T-Shirts and Christmas Songs

I parted from Y in front of "Starbucks". My plan for the day was sightseeing in the city centre of LA. Although I like travelling, I am not too enthusiastic in sightseeing. Perhaps this statement of mine is a contradiction. In other words, I like visiting different places in the world, but once I arrived at the place, I suddenly felt lazy; I did not want to do so many things and I wanted to spend time relaxing. If I can defend my laziness, my purpose of visiting foreign countries is to talk with the local people and to observe the life of ordinary people there. I am not so interested in sightseeing, which has little to do with the daily life of local people. When I visited my friend in Chicago in the previous year, I spent most of the time watching the major league baseball games. During my stay in LA this time, Y described my life ironically,

"You do only two activities here; running and drinking."

I decided to walk around in the Korean Town. Y’s office was placed in the middle of the Korean Town, where we could see a lot of billboards written in Hungul. In the town, I found that I did not feel myself as a stranger, because I, a Japanese tourist in dirty clothes, was blended completely into the people and scenery there and this made me feel comfortable. I had expected a lot of Korean restaurants in the town, but there were also many other businesses by Korean people for Korean people, such as practices of Korean doctors, offices of Korean lawyers, rental shops of Korean videos. When a billboard of "Tofu Soup" caught my eye, I felt nostalgia from it and I could hardly resist myself from going into the restaurant, even if I was not hungry at all. Meanwhile I entered a part of the Korean Town with of a lot of young men, who seemed to be unemployed. I did not feel safe there, and so I returned to where I had started my tour.

Then I took the Metro, an underground train, to go to the centre of Down Town, where about twenty "sky scraper" buildings stood. Just next to the very modern buildings, I found a Mexican street, where cheap clothes, ornaments and other miscellaneous things were sold. According to the guide map, there was also "China Town" and "Little Tokyo"(Japanese Town) near there, but it was already enough for me to experience the town of different ethnic groups, so I did not go to the Chinese and Japanese towns.

I contacted Y from my mobile phone and we decided to have lunch together. So I returned to my starting point for the second time and had lunch with her in a food mall of Asian restaurants. I ate Vietnamese noodles, called "‘Pho" and it tasted nice.

What did I do after lunch? To tell the truth, I found a public library and read books and took a nap there. I wondered to myself "What a lazy tourist I am!", but it was not a bad feeling to pretend to be a local person and to spend time in the local library

Late in the afternoon, I went to "Starbucks" again to drink coffee and to wait for Y, who I was meeting after she finished her work. The young Mexican shopkeeper remembered me, and he said "One espresso for Moto" without asking my name, when I ordered a cup of coffee. Sitting by the window and drinking coffee, I observed the pedestrians walking up and down along the street. In the shop, Christmas songs were being played in the background. It was not surprising to hear Christmas songs, as Christmas would arrive in less than four weeks. However, I felt a little strange. Most of the people passing by the street were only wearing T-shirts and shorts. I had an obsession for Christmas and I had always imagined "winter" and "white Christmas" from it. As a person from Europe, naturally, I could not accept the combination of T-shirts and Christmas.