honk my horn

Okay people, this is serious. All of this past summer's environmental initiatives in Paris (free bikes and anti-car days and bla, bla, bla) have just bitten the dust. Or rather, are choking on the pollution of hours of gridlock as every car owner on the Ile de France tears up their worthless metro pass and spends hours in their vehicle to cover 5 kms in 4 hours.

We are entering DAY 7 of the transport strike and for good measure, the teachers and postal employees are joining the fray. It'll be like a bloody bank holiday here tomorrow - except that normal people are trying to work, with very limited options as to how to physically get to work and nowhere to leave the kids!

I have been making use of the passenger-on-scooter mode of transportation. Luckily one of the owners of a voice-over studio I do a lot of work for lives near me and has a scooter. This evening we crossed the city from west to east at 30km/h, dodging side-mirrors as the cars turned Paris into a giant, idling parking lot. Here's what I've learnt about strike etiquette: scooters and motorbikes put on their hazards and then dash right through the middle, between the cars. In tunnels, the gleeful two-wheeled drivers sound their little hooters as they manouvre through the lines of cars: beep-beep, bip-bip-bip, beep-beep-beep-beeeeeeep and the cars REPLY. Yes! It's true! Car hooters are much louder and fuller than the tinny little scooter horns, so it's quite cool to hear the resounding BEEP-BEEP, BIP-BIP-BIP, BEEP-BEEP-BEEP-BEEEEEEEP reply.

I am amazed that in this crisis, people find the time to play eccentric little honking games in tunnels. Especially if you take into account how much bad feeling there usually is between the 'scoots' and the cars :-) People are weird.

yoga diaries

A day in the life of a non-union, non-work permitted, non-American actress hanging out in lalaland...When at all possible, my day starts out with a Yoga class in Runyon Canyon. These classes are offered 7 days a week, outdoors, at the foot of the canyon where everyone and anyone (celebs included) come to walk their dogs (and their bottoms) up the hillside and back down again. There are various trails of varying degrees of difficulty one can take and all are rewarded by a spectacular view of the city and surrounds.

I'm using 'spectacular' here in both a positive and negative sense (regardless of whether this is a grammatical possibility). After strong winds or rain, the view is spectacular as you take in the Hollywood sign, the sprawl from Los Feliz to Hollywood, Century City, Beverly Hills and even a glimpse of the ocean in the distance. The sunlight reflects off the buildings and the hum of sirens is like the faint buzzing of hyperactive mosquitoes.

On other dry, sunshine-filled days (like today) the prized view is spectacularly bad. Pollution and smog as far as the eye can see. In fact, the eye cannot see very far at all and those happily sun-reflecting buildings are all but invisible behind the dirt in the air! This is no exaggeration - you cannot see the Century City high-rises for the smog. It's SO depressing - especially when you're out on a hike and that is what you're looking at. In these conditions, terminating one's respiration would be an appropriate, albeit life-threatening, decision - either way you lose. It amazes me that Los Angelenos are so patently aware of how dirty their city is... yet NO-ONE wants to give up the SUV....