Angels and Sins. Los Angeles and Las Vegas

The drive to Los Angeles is one again like seeing it in a movie, with one of my favorite albums ever from Red Hot Chili Peppers “Californication”. Lana del Rey has also been a good companion for the trip.

We met Cecilia at Urth Caffé in  Santa Monica beach. Urth in welsh means earth and has a really good italian cafes and products and in the past has won number 1 Coffee Restaurant in Los Angeles. 

Cecilia came to pick me up there with a vintage Jaguar, she was just amazing, it was funny to be in that kind of cars you don’t really see often in Europe. Again times for goodbyes, those one I don’t really like. It was time to separate from  Natasha after 10 days living 24 hours a day a wonderful trip. She would take her flight back to chicago after few hours.:-(

Los Angeles was neither in the top of the places I wanted to see, and probably I would have never came if here wouldn’t have lived  Cecilia, my great friend I introduced in “Mind the Gap” article. She got married last year and lives in West Hollywood with her husband Tony.

We could finally have another large chat face to face, and after have driven half city I cooked pasta at her place for her, Tony and a guy who would be with us the entire time: Santi: A friend of Tony who just moved to Los Angeles for work. From now on I will call him Al Bottino or Al Boludo.

I came to  Los Angeles as I wanted to see where Cecilia lived, what she would do in an ordinary day. I was not particularly excited about seeing something in particular apart from the Hollywood Sign.

I had an amazing time in LA, but honestly, I didn’t like this city too much. I think it is one of those places you might like specially if you work in  Cinema, Art , but to me, it did not give me any emotion. And some of you might know that when a place, a song, or a person doesn’t emotion me in some way, there is nothing to convince me. But the biggest emotion ever was hugging Cecilia and spend time with her in her new life.

The big surprise of my stop in La was that we would go to Las Vegas. We departed early in the morning.

It was four, sorry, five of us. An Uruguayan wanna-be actor in L.A. who claims to be Italian, a bonkers Irish photographer who never stops telling funny stories, a gipsy doll willing to travel from New York to Rio de Janeiro, a classy Neapolitan gipsy tired of the American junk food and the Italian version of the typical alienated semi-desperate American housewife. No, this is just a joke. I am sure that when her husband will stop using all the glasses of the kitchen in a single day just to drink some water and leave them all over the house, she will be just a happy wife.

The trip itself to the City of Sin was an experience. Being in the car as old schoolmates, listening to music and recording videos, making fun of the crazy drivers, and of course looking at the desert and the mountains made us stop speaking for few seconds. And along the way we realized that, even if we all came from different places and stories, we did have something in common: Barcelona, the beautiful Catalan city where we all spent some years of our life, and we all first met as friends, Tony and Santi 8 years ago, and Cecilia and myself in 2009.

Las Vegas is known not only as the City of Sin, but also the city of fake. A fake statue of liberty, a fake Empire state building, a fake tour Eiffel, a fake Como Lake, a fake dream and hope of becoming millionaire in its smoky and crowded casinos, and so on. In Vegas there is also a fake sky. Those who have never been there may not get it. Yes, when outside the sun is shining in the middle of the day, you enter some hotel mall and its ceiling is a dark sky. Fake dark. Just like at the Caesar’s Palace, where even the floor looks slippery like it had just rained. You walk to the Strip for hours and wonder how it is possible that somebody got this bizarre idea of creating a crazy city in the middle of the desert and make it the icon of debauchery, the place where, no matter what you do, it stays there forever.