Los Angeles Downtown - Smalltown, USA?

At around 3PM the Starbucks in California Plaza is overrun.

It seemed like there were a lot of Deloitte and Touche folks, but there were plenty of folks who were not so tagged. Regardless, the members of this prodigious line of people were individually addressed by name by the baristas, who go on to inquire if they would like their regular beverage. Granted, these people probably come every single day. But now it's an hour after I first got here and the line has maintained a constant length, which potentially says interesting things about the average random distribution of coffee breakers throughout the afternoon, but is also a testament to Starbucks' processing power.

I felt like I was mucking up the gears of a well-oiled machine, a solitary, silent outsider, adding a longer seek time to the process in order to acquire my name and order.

At the corner of 2nd and Main,

The Burrata Pie: Arugula, hazelnuts, tomato sauce, burrata cheese.

Eating outside at Pitfire Pizza (something I have had the infinite pleasure of doing twice), I felt like I was at the corner of 2nd and Main in a town one ten-thousandth the size.

People walking by on the sidewalk called out to friends passing by in cars, who waved back.

People enjoying their meals greeted passerby, exchanging a few words before they moved on to their destination, whether lunch or post-lunch.

Police officers strolled by chatting with civilians.

And there were so many more bicycles than I had expected for the center of one of the most famously sprawling urban areas in the world.

I'm singin' on the bus

A final anecdote.

Driving through downtown one morning, as my host was preparing to drop me off at a café where I would work that day, a singular noise penetrated the car as a bus pulled up just behind us.

"Huh. He's singing."

I: "What?"

"The bus driver's singing."

"What?"

"Roll down your window."

I rolled. We listened, speechless, waiting for the light to turn.

Finally, I asked, "Is his window open?"

"No, he's using the loudspeaker."

The light turned, and so did we. I watched the bus go past us, and sure enough, there he was, a rotund fellow, cradling the mike in his left hand, piloting with his right, joyfully belting out some tune. I wish I knew what he had been singing.

Not possessing a good ear for these things, I have no way of reporting on the quality of his performance. But it is enough for me that there was one in the first place.


Maybe my casual-interaction-with-strangers muscle 
(medical term: 'anterior smalltalkoids') has atrophied.  

Perhaps this post is more revelatory of how garbled my image of what a small town is. Or of the groove my mind has worn itself into living in Tokyo. Singing and dancing in the streets - have I been watching  musicals? Still, my expectations of downtown were of people corralled into office buildings and shopping malls, exclusively car traffic, no social interactions or kindness, exhausted and destitute bodies curled up in doorways. Not that there aren't homeless, but they somehow coexist (though not without friction) with a multitude of other groups out and about on sidewalks, public places, and outdoor cafés.