home Articles My home My Ancestral home More about LA The food in LA More suburbia - In LA Yet Another Rant about LA Loyalty   contact me at: justin (@) deepdrift dot com Comments GyozaQuest is a non profitable site,	Los Angeles This is my ancestral home: Well sort of... At least I grew up here, and my mother was raised here. So that makes two generations raised in this place. On the right is a photo taken from the plane on the ride in. Note the smog. They claim it's getting better. From looking at it it still looks like a pretty gross brown mess. It's true that I dislike LA, but for some reason there's a strange attraction which draws me back to the place I grew up. More than just family, I would move back for that, but the longer I think about it, the more it really doesn't seem all that bad. LA's a big city, and it's sprawling. LA is known for a couple of things. Hollywood is one of them. I did make a note to drive up and take a photo with the sign. My local friends who work for the Parks and Recreation division. Suggests that we not try and climb the mountain to try and re-arrange the letters. Hollywood, is one of the reasons LA continues to exist. It does drive culture, for all we like to complain about it. We still go see movies, we still export them. Movies still inspire us, they make us think, they challenge us. We may not like all of them. But Hollywood still plays a part in our lives. Aside from Disneyland, which is also a separate state of mind in LA. Where else are dreams made of than Hollywood. This is where Mullhuland drive ends - the beach. Mullhulland drive was named after the man who brought water to LA, a visionary, and a man made famous by the the movie that immortalized incest, as not only a problem of hillbillies. Anyhow the road winds through the hills that separate LA from "The Valley" then passes above Malibu and through the canyons. Home to an amazing array of waay overpriced houses. And yes that's blood on my legs. We were looking at the tide pools I stumbled in a hole in the sand, and got hit by a wave.   My good friend Ken pointed out the pizasters, Purple Pizasters, they're the local fauna, also known as starfish. Although I can't really see how anyone would call them a fish. They don't move very fast. I guess when you're compared to a clam, or a mussel, they move faster than them. So I suppose fast is relative. We managed to go to the beach at low tide, so we could still see all the critters. I was pretty impressed with the amount of wildlife to be seen. This is LA remember, and Santa Monica bay is the poster child for enviornmental clean up. Anyhow I'm rather impressed with Ken. Although probably the biggest computer geek of the bunch of us in high school. He's now a lifeguard during the day, and teaches scuba diving during the evenings and weekends. Not a bad life, I'd like to see him doing other things, but I'm also jealous that he lives a life always in the water, that I have not the courage to try live Updated 2003.12.3