La La Land Is Full of Smiles & Side Hustles

Recapping my week in Los Angeles.

“Everyone is just so much happier here.”

That’s what my sister and I concluded after spending four days in Beverly Hills. She was there to design the merchandise layout of a new store location on Beverly Drive; I tagged along as her travel buddy, pilates partner, dinner date, and roomie.

It was a very good trip.

I hadn’t been back to LA since 2019 when I hosted the “Single, Swipe, Repeat” dating podcast for Cosmopolitan and Tinder. I stayed in Santa Monica where the recording studio was, and, thanks to not having a car, didn’t venture out much.

Before then, I attended a quick bachelorette trip in West Hollywood and had a few friend visits in 2011 and 2012.

But, as our Uber drove us from LAX to the Sixty Hotel on Wilshire, the memories that kept flooding back to me were times when I lived in LA for three months during my senior year of college. As an intern for Maxim magazine taking classes at Emerson College’s LA campus, I called the Oakwoods Apartment complex in Toluca Lake home (yes, just like in that show, Love) and carried out my last few credits frolicking around the city with a group of friends and my then-boyfriend who was studying at USC.

Passing a shopping plaza, I remembered the ice cream shop and unassuming bars we used to go to, tucked in amongst Chinese restaurants and laundry mats.

I remembered driving my Dodge rental along the five lanes of the 405, sitting for an hour on Highland Avenue trying to get the five miles home from work, and hitting Runyon Canyon on the weekends. I remembered sitting at a waterfront seafood restaurant in Malibu, window shopping at The Grove with no money, and touring The Getty Museum.