1. 60 degrees will absolutely feel cold.
My first couple weeks settling into LA, the temperatures hovered in the mid-60s with clouds, and I thought it was pleasant, even while people outside wore sweatshirts and generally looked cold. It didn’t take long for me to acclimate, however, and soon I became one of those laughable Angelenos who complains bitterly about how cold it is when the temperatures drop below what would otherwise be a normal Midwest spring or fall high temperature.
2. Summer is awesome
Yes, you could argue that we get summer all year-long (and you’d be kinda accurate), but I’ve learned to really love those three straight months from July to September where highs hover around or above 80 degrees, when every day is shorts and t-shirt weather, and when your sunglasses get all beat up from regular use. The rest of the year those days still happen with less frequency, and you enjoy them when you can, but there’s nothing like just knowing that every day all summer long will afford you with sunshine and warmth day after day. “Rain or shine”? That’s an utterly foreign concept.
3. Sports are very confusing
LA’s sports scene is bizarre. Unlike many cities, where they have only one team to cheer for, LA has lots of doubles or nothing. Do you cheer for the Lakers or Clippers? The Dodgers or Angels? USC or UCLA? The Kings or Ducks? And then in the NFL, the most-watched professional sport of all, LA doesn’t even have a team, and hasn’t for decades (though that may change soon). While some people will assign geographic boundaries to any team’s base, it’s not as simple as cheering for the Giants/49ers in San Francisco and the A’s/Raiders in Oakland; or the Cubs on the north side of Chicago and the White Sox on the south. Yes, Echo Park is Dodgers country, and Anaheim is Angels territory, but it’s not so simple in many parts of LA. The lack of an NFL team also means that people cheer for whichever team that they like, regardless of its proximity to LA; it also means that the UCLA-USC game is the region’s biggest football game of the year (after the Super Bowl, of course).
4. People either care a LOT or NOT AT ALL about sports
It’s very easy to live in Los Angeles without ever knowing let alone having to care about anything sports-related. Many people do this. And for those who do find themselves drawn into the world of local sports, they tend to be die-hard fans. Go to a Dodgers game and see how many people genuinely care about the hometown team, but then go home and see how few people out in the rest of the world even notice. Same with the Kings, the Galaxy, the Lakers, etc. It’s probably just because there’s so many things to do in LA that sports simply don’t have the same cachet among the general population, but when you do start to follow this or that team, you feel like you’re part of a special cause and want to see it do well.
5. Traffic sucks, but it doesn’t have to
My first job in LA required driving across downtown on the freeways back and forth every day. That was sheer misery (as it would be in nearly any city), and the only way to alleviate some of the pain was to shift my hours so that I could at least avoid some of the awfulness. The first best thing I ever did to deal with traffic was to take a different job for which I could get to and from work using sidestreets and almost always at only 15 minutes each way. The second best thing I ever did to deal with traffic was to take yet another different job, this time enabling myself to ditch the car entirely and rely instead on LA’s transit system.
6. LA does have a transit system, and it’s actually quite good
It’s almost a point of pride among some Angelenos that they don’t or haven’t taken the LA Metro system, either the trains or the buses. But (and full disclosure, I do budget work for LA Metro), in fact LA has the third-largest transit system in the country, with over 1.3 million boardings a day and a large and growing network of train and bus lines. What surprised me most the first time I took a bus in LA was how clean it was. And with the ability to just check email on my phone or read a book while riding, the extra bit of time that taking transit involved versus driving (and dealing with traffic and finding and paying for parking) was no big deal. People here complain that the Metro doesn’t get them precisely to where they’re going, but if they actually looked at a map of the system, more often than not they’d see that there’s plenty of transportation options available to them, and all at the cost of only $1.75 each way.
7. Homeownership is awesome
It was not so long ago that I gave up on the idea that I’d ever own a home, as I strained to make monthly rent payments in San Francisco (this before the most recent steep increase in prices, no less). LA is known for being an unaffordable place to live, and rightly so. Rent and home prices here, though significantly better than San Francisco, still compare unfavorably to nearly anywhere else in the country. But what I found quickly on was that you can still find something that works in your budget, and there are lots of neighborhoods that people might write off or not consider that are still affordable and quite nice. It’s all a question of trade-offs, and in a place as large as LA, those trade-off opportunities are ample. Furthermore, being a homeowner has been an incredible experience, from having a yard that my husband and I take care of, to being able to make fixes and improvements without consulting the landlord, to actually building equity in our home. While it’s not for everyone, homeownership continues to be worth it for me and my beau, and the prices of homes within LA were enough within reach to finally make that dream a reality.
8. LA is not Beverly Hills
Nearly everyone not from LA considers the following places to be LA: Santa Monica, Beverly Hills, West Hollywood, Burbank and Compton. None of these places are in the City of Los Angeles, and the natives can quickly tell you that. But, oddly enough, Hollywood, East Hollywood, Silverlake, Highland Park, and Echo Park are in the City of LA. What confuses outsiders is that LA doesn’t make a big deal about city versus suburbs. Compound that with the fact that all of these places are in the County of Los Angeles, and you’re now thoroughly confused. In fact, with over 10 million residents, if LA County was its own State, it would be the nation’s eighth-largest. The County also includes places like Malibu, Palmdale, and Long Beach, but more folks seem to understand that those are not LA. So there’s this strange connectedness that’s also disconnected, which is only further compounded by the fact that everything on a government level is splintered, with the City handling some things, the County handling others, and a total lack of contiguity with any elected officials’ districts, from the local level all the way up to the federal level.
9. Politics is like sports; People either care a LOT or NOT AT ALL
Unlike my previous home in San Francisco, there are a lot of people in LA who couldn’t even tell you who their City Councilman is. I’m convinced that’s a direct result of the above-mentioned lack of contiguity between various districts, combined with the off-year elections for local office. Even the Mayor’s race – for which a single official is elected to lead the nation’s second-largest city, of nearly 3.9 million people – hardly registers on the radar for the majority of LA’s residents. By contrast, the people who DO care about politics in LA are very intense about it. There are myriad battles over land use, funding streams, program development, and elections that go unnoticed by LA’s many “muggles” (my term, and I’m copywriting it) but are the stuff of legend for those on the front lines.
10. Out-of-towners will never hesitate to tell you what they don’t like about LA
It’s like a national pastime – everyone you know who doesn’t live in LA will have something to say about what they don’t like about it. I’m certain that no other city puts up with this treatment to the same degree. Perhaps it’s deserved on some level, but living in LA feels like being in the nation’s collective punching bag. Rarely does a week go by where I don’t get to hear it from someone somewhere (often an acquaintance from my old haunt upstate). It’s usually something about the traffic or the air quality. But sometimes it’s something else, like that LA isn’t anglo enough, or that it lacks culture, or that it’s plastic, or that LA's sports fans are horrible people. What’s most unnerving as an Angeleno isn’t that people possess these lazy stereotypes that really don’t match the experience of actually living here, it’s that they feel so empowered to share these stereotypes with you to your face, all the time. Or to somehow imbue you personally with these concepts, as if your choice to live here infuses you with those very characteristics so loathsome to outsiders.
11. The smog is overrated
There are definitely days when the air is visible or an unpleasant shade of brown. But, first of all, what are you alone going to do about it, really? And, second of all, it’s a far cry from the days of endless smog alerts and health hazards for which LA long ago earned its reputation as the nation’s worst region for air quality, when the mountains that you can now see every day weren’t even visible to most residents on any day. LA has done a lot to clean up its act since the 60s and 70s, and it continues to do more. And, while cars get the bad rap, they’re only a piece of a much larger puzzle, which is actually as much about pollution from the nation’s largest port as it is about our cars. But few people outside LA probably even recognize that so many of their cherished articles of clothing or smartphones made their way through LA’s massive ports, adding a little more pollution to our air. You’re welcome America.
12. LAX really is as dreadful an airport as everyone says it is
There’s no excuse for LAX being so terrible. It’s absolutely downright awful. Sure, flights arrive and depart on time, but the experience of getting to and from that place undermines any benefit you might get out of the reliability of your flight’s timeliness. Fly through Burbank (Bob Hope), or Long Beach, or Orange County (John Wayne) instead. Or take a train (especially if going to San Diego).
13. Nowhere else can come close for hiking opportunities
Between the Santa Monica Mountains, Griffith Park, Mt. Verdugo, the Santa Susana Mountains, and the San Gabriels, you are never more than a short drive to an incredible hike with stunning views and the absolute certainty that you are no longer in the hubbub of the city. Special canyon hikes like Bronson, Franklin, Runyon, Topanga, and Eaton only augment the opportunities. There’s so much outdoor hiking that you could do a new hike every week for an entire year, all within a single hour’s drive of your home. If there’s anything that makes many in LA unaware of the array of hiking opportunities, it’s that there’s so many of them that only a few (Runyon and Bronson Canyons in particular) actually get a lot of attention.
14. Strip malls have some of the best food
Strip malls are rightly denigrated as a relic of a bygone era in LA that thought “walkable neighborhood” meant “parking lots adjacent to sidewalks.” While that thinking is quickly vanishing, the cheap rents of these otherwise place-less buildings actually provides for some of the richest cuisine opportunities by aspiring restauranteurs and new immigrants just arrived to the States. And if the setting or décor puts you out, just take your food to go and enjoy it in the comfort of your own home. Yes, there are lots of great food places not in strip malls, but you’d be amazed at what you can find where you’d least expect it (and Yelp is quite helpful with that).
15. LA is actually quite walkable
Sure, you’re not gonna take a morning stroll from downtown to West Hollywood for brunch with friends, but much of LA was built up around what was once the country’s largest streetcar network. That means that the city has lots of neighborhoods that are very walkable, with loads of small businesses and local restaurants all within 5-15 minutes on foot. Our home, located between two popular commercial business districts, is no more than 15 minutes walking from dozens of incredible restaurants, an array of bars, myriad shops, a couple grocery stores, numerous bus and rail lines, and a beautiful park. Yes, things overall are more spread out across distances, but LA retains much of the walkability that made it the city it is today.
16). LA is a collection of smaller cities, and that’s actually a good thing
Many people come to LA expecting to find a typical East Coast-style city, with a single center and a few neighborhoods radiating out from that. What they don’t understand is that LA was never that place. Even the native peoples who lived off the areas plants and animals for thousands of years before Europeans took over were spread out across the entire region. And there’s nothing wrong with that. Places like North Hollywood, Glendale, Pasadena, Venice, Redondo Beach, West Adams, Leimert Park, Boyle Heights, and Atwater all offer great walkable environments with an array of dining, shopping, and living opportunities that can vary a lot from one place to the next. You’ll find amazing Chicago-style pizza in Echo Park, and great theater in North Hollywood, and funky beach life in Venice. And while these things are spread out, LA still has a thriving downtown with its own neighborhoods – South Park, Jewelry District, Old Bank District, Arts District, Little Tokyo, and Chinatown, to name a few – that each offer different experiences and sides of a city that is more diverse than anywhere outside New York. Many people also don’t realize that Wilshire Boulevard, which runs 15 miles from downtown all the way to the beach in Santa Monica, is the densest corridor west of the Mississippi. All of these things combine to make LA both a very difficult place to comprehend in a short span of time and a fantastic place to explore, neighborhood by neighborhood, over a longer period of time.
17. LA does care what you think
Who are we kidding? Angelenos will tell you that they don’t care what you think – with your silly stereotypes and ridiculous notions about our city – but that’s not true. We do care. It’s just that we don’t expect what you have to say to be anything positive (see #10), so it’s easier to act like we don’t care than to get worked up over it. But share an LA experience that you enjoyed with an Angeleno, and they’ll likely open up and tell you about other places you could check out that you might only find out about if you actually treat an Angeleno kindly.
18. The LA River is, strangely, kinda cool
That giant drainage ditch that runs down the eastern boundary of Griffith Park and past downtown is the Los Angeles River. Yes, it played host to a car race in Grease, and it was the site of some big explosions in the Terminator, but it actually is an honest-to-god river. [Ok, take a moment to stop laughing.] You’re not alone in thinking this is an absurd notion. But the reason that LA even exists here, why downtown is 15 miles from the beach, why thousands of native peoples lived quite easily for millennia before the Europeans arrived, is all tied up with that strand of cement that looks like an empty freeway with a single thread of water trickling down it all but a few days in the year. The LA River, for only being 51 miles long, actually drops more in elevation than does the Mississippi River, and it has at times had a rate of water movement that is higher than that much more widely-known gulley. While the pavement keeps it from overflowing its banks during major winter storms, what makes it cool is that thousands of people are working to open it up (and have been doing so for decades) – regularly cleaning the river, building bike paths and new pocket parks, and planting native habitats along its forlorn shores. LA is quite literally going from turning its back on the river to facing and embracing it. The LA River is definitely worth a visit, even if you’re overwhelmed by the constant engine noises from the 5 freeway.
19. Everyone says “the” before freeway numbers
Give it a year, and you will not only do it too, but you’ll feel weird not doing it.
20. LA is more than you or I will ever know
The thing about Los Angeles is that there are so many different people and things to see and do that it really is impossible to pigeonhole just about any part of this place into a single stereotype without it blowing up in your face. LA is like a forest that from afar looks like a monolithic green landscape but that, as you explore it from within, turns into unexpected meadows, gurgling streams, ancient stands of trees abutting new growth, and vistas at random turns. Only here it’s discovering a pocket park, watching an international music star perform live while out under the stars at the Hollywood Bowl, finding a random food truck with the best empanadas ever, taking a bus to a new part of town you’d never visited before, or hanging at a local brewer with an unforgettable IPA. And that’s freaking amazing. And it’s why I love LA and think you could too.
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