Little Worlds in Los Angeles

LITTLE TEHRAN
On Westwood Boulevard, you walk past store-fronts of carpet shops and small markets with doors opened wide- it smells like dates and cardamon.  Farsi scribbled on neon signs and Persian music plays through scratched radios.

And there's the local ice cream joint: Rose and Saffron Ice Cream.  I like it because it's creamy and sweet... with rose water, saffron, and pistachio, and the best part isn't the ice cream, but the cubes of sweet milk, the white squares amidst a scoop of electric yellow.  We're eating home-churned ice cream out of styrofoam cups and it's not like Baskin Robbins, it's a bit gooier.  When it melts, it's like a thick syrup.  And it's fragrant like perfume.  It's not sweet like artificial candy, but mellow and tart and full-bodied.

CHINATOWN
Yesterday, I was with Austin and Danielle, Downtown.  Something about dim sum and beer.  The dim sum's quasi-cheap and loaded with MSG, curry spice and sweet bread and fried noodles.  Round tables and a parking lot attendant with rhinestone glasses- he's fearless and he gets behind Austin's car, in reverse, and reprimands his driving skills and laughs.  Inside is crowded and it's a dim sum restaurant, but there's no dim sum on the menu.

LITTLE TOKYO
After, we drive around and we search for this beer festival, or maybe it's not... I'm not sure what it is, but we never find it and instead we park around Little Tokyo and there's an outside cultural concert that just finished and everybody's getting ready to leave, disrobing the stage and disassembling the chairs, as costumed drummers in palm leaves and head-dresses walk by.  We walk forward and there's a manicured zen garden and fountain.  "Take a picture of it," Danielle says...but, "it's too pretty," Austin says.  And it's too picture perfect as an Asian boy hop-scotches over a small bridge as his mother follows.

Chinatown's grimy with cheap knock-offs, boom boxes, and a guy in the street who's playing the Guzheng, but Little Tokyo is prim and proper and clean with lamp posts and 14 year old girls who sing karaoke in the smack-middle of a square.  It's very yin and yang.

Down one narrow passage-way, between two brick buildings with fire escapes, is an open patio.  It's a weird time, late afternoon, right before it gets dark, so we sit and order two dark beers on tap and one spicy ginger brew.  We talk about Leonard Nimoy, Slash, and Martha Washington, and, before we know it, the sky dims and when you look up, strings of lights sparkle.

Chocolate, Beer, and Estrogen

I get there five minutes late.  He's pale-faced and and has a small pointy nose, and he walks to the left and drags his right because of a coma he had ten years back.  This isn't how I remember him being (actually, I don't remember him at all) and I feel sick when he approaches me, smiling, and says, "I didn't think you'd come."  And then a little bit later he asks, "Remember what I told you about our kids?"  No, I lie. 

There's something very womanly about his frame and demeanor (and it might be the female hormones that he injests once-a-day because his throat doesn't produce them).  Mostly, it's his feminine arms and stomach.

He shows me around his neighborhood and we eat doner kebabs and there's a slab of Berlin Wall preserved and displayed in the street.  I take a picture of it.  Later that night, I'm drinking Orval and he's drinking Diet Coke.  He talks a lot about himself, how he likes to sing and how he wants to move to Toronto in five years.  He stops talking and I ask him if he's had a drink since the accident and he says that the taste of alcohol makes him sad and I'm on my third beer.

Brussels is confusing.  It's metropolitanized and French and Flemish and German.  It's a conglomeration of cultures and with the E.U., it's difficult to decipher what Belgium actually is. 

It's good beer harvested by monks and great chocolate and too much of the two makes your cheeks tickle. 

I meet Andreas on the train from Brussels to Berlin.  It's very "Before Sunrise" and he's my Germanic Ethan Hawke, or so it seemed.  He schedules me into his digital planner while out-of-focus scenes of the green German country-side swish past his head.  In three weeks, at 2:05 PM, we'll meet at Place de Luxembourg.  He grabs his empty suitcase from the over-head, and beckons goodbye.  Before hopping off the train, he runs back to my seat, on a last-second whim, and, fucking everything up, whispers, "We're going to have three kids."  Just like that, and he disappears.  I wish he didn't come back and, although I'm willing to pretend that it never happened, it unnerves me. 

When you're all alone traveling, people you meet on the road become romanticized into warped perceptions, false realities.  It's not until later, after the initial rush of human interaction, that you sober up and realize that maybe you're just a little bit lonely.