Meeting the locals

What really helped us to enjoy LA was knowing some people who lived there. Barbara, who used to work in Animation Studios in London before we had kids, knew a couple of animators who had moved to LA in the late 1990s. Judy, originally from Australia, is a really lovely woman who I remembered from the first few months of going out with Barbara – she was very friendly at an animation studio picnic in Regents Park when I felt a bit alone as the non-artist in a bunch of creatives. She has left animation now and is studying to become a hypnotherapist. We went to visit her in her home up in the Hollywood Hills, quite near to our home exchange home. The house wasn’t very big, being on just one floor, but the rooms were large and there was an easy transition from indoors to out, and I think Judy and Jurgen spend a lot of their time outside, looking at the fantastic view of downtown. The only problem there is the coyotes that have in the past attacked their cats – but coyotes are like foxes in London … attracted by the rubbish that we leave out, and probably impossible to get rid of.

Judy took us up into the hills of Griffith Park, near the Observatory (famous as the setting for some of James Dean’s key scenes in “Rebel Without a Cause”), from where we got a classic view of the Hollywood sign, and LA sprawled below us. She also came over to our home exchange house to enjoy the pool, and we went out for a meal in Los Feliz with her and Paul Demeyer, another friend from Barbara’s animation days, and their partners. Paul had worked on the “Rugrats in Paris” movie and was working hard on another project now, and his German wife Renate was a dog trainer, specialising in dogs with acute behavioural problems (a normal LA kind of job). Judy’s husband Jurgen is also an animator but was now working on a live action movie directed by Danny de Vito, who they had both met and found delightful.

They were all happy to be living in Los Feliz, and it was strange that we ended up in a home exchange so close to where they all lived. It is the sort of area that has a lot of history (well, about 80 years worth) but then became a bit neglected as other areas became more fashionable, and thus seems a bit more real than some other LA neighbourhoods with a mix of population and relative lack of pretension. It is now having a resurgence as people recognise its attractions.