Probably the best part of my stay in LA was my visit to various bars and pubs in the city and Arthur Rhodes is the man who introduced me to the regular lifestyle of LA. The student of UCLA and an aspiring filmmaker (and writer of an article about me in UCLA Asia Media web site) took me to different bars and arranged meetings with his friends. I had a chance to interact with young Americans folks and feel the beauty of Hollywood Hills, thanks to Arthur.

Downtown Los Angeles as seen from Beverly Hills Pic by Wagle

First bar we went to was Barney’s Beanery (established in 1925, the bar, I was told, is Los Angele’s third oldest) in West Hollywood. I went there after spending some time in a coffee shop surfing wireless internet in Arthur’s Apple laptop. That was great. While he was taking me around the city, we were talking about Nepali politics and journalism (and blogging of course) for his Asia Media article. Asia Media’s editor Angliee Shah had introduced me with Arthur when they came to see me in Omni, hotel where I was staying in. Arthur turned out to be a pleasant surprise for me. A student of Anthropology in UCLA Arthur wants to get himself involved into the study of politics. He is also working on a documentary project that, he said, will incorporate the conflict of Nepal as well. I can’t forget his efforts to take me around the town in his car which wasn’t in really great condition because, Arthur said, friends ruined the machine while he was away from the country (in Sri Lanka).

So I was talking about Barney’s Beanery. The bar was crowded with young souls and on one table near the entrance gate were Arthur’s friends. All in their mid 20s, they were, I think, the perfect group of American youth I wanted to talk to.

They were drinking beers and talking with each other on every possible topic available.

“Be brutally honest with me,” one boy started talking with me knowing that I was from Nepal, the country of Mount Everest. “Be brutally honest with me, okay? Tell me who really went at the top. Edmund Hilary or Tenzing Norgey?”

God! What a tough question! He was drunk but not to the extent that he didn’t know what he was saying. He knew what he was talking about. So he started looking at me giving me the impression that he was eagerly waiting for my answer. “Well, they both said that they reached at the top together,” I said. “Team effort.”

“Yes, team effort,” he said and took another sip. He seemed to be satisfied with my answer. We talked about a few other things.

Then came another man near where I was seating (they were constantly changing their seats and moving here and there). He was wearing a baseball cap and talking about the game. “Why the World Series is called so?” I asked him. “Are there any countries other than US and Canada that play World Series?”

“Hum,” he said. “This is quite a misnomer actually.” After saying that he plunged into a deep thought.

It was getting late as I had to wake up early in the morning. So we decided to get back to the hotel.

Next evening we went to another pub called Jones and I ordered Margarita Pizza. We were three. Arthur’s friend was with us. She was working as a waitress in a bar near Hollywood Hills and was planning to go to South America soon.

“This is the real LA bar,” said Arthur as I was struggling to hear his voice amidst the loud rock music. “Loud music, dark setting and carefree waitresses!” Yes, it was dark inside and the atmosphere was definitely different than other bars I went to in LA. Hum, waitresses were carefree too. “You see the service is terrible. They don’t care about you,” Arthur said. “All they care about is their dream. The dream of being a Hollywood actress or singer one day. They are here to be a celebrity.” And they think that being waitress is a transitional phase.

By the way, before I forget, I would like to mention about the Ethiopian food that we ate in the afternoon. But I really don’t know Food, a kind of bread and vegetable, was great or the waitress who served the food to us. I could see Arthur trying to flirt with the girl who had left her husband back in Ethiopia. I was too shy to flirt and my shyness must have made Arthur not to go further. Okay, Ethiopian food? Yes, its not Ethiopia but Ethiopian food. Arthur told me how he thought about having Ethiopian food when one of his friends told him about that. “Come on, I thought Ethiopians were undergoing famine!”

Visiting A Gay Bar
After Roberto, another gay came to see me all the way from San Francisco. Joe was Roberto’s friend and we were in touch via email for quite some time. The rich hunk who said he was planning to buy a hotel in downtown LA was driving a fancy car equipped with satellite navigation systems in top speed. We went to a bar where gay couples were having fun-filled talks and drinks. That was quite an experience.

This is in downtown Los Angeles, near MOCA (Museum of Contemporary Arts) where we saw a couple busy kissing each other. A man was filming the romance in a video camera. (Remember this is downtown LA and Hollywood is not far from here. But we didn’t see anyone directing the couple!) It was around 4:30 PM and we were just returning from Artesia, a town of South Asian majority in south of Los Angeles, observing a town hall meeting. Our presence didn’t seem to pollute the romantic environment. The girl on the left (in khasto) is Maysoon Mohamed Osman, a journalist from Sudan, who couldn’t resist the temptation of watching the romantic couple. And she wasn’t alone, to be honest. That was very new for us and folks tried to tease the lovebirds. But lovebirds were unaffected by any comments passed at them.

The first day in LA

Within an hour of landing at the Los Angeles Airport, I was in Santa Monica Beach experiencing the cool breeze and cold water. Thank you Roberto! Roberto is my friend whom I met in Kathmandu some 8 years ago. He had come to our house and I had gone to Pokhara, Chitwan and Lumbini with him. He is a proud gay and lives in between Palm Springs and San Francisco. “I love to live in my house in PS,” he said. “But the health insurance in San Francisco is more reliable and attractive.” That is why, he said, he spends much of the time driving between the two cities. Road is his third home. I mean his car that has a bed, a refrigerator and other household stuffs. “The situation has changed after the September 11,” he said. “It’s very hard to sleep inside the car because of police restriction in parking many places.”

After he picked me up from in front of the Omni Hotel, Roberto headed to the southern part of the Santa Monica beach where I touched the sea water for the first time in my life. I walked around the beach wearing Roberto’s sandals. “Take this,” Roberto picked up a stone from the beach and handed that to me. “This is a souvenir to you.”

Roberto wanted me to go to as many places of the city as possible. He was ready to take me anywhere because he had promised me to take around the city. We went to a Chinese restaurant, filled out bellies and the late night city tour started. We went to Hollywood. Oh…the Kodak Theater (where they distribute the Oscars) was so small that I couldn’t believe I was in front of the building. We went inside a few shops where, Roberto said, celebrities shop. “You don’t believe me?” he said. “Just check the price tags boy.” He was right, the price was for celebrities.

I wanted to go to Gay bars but there was no time. It was already 11 PM and I was damn tired because of the flight and the time change. (LA is three hours ahead of D.C. where I had started my day in early in the morning. To stay awake till 11 PM in LA on that day meant not sleeping till 2 AM in D.C.)

Roberto was also new to the downtown LA and I knew what that meant when we got lost for about half hour while trying to get back to the hotel. The road was like a deep web and if you miss a turning you miss the whole route. Roberto was repeatedly consulting the maps but that wouldn’t work. He asked people on the road and we were like two crazy men doing unwanted adventure on the streets of Los Angeles. (In fact, even people in the city find it difficult to navigate through the downtown web of roads). Finally we found the route and the hotel. The first day in LA was fruitful and quite adventurous as well.

April 3 was the day to be rich, really rich in a sense. We went to the office of Delphi International Program of World Learning, agency that was administering the IV program. It’s weird that I actually forget how many hundred dollars bill I received that day from Delphi. (Well, the money actually belonged to the US State Department. Or to the American taxpayers to whom I must be thankful.) I think 45. In the form of travel cheques. Boy, it took me more than 10 minutes to sign on those pieces of paper. That was my first introduction with the world of travel cheques. While I was nervously (and carefully) signing on those papers, Anna Karkovska McGlew, the Program Associate, was constantly warning us in non-American accent not to carry all the cheques and the purchase agreement form together. In fact, that was printed in the PAF itself. “Even if you lost these cheques,” she said. “That piece of paper will help you claim the money. So put that separately.”

Folks were patiently listening to her. No one wanted to take a chance. After all, you don’t always carry 45 hundred dollars in a single pocket. It was really an irony that I was carrying that money (biggest sum I have ever carried in my life so far) and walking around the city of D.C. as if I was a broke. I mean there was no fear of loosing the money. They were really equal to paper for us because we had to spend that entire sum inside the States. (That wasn’t compulsory but the situation no different than that. We were staying in a hotel that would cost about two hundred dollars per night.) That money was for our hotel and daily food expenses based on a complex math of American government’s per dime allowance system. (I am always poor at math.) And that’s a good idea because that really helps the visitor to understand American society and its science of consumerism if they get to know how to pay money to whom.

Dinesh Wagle smiles in Santa Monica Beach…a self portrait by camera

Like many other friends in the group, I kept the money in a safety deposit box of the hotel later in the evening. But while I was in Los Angeles, I carried money (now reduced to somewhere around three thousand dollars after paying to Omni Hotel in LA) in my pocket all the time along with my passport. (That is why I was carrying my jacket all the time, folks!).

Did I mention an irony above? The other irony was that I was staying in hotels that would cost me more money than I would (at least in my case) earn in a month back in home. I wasn’t the only one facing such similar situation. After all, overwhelming majority of us (129 journalists from 105 countries) were from third world societies. When Josh of Afghanistan explained about this irony in the international conclave on the last day of our visit, people appreciated that with applaud.

We were trying to save as much money as possible from those 48 hundred dollars. (I wanted to buy a laptop computer- actually this laptop in which I am writing now). One easiest way to save the money was to share the hotel room. We tried to double up the rooms but we were disappointed most of the times. They wouldn’t allow us to share the bed citing different reasons like, the hotel would say that the State Department wouldn’t permit sharing or they can’t let us do that because a single room was booked for a person. I shared the room with Kiran Nepal for three nights. Boys were joking why just share the room between two, but do the same among 10 so that we can save more money! That was a crazy idea and we cracked all kind of jokes regarding that money and doubling up rooms. May be jokes were worth more than 5 thousand dollars! I think there were two folks one from Bangladesh and the other from Pakistan who didn’t want to share rooms.

So at the end of my trip, after buying this laptop, I still had a few hundred dollars (travel cheques) in my pocket. But that was possible because many of my friends (in the US) paid for my food and I stayed in a house of my friend in New Jersey. Plus, I didn’t have to spend money while I was in New York.