The Strange and Fascinating Land of SoCal

In California, its common to talk about SoCal (LA, San Diego, Santa Barbara) and NorCal (San Francisco and the entire Bay Area, Sacramento, Santa Cruz). It's also common to turn your nose up on the one from the other. SoCal is all about traffic jams and Hollywood, Butox and silicon, beaches and bimbos. NorCal is about Silicon Valley geeks, hipsters and the great Smug Alert.

Long before I first went to California, I asked my friend Jackie about why NoCal was called NoCal and not MidCal, since there's about as much coast to the North of San Francisco as to the South.
"Honey", she said, "for us, San Francisco is where California ends. North of that, its all one huge dope field".

I'd spent my entire time on the west in 2007 in NoCal (and some weeks of it in the huge dope field too), and the wanderlust for the new and strange was now strong on me. I had to get down to SoCal and see the real California, not perpetually cold and foggy San Francisco, which has about as much beach-and-palm-tree culture as New York. As an added, powerful incentive, the fabulous Stefanie (whose room I stayed in San Francisco) was in LA/Hermosa Beach for the summer, taking care of her ailing grandmother.

So I worked my way through the 4th of July and took a Friday off in early August to drive down the coast on the old Highway 1, through the fire-ravaged Big Sur coast, where I camped the night, and then down further south through the border town of San Luis Obispo, and then I was there in the land of all of our collective dreams: SoCal. And driving into Hollywood was an eerie feeling, like I'd come back to a place that I knew so well, even though I'd never been there before. This was the America as its seen in movies and on TV.

I went down down laden with the prejudices all NorCalians have (even the part time NorCalians): it will be an one giant traffic-snarled metropolis and a bunch of superficial air heads working for Hollywood. And LA was a giant traffic-snarled metropolis, but I loved it. It reminded me of Johannesburg: vast, sprawling, in-your-face with bumper-to-bumper traffic across 5-lane freeways at midnight, full of ostentatious wealth. Except it had a giant beach, and lots and lots of palm trees.


It was on the giant beach that Stefanie introduced me to SoCal beach culture in the form of the amazing Hermosa Beach Volleyball Tournament. It went something like this: dress up in (skimpy) costumes to form Beach Volleyball teams. Be pretty good at what you do at the beginning, but drink as much as you can in the course of the day, illicitly, like beer from plastic bike bottles or vodka infused into pineapple, or tiny, innocent-looking bottles of sake, so by the end of the day your team can hardly stand, let alone hit a ball across the net. Spice the event up further by introducing penalties by which your team can make up losses; penalties range from 'bum crack beer' (pour beer down the back of your team mates and drink it from between their legs) through 'mayonnaise madness' (squirt mayonnaise all over your body and roll in the sand) to 'girls making out in the sand', this last one ultimately destroying the neighboring volleyball team because all the male members forget their game and stumbled over, fascinated, to have a look. It was hilarious.

(Stefanie and I just watched)