A walk through Los Angeles: Koreatown to Little Bangladesh to Larchmont

Here’s a nice little stroll you can do through Los Angeles:

1. First, get yourself to the Wilshire/Vermont metro station. You can get to this station quite easily on the Red Line or Purple Line metros. Supposing you start off at Union Station — then the Wilshire/Vermont station is just a ten minute ride away. Wilshire/Vermont station will have put you right in the heart of Koreatown. You just need to be forewarned, riding the Red line or Purple line is no joke, prepare to be killed.
2. Get off the metro at Wilshire/Vermont and take a look around at the Korean stores around you. Then, walk north on Vermont.
3. You’re going to run right past the Islamic Center of Southern California! If you’ve timed things right, you can go in and listen to the Friday prayers, which are around 1 pm on, you guessed it, Fridays. I mean, they probably do a group prayer there five times a day, but the Friday 1 pm prayer is special because the Imam will do a lecture to break up the ordinary prayer. He’ll give you some things to think about. Maybe, for example, he’ll say to remember that all things in this world are temporary anyways.

1. When the prayer lets out, there’s a bunch of people who set up tables right outside the mosque doors, and they sell Bangladeshi food. So you can buy something, or you can keep walking north on Vermont until you reach 3rd Street. This is like the official start of Little Bangladesh. You now start walking west on 3rd Street, and you’ll pass ever so many little shops and stuff. I got a Bangladeshi ice cream stick when I did it, cause it was a hot day.
2. Eventually, all the Little Bangladesh shops peter out, and you’re left with ghoulish blank buildings with trash littered along the sidewalk. Well, you’ll have to hopscotch along all this, and at this point, you’ll want to go both a bit north and further west. Technically, you want to get to Beverly Boulevard. But that is going to be choked with cars, so for the time being, you can just walk one block north from 3rd St to 2nd St, and then keep going west.
3. Your next destination is Robert Burns Park, and when you get close enough to it, then you will need to walk north all the way to Beverly. And then you can sit in the park for a bit! It’s a nice green spot, and you can find benches under the tree (for that hot day). And, wasn’t Robert Burns the one who wrote, “My love is like a red, red rose”? So might as well sit in his park and read a book.
4. When you’re good and rested, just walk a bit further west and you’ll get to Larchmont Boulevard. You see, before I ever moved to Los Angeles, I read a book (a really bad book) that was set in Larchmont Boulevard. I can see now why the book had no choice but to be bad; Larchmont is a hive of white vapidity dressed up as sophistication and “let’s drink wine!” I remember the very first time I saw Larchmont — feeling so excited by the quaint descriptions given to it in the book — and being so demoralized when I set eyes on it. So even this “quaint” and homelike village looked like absolute garbage! It was still just blocks of concrete and so impersonal. So it has never become a favorite place of mine. I think I’ve only been there three or four times total over the years. But you can still check it out, just to check it out. It has a bookstore (the bookstore on Union Street in Concord, NC, is about fifty million times nicer) and it has a shop that supposedly has the most divine sandwiches in the world … but it also stinks, and didn’t look too sanitary. I did get a sandwich from there once (not too expensive) and I didn’t quite like it. But the little bit I had leftover, when I brought it home and heated it in the toaster oven, tasted much much better. This sandwich shop also sells Swedish candy. I asked them about it, they said they’d started selling it about a year ago. Based off some craze for Swedish candy that’s taken over big American cities or something. Oh, there’s also Levain Bakery on this street. I actually do like that. They have monster-sized chocolate chip cookies that are very super good. .There’s also a smoothie shop .. I got a smoothie there my first visit, and it was $8, and I was in shock, thinking, I’m not going to be able to afford a thing in this city. There’s also a shop called “Flicka”. Flicka means girl in Swedish. So of course I went in. The shop is full of little girl clothes and jewelry and stuff. The people who run it are Californian and Asian-American. I don’t remember if the mom had once visited Sweden, or if she had a Swedish friend, or if she just ran into the word … I once searched for it all on the internet, and I faintly remember that there was possibly some big family drama involved with the family running this store.

Any case, so that is a nice little walk you can do! According to Google Maps, it’s 2.6 miles from Western/Vermont to Larchmont Boulevard, and will take you about 1 hour to walk, but of course, for me, it took a longer while since I stopped for the Friday prayers and looked around the shops and ate and read a book and wrote at Robert Burns Park. But you will see Korean things, Bangladeshi things, Muslim things, and then very “progressive liberal Like Oh My God” culture things, and the store with the Swedish name. And on top of all that, you can ride the metro to Western and Vermont, which is a cultural experience in itself. And then, you can ride the bus back from Larchmont to downtown Los Angeles (I took the bus that dropped me off near the Central Library, which is a short walk from the Grand Avenue/Bunker Hill metro station). Plus you’ll get exercise and enjoy “fresh air”, or whatever polluted version Los Angeles is able to offer.

Happy walking!