Contrasts

My hotel in Sherman Oaks didn’t have a complimentary breakfast, apparently because the previous owners sold the dining room and kitchen to a Denny’s franchise, leaving the hotel with barely enough room for a lobby. But the new terrible hotel had a complimentary breakfast, and I figured it couldn’t be worse than the grim breakfast options at Joshua Tree.

Again, I am very good at underestimating Los Angeles.

The breakfast room had little pouches of microwavable sausages and biscuits, packets of shortbread cookies, sachets of instant oatmeal and, bafflingly, the same make-your-own waffle machine as the nice hotel in Palm Springs. But there was no cereals, no fresh fruit, no yoghurt, no eggs or bacon, no muffins or even toast.

With limited options I decided to make myself a waffle, and it became a cautionary tale of how to ruin the concept of waffles completely. I pushed the lever to issue the batter, and it took fully 60 seconds for enough turgid batter to ooze out of the nozzle to fill the cup. The waffle machine itself was clean – clearly few people are as desperate for a waffle as I am – so it cooked up nicely, but then the syrup dispenser didn’t work. I eventually got some syrup out of it by disassembling the pump.

As I ate the World’s Saddest Waffle it occurred to me that, given the turgidity of the batter, and given the general lack of care or cleanliness in this hotel, it probably wasn’t the wisest move to do so. Batter goes off in almost no time, growing mould more efficiently than agar. Besides sadness, what else was I ingesting?

I still ate it, because waffle, and also because of the sunk cost fallacy: I’d put a considerable amount of work into making it and syruping it.

I regained my composure by walking half an hour down to Republique, the fanciest cafe in Los Angeles, where I had an excellent cortado coffee and my first LA celebrity sighting when Vince Vaughn reached in front of me in the order queue to grab a loaf of artisanal bread.

Unfortunately I have to be at the same terrible hotel tonight. I looked into the boutique hotel around the corner, the one with the delightful bar, and their cheapest room for tonight was $280US, or $400AU. I may be a rich and fancy man but I am not that rich. The terrible hotel is $130US ($200AU) cheaper, so here I stay.

I did have to move to a different room, but this one is on the upper floor so I won’t have someone crashing about overhead at 4.45 as I did this morning. This new room faces the alley rather than the noisy street, so apart from a couple of blaxploitation characters currently making a drug deal out there, it’s quieter.

Walking around this part of Los Angeles reminded me of a concept of John Kenneth Galbraith’s; that private affluence and public squalor are a warning sign of malaise in a society. It’s almost painfully obvious in this part of LA. Fitness studios and doggy daycare spas stand next to abandoned cars and roads that are more pothole than asphalt. Cutting edge robot delivery drones manoeuvre themselves around homeless people sprawled on the sidewalk. The garden beds around restaurants and homewares stores are immaculate and lushly planted, but the sidewalk pavement is broken and buckled.

It may seem like an odd example, but take these hanging baskets at The Grove.

With their packed volume of meticulously cultivated blooms, and elegantly trailing tendrils, they are ridiculously, ostentatiously perfect. And there are dozens of them hanging from the lamp posts all over The Grove’s privately owned footprint. Meanwhile on the street outside, the crosswalk is so worn and faded that I didn’t even realise it was there until I saw the call button, and the bus shelters all have homeless people living behind them, using them as one wall of their makeshift shacks.