First of all, stay the hell away from Los Angeles. It is hands down the worst city I've ever visited. If you have to go there, don't smile at anyone, or they'll sue you or shoot you. Or both. Get a good car. You can't do anything without a car there. The distances you have to travel to go anywhere are staggering to a European. Be prepared to discuss your annual income and that of your neighbours absolutely all the time. Use the words "dude" and "like" at least three times in every sentence. Go blond, it helps. Forget the fine arts. Most people who attend classical concerts in California are insufferable snobs who feed their cats Beluga caviar. Doctors don't come from Sweden, porn stars come from Sweden.
Charity means attending the annual party of the "Save the Krill" foundation while your teenage kids drive around in 500 000 dollar cars and your wife feeds the mutt
foie gras. There is an enormous amount of obese and extremely black people, whose only form of communicating is shouting at the top of their lungs in a high-pitched voice and a language so removed from English that you might understand every fifth or sixth word if you concentrate. These people have two emotional modes: rude or angry. They also usually work for public services so you have to deal with them regularly. Then there is their counterparts, the health-club crazies. These are the people who will give their goldfish facelifts, and they are everywhere! Start jogging, or you'll be a social outcast. Get botoxed, even if you don't need it. Spas are a way of life. You can have skin like Helen of Troy, but you must spend at least 5 hours a week with mud in your face and cucumber on your eyes. These people bring their own vitaminized bottled water to restaurants so the chef can cook their broccoli according to their dietary plan.
Get used to earthquakes. They're so common people hardly notice them, which is pretty bizarre for a Scandinavian.
Of course there are nice places there, I especially liked San Diego. It was like coming to a different planet after LA. Escondido was a delightful little town with some beautiful nature and quite friendly if somewhat conservative people.
I think the thing that really got to me was that to a Californian, to a larger extent than anywhere else in the USA, life is a constant competition. Everything revolves around size and who's got what. If you're not competing with your peers, you're competing with yourself. It's a built in mass psychosis that's a part of life over there. Who's got the biggest car, breasts, paycheck, barbecue. Where do your kids go to college? Never heard of it. You try to lead a non-materialistic life? I'll show you non-materialistic. Me'n my wife recycle condoms, I've used the same one since -87. What's you're golfing par at the moment? Really? Well I bench pressed 200 kilos at the gym this morning. Is that the new Mercedes? What'll that set you back? I'm thinking of getting the new BMW. Blah..blah..blah IT JUST WON'T STOP! If you tell someone "Today I saw a deer by the side of the road" that person will immediately say "the other day we saw 3 deer and a moose doing the macarena in our back yard!" You can't win.... But the weather's nice, though....
