Los Angeles
Seventy miles west — and a world apart from the lab.
"Los Angeles is everything they warn you about and more than they ever tell you. The sunsets alone are worth the traffic."
— Somewhere on the I-10, heading westChaos, sunshine, and remarkable food
Living in Riverside puts Los Angeles at arm's length — close enough for a spontaneous day trip, far enough that you appreciate it more each time. LA is a city of neighbourhoods: Los Feliz and Silver Lake have a bookshop-and-coffee energy; Venice Beach is reliably strange; Santa Monica faces the ocean with quiet confidence.
The food is genuinely excellent across every price point. The diversity of cuisine in this city is something I had not encountered before moving to Southern California — and it makes Riverside's relative quiet feel almost like a choice rather than a constraint.
The sunsets from the Santa Monica Pier or the Griffith Observatory are the kind that make you take too many photographs and still feel you have not captured it correctly.
Griffith, LACMA, and the long drives
The Griffith Observatory is worth visiting at dusk — the city sprawls below and the fading light turns the San Gabriel Mountains a deep amber. The LA County Museum of Art runs ambitious exhibitions and the tar pits next door are a reminder that this basin has been remarkable for a very long time.
I tend to drive the PCH north toward Malibu when I need to think through a research problem. There is something about the combination of speed, coast, and open sky that clears a particular kind of mental clutter.
"Every time I drive back to Riverside on the 60, I think: I should come here more often. And then I remember that the whole point of LA is that you can, whenever you want."