus where everything falls (and therefore don’t need to use those nasty little toilet brushes)
4. ‘Real’ clothes dryers
5. Great ethnic food restaurants (instead of pretend ethnic food restaurants that cater to the French palette, i.e., no taste or spice); I guess you can’t send Thai or Mexican food in the mail?
6. Computer keyboards that don’t have the damn ‘a’ where the ‘q’ is supposed to be and an @ sign that doesn’t require three fingers to type
7. Sunshine year-round
8. My housekeeper
9. People who aren’t paranoid about ’killer drafts’ and therefore don’t yell at you when you open a window
10. Customer service
11. Baskin Robbins ice cream and Trader Joe’s grocery stores
12. Did I already say customer service?
13. Bureaucrats who write things down instead of making up the rules as they go
14. Not having to give the right of way to little allies and streets that suddenly appear on the right while you’re driving – this stupid traffic rule leads to many near-misses
15. Upright vacuum cleaners
16. Great educational TV shows, including my cooking, history and travel channels
17. Decent radio stations
18. Having my own bathroom and office
19. Having the option to use a microwave to heat up a frozen meal on occasion (sacrilege in France!)
20. My convertible car
21. Being able to return something to a store because the color is wrong rather than because it has a major defect, and then being interrogated and treated like a huge liar and scam artist
22. Rooms that aren’t painted in orange or some version thereof
23. Public bathrooms that aren’t co-ed – I still get startled when coming out of a toilet stall and running into a man at the sink
24. English language movies and bookstores
25. American prices at the stores and restaurants, and a huge variety of shopping options
26. Entertainment opportunities: concerts, music bars, Hollywood bowl, wine clubs, plays, movies, etc etc etc.
27. Stylish clothes for women who wear sizes larger than 8
28. No strikes
29. The international, multi-cultural society of Los Angeles
30. English!!!
31. And of course, my friends (thank goodness for SKYPE!)
This was my house in LA. It’s 2-bedroom, 1000 sq feet, with a small guest house, in a decent neighborhood.
It cost $480,000! That’s the price of housing in LA!
Things I Don’t Miss about Los Angeles:
1. Traffic
2. Stress
3. 50 hour work weeks with only 2 weeks a year of vacation
4. Long lines everywhere
5. Pollution
6. Crime and gangs and the need to be slightly paranoid about your safety at all times
7. Did I mention ‘parking lot, stop and go, and rude, aggressive, crazy drivers’ traffic?
8. Insanely high housing costs
9. Los Angeles Airport
10. The eternal youth and perfect body culture
11. Neo conservative, religious fanatic, Bush-loving Republicans
12. No universal health care and greedy medical insurance companies
13. The culture of workaholism
14. The dating scene, including my past boyfriends
15. A ‘survival of the fittest’ society where the middle class carries the weight and the tax laws benefit the rich
16. Little public transport
17. The need to make a six-figure income in order to have quality of life
18. Superficiality
19. The ‘you are what you drive’ culture
20. The need for some people to project an image of wealth and success even if you’re poor as a church mouse and living on credit cards
21. A landscape of buildings, cars and concrete
22. Hollywood
