L.A. by bike

It takes approximately an hour to bike from my parents' house to UCLA and about 45 minutes to bike back. The last stretch to campus is a significant series of hills, conquerable only with the knowledge that the first thing to greet me after a day in the library will be a long spell of coasting down through shady glades on side streets while parades of automobiles sweat it out on the major arteries. On my rides to and fro today I did notice legions of Prius drivers and scores of buses - part of the "The Nation's Largest Clean Air Fleet" - so something must be afoot in the Concrete Jungle. The biggest secret here, though, is that L.A. is actually a pretty perfect city to bike in. The roads are very wide and obsessively well kept. Automobile drivers treat you with exaggerated caution - at least on the small roads, which is where you really ought to be anyway.

A friend of mine who recently moved to L.A. from Boston remarked that here, since no one can really talk about the weather, they talk about the traffic - how it's doing, its currents and its flows. The worst thing a person can do here is interrupt the flow of traffic; all else could be forgiven, which is important to keep in mind as a cycling commuter here.

I spent most of the day in the Arts Library, a rather small, uninspired nook in the Public Policy building, but I finished by making some photocopies at Powell Library, across the great lawn from Royce Hall. This is one of the most wonderful university buildings I have ever come across, and every time I am in this part of the campus, I'm reminded how beautiful UCLA is, even when most of its buildings strike me as banal 60s-style bunkers or contemporary glass boxes. You don't really come here to look at the architecture - most of it is blissfully tucked within and hidden by groves of eucalyptus - and in those areas where you can't help but notice it, the university intelligently shows off its absolutely best side.