My parents, niece, nephew and sister-in-law met me in New York last April. For many years, I had been resisting the call to New York. Crowded streets and underground transportation don’t appeal to me. I was happy to leave it all behind when I moved from Paris to Los Angeles. But my father insisted: “Tu dois voir New York!”
My French family doesn’t understand that, having only 2 weeks vacation a year, I’d rather spend it at Mono Lake or Big Sur - two out of the many dream spots that gorgeous California has to offer - than in a congested city. You see, my sister-in-law has 12 weeks paid vacation. I repeat: TWELVE WEEKS. I rest my case. In fact, I stopped talking to her after she mentioned this little known fact. If I had twelve weeks paid vacation, I would probably spend one of them in New York.
I must say at first I was put off by the many RULES OF CONDUCT postings we saw in the subway. By the time I spotted this sign on the Hell’s Kitchen street where we rented an apartment, I had it: “If you can’t even stand in your own street!!!!”
Seriously, I’ve never seen a NO STANDING sign in Los Angeles and for a moment I pondered the meaning of this one. Cars don’t stand, do they? Buildings do. Is this skyscraper truly blue or is it the sky reflecting in its windows? I call it the Cloud Scraper.
Loved the juxtaposition of past and present:
Visiting New York with my family meant we hit a lot of tourists’ spots.
“By the late 1880s, the boom had peaked, and some of the dream of a new city East of Los Angeles had given way to concessions to certain other kinds of settlers. The black labor force settled into the East side, as did Italians, who would build much of the houses during the time, Germans and French, followed by the Russian Molokans and Armenians, who were fleeing the horrors of terror and repression in their respective homelands. The small pockets of Chinese and Japanese families that didn’t live in Little Tokyo or new Chinatown were also in East L.A., and Mexicans who had survived the push east were still very much a growing presence. Several years before, during the height of the first wave of xenophobia, the city fathers found it appropriate to move the local graveyard, far too close to the civic center, and for sanitation purposes, out to a then remote locale in East Los Angeles. Thus, the Evergreen Cemetery was established, and remains the resting site of many of the new settlers of East L.A.” From 
