Los Angeles

Several years ago I ran a little magazine. I managed to squeeze onto a few tours to promote the thing while I was doing it. One tour was the Vans Warped tour and it happened to have a "zine booth." The booth was run mostly by volunteers who ran zines and would come and help out on the day the tour ran through their town. I threw caution and sensibility to the wing and organized to volunteer first for 10 days and the next year for a month. 

During that time I got to go all up and down the East coast of The US (plus a couple of Canadian dates). Most of the people who work on the tour are from Southern California. Perhaps the best part of the whole experience was meeting one of my very best friends, Kyle, from Los Angeles.

Since I met Kyle I have visited him and some other friends nearly a dozen or so times, originally to clear my head on vacation, then to break up the rough winters Canadians face, and more recently on my way to and from Australia & New Zealand.

LA is huge, of course. But it's not all Hollywood and Beaches and Snoop Dogg. 

My favourite parts of LA include, but are not limited to (and will surely develop beyond):

In n Out Burger

Amoeba music

Downtown LA

Second hand shopping on Sunset Blvd

Silverlake

Little Tokyo

Kyle's gross humour.