Better

After staying in a hotel in Sherman Oaks for the last week, I got the opportunity to switch to a different hotel in the same chain in Fairfax, just east of Beverly Hills. Sherman Oaks is an almost featureless suburban wasteland – the nearest proper supermarket was a 45 minute walk from my hotel – so moving to a more central location with plenty of cafes, shops and bars seemed like a good idea. Fairfax has a Wholefoods, the Los Angeles County Museum of Art, and the CBS TV studio where they film some of their reality shows, so I assumed that it had to be a decent area.

I had much to learn about LA.

The first indicator that this hotel might be a step down from the previous one was the stench of old urine in the external stairwell. Then there was the fact that the lobby had security doors that could allow it to be locked down from the rest of the hotel.

The room itself, once I got there, was very spacious, but unfortunately that just allowed more horribleness to be packed in. The pillows on the bed were somehow simultaneously flat and lumpy. It was on the ground floor, facing the street, and the window overlooked the homeless encampment on the sidewalk. The catch on the door wasn’t a metal insert, but a series of holes gouged into the door frame. There was no little pad and pen, no desk lamp, no complementary bottled water. There were mysterious stains on the ceilings. And walls. And carpet.

But staying at this hotel is a little like voting for Donald Trump: you don’t want to do it, but you can’t identify a viable alternative so you hold your nose and just get it over with. And to be fair the location really is great. It’s only a block from The Grove, one of the other tourist attractions that Google will inevitably throw at you if you ask it for classy things to do in LA. The Grove is a singular example of the American philosophy that if something is worth doing, it’s worth wildly overdoing.

If you’ve ever wondered what it would be like to wander through a Hallmark Christmas movie’s idea of a charming town square, then visit The Grove in December, when they go apeshit with the decorations, fairylights and an overloaded Christmas tree the size of the Burj Khalifa. I half expected to see Lacey Chabert bustling though the crowds, arms loaded with Christmas presents, before bumping into the hometown hunk she dumped when she left to become a professional girl in the big city.

I finished my evening at a much nicer hotel than mine, having cocktails in the bar at the Short Stories boutique hotel just around the corner. If only I could have stayed.