The Hyperion Hotel.

Inspired by Allison's post on her apartment building, I decided to write a post on my apartment building, too. Since my building is a former hotel, I will henceforth refer to it as The Hyperion Hotel.

First off, I ended up with less than a day and a half to find an apartment somewhere in LA. Surprisingly, I did so, and with not a small amount of luck - it was the only building that was both priced as advertised and that didn't have, say, hordes of dead roaches in the kitchen when it was shown to me. I turned in a rental application only for this place, then left, not having the foggiest clue what I'd do if I didn't get accepted. Fortunately, I did, because as one will soon discover, The Hyperion is not very selective about their tenants.

So the Hyperion is old. 1920's old, and every once in a while, if the lighting is just right and you're at the perfect angle, you can almost get a glimpse of how awesome it must have been 80+ years ago. The rest of the time, however, the best way to describe it quite frankly is "falling apart." The first clue I had that it was in such a poor state came less than a week after I moved in, at which point the electricity went out. No big deal, right? It happened again, less than a week later, only this time it was only my apartment so I had to call the LA department of water and power and wait while they sent a repairman out to basically hit the electric meter until I got power back. (Literally. I had to show him where the meters were out back, so I watched him do it.) Not two weeks later, the hot water went out, just as I was about to dye my hair, as a previous blog post details.

Then there was the time a housing authority official had to inspect the apartments to make sure that we had working heat, working cold and hot water, and no overcrowding or other "unsuitable living conditions". Fortunately, my apartment seemed to be overlooked, probably because the management could assure her that it was only me in the apartment and I was mechanically inclined enough to not need a government official to help me determine if everything was in working order. However, the upside of someone having apparently reported our building for "unsuitable living conditions" (because I later discovered it's actually not routine for housing inspectors to randomly inspect apartment buildings) was that everything got fixed, fast. Even if it was only the blinds that had broken, I don't think it ever took more than 24 hours for something to get repaired. The downside is that there is near constant construction noise starting promptly at 8 AM, when quiet hours end, but no discernible improvement to the state of the building.

More recently, I found yellow liquid in the bathtub, and assumed my cat had decided to be either very dumb or very smart and decided to pee in there. Upon going to clean it up, however, I discovered that it was not cat urine, but water, tinted yellow from mold, that had somehow dripped into the bathtub. EW. Since then, I have regularly lysoled my bathroom nearly to death.

The Hyperion also has lots of insects. In fact, when Allison visited, she informed me that one particular species of insect was actually a cockroach. Icky. All this time I had thought they were beetles or Junebugs... fortunately, Orion likes to show off his hunting prowess by diligently stalking and killing upwards of 95% of all scurrying insects that venture into my apartment. Cats are good for more than just rodent control! (and I don't doubt for a second that adventurous rodents might have crawled into this place had they not smelled a cat and thought better of it) However, I've had a recent fruitfly infestation - after spending the last two days inexplicably crowding around my bathroom mirror, they've moved to Orion's food and water dishes. I guess they like shiny things?

Last, but most definitely not least, are the tenants. Some of them are OK, like the quiet middle-aged lady with the even quieter 15-year-old German Shepherd rescue, or "Cloud", who literally looks like he walked straight out of the Final Fantasy video games, or The Hipster Couple that lives upstairs on the other side. Others are not so OK. The tenants upstairs seem to entertain themselves by dropping bricks on the ceiling, which cause some of the lightbulbs in my light fixture to flick on and off. Some other tenants seem to be dealing marijuana. Still others have children whom they allow to play with recorders, vuvuzelas, whistles, kazoos, or other such noisemakers after quiet hours. Another constantly leaves things in the hallway.

Then there are the tenants across the hallway-ish. They're the awful ones. They frequently display a blatant disregard for quiet hours, sometimes by blasting obscene music so loudly I can hear it clearly in my room at 3 AM on a weeknight, and other times by having screaming domestic disputes, which are only not reported to the LAPD because the angry person always gets locked out of the apartment until he, or perhaps she, goes and finds a place to sober up and cool down. On top of all that, they got a pit bull puppy that has pooped all over the lobby, and tends to squeak loudly and pathetically at various times. They leave their trash to rot in the recycle bin in the lobby all week, and in general are some of the most abhorrent, awful people that I have ever had the misfortune of sharing a building with.

The worst experience ever living in this building, and the one that made me decide I had to move when my lease was up, was The Gun Incident. One night, as I was lying in bed trying to get to sleep, I heard another loud argument - apparently upstairs or maybe in the lobby? Fortunately, more distant than the hallway outside my room at any rate - and I was tuning it out as normal, when there was running and someone screaming "He's got it!" Within seconds, two shots rang out (from a .22 handgun if I had to guess) and there was more screaming and running. Someone else was actually alarmed enough to call the police to our building, but when they came to investigate, nobody answered their doors. I slept in the bathtub that night, as there was only a thin wooden door between my head and whatever was going on in the hallways outside, and I didn't trust the walls much more. The police ended up in our building at least once more in the following week, further confirming my decision that this was not a good place to live.

The strangest experience, however, happened just last night. I came home from class to find one of my belts hanging from my doorknob. Now, nobody in my building knows me very well, and I don't know if I've ever worn that belt in public, and I didn't think I'd even brought it to LA, and had definitely never possibly left it in the laundry room or anything like that, so I don't have the slightest clue how it escaped my apartment. Nevertheless, it does indeed appear to be the exact same belt that had come with the black skirt that I had bought to wear to my grandfather's funeral. Maybe there are some supernatural tenants living here, after all...

So, Los Angeles is COLD?

As the title implies, I went to LA recently, and was quite surprised at the temperature. Everything I had heard indicated that it would be something like 105 F outside, but it was down to nearly 60 at night, which meant that the heat in my hotel room actually went on to keep it up to 72 all night long!

Getting to LA was not a pleasant experience - the flight was delayed nearly 2 hours because of bad weather, which caused at least half the passengers to realize we'd miss connections. While people were boarding the plane, the flight attendants were giving the people in business class free drinks, and I had to resist complaining that ALL of the (adult) passengers could use some free alcohol at the moment. As it was, I missed my connecting flight, and had to stay the night in Atlanta. I got a hotel online for cheaper than the discount vouchers the airline offered me would've made it, because by then it was 11 PM and I was tired and fed-up and needing a shower and just generally not in a mood to sleep in the airport.

Now, sleeping in the airport wouldn't have been that bad of an idea, since I wouldn't have had to go through security again. If you ever fly out of ATL or LAX, be warned that security takes an obscenely long time, in part because they have no "experienced traveler" or "family" lines - instead of getting in line behind people with flip-flops and no jackets and only one carry-on item, you're also stuck behind the people who are dragging carseats and strollers through to be gate-checked.

So, I got in around noon and took 2 buses and 3 trains to go apartment-hunting. I don't know what everyone's objections to LA's public transportation system are, because the metro was spacious and clean (although it doesn't go to very many places) and the buses were everywhere. OK, maybe the fact that if you don't live near a metro stop you have to take 2 buses just to get to those 3 trains, but that doesn't faze me.

Apartment-hunting was ridiculous. The first place I managed to go claimed to have a studio available for $650/mo, but when I actually got there the lady whined about "forced advertising" and could only offer me an efficiency (bachelor, ie, no kitchen/only a kitchenette) for about $800/mo. Another place had dead, recently exterminated roaches all over the place, and the manager said she was going to exterminate again to make sure there were no survivors and then clean them up, but it was still gross. All in all, I only saw 2 places that were priced as advertised and one of them was a little more expensive and far away from the metro stop for my taste, but when I walked into one unit in another building it was like it almost screamed at me "You're home!" So, naturally, I applied for that one.

Advising wasn't bad, and I finally got to see the campus where I was going to grad school. There wasn't an interview, and I couldn't make it out for a campus visit, but I applied and I was accepted, so I took them up on it, sight unseen. It's not a bad campus, a bit bigger than I'm used to but I think I won't mind the size in the absence of snow.

I made a couple fun discoveries: A friend of mine who works in the entertainment industry took me around Hollywood, and among other things showed me the Amoeba music store, which is absolutely AMAZING! I saw movies and music there that I've never seen in stores before. I was also taking a bus that went along Wilshire Blvd when I noticed a big polluted-looking pond thing with a statue of a dying mammoth in it. Until then, I hadn't made the connection between the La Brea tar pits and the various things named "La Brea" in that section of LA, but I had to get there and check it out. It turned out to be pretty cool, but if you walk in the grass and get water splashed on your legs, you might end up with tiny flecks of tar on your legs, which fortunately weren't too difficult to wash/rub/pull off.

Anyways, fortunately I managed to return from all of this successful at everything I wanted to do, and not really jet-lagged, and without having to deal with flight delays of more than 15 minutes. I think I love this city... only, seriously, 61 degrees is almost intolerably freezing as far as I'm concerned.