Personal Narrative: Going To LA

1. I grew up in San Francisco in an area where the majority of residents had lives there for generations. In my building all of my neighbors were older than my parents and a few were even older than my grandparents. Mrs. Garcia was a woman who lived in the apartment under us. She was in her 90s and had lost most of her hearing by the time I was eight but she would still complain that my brother and I were making too much noise. We rarely played inside and were generally quiet as to not disturb the neighbors so how she was able to hear us well enough for it to be a disturbance is still a mystery. She would constantly have old game shows blasting I remember hearing Monty Hall’s voice every night and being conditioned to know that meant it was …show more content…
Going to LA is something my family does fairly often. Recently circumstance had it so my brother and I would have to stay in LA for three day before my older sister and her husband arrived. We had made the mistake of booking our hotel online without any knowledge of the neighborhood and only a select number of photographs. The price was low and the photos seemed okay so we didn’t question. As we drove through the neighborhood which was a fairly decent middle class neighborhood in Santa Monica we had unwittingly passed our motel twice due to our disbelief that the run down business was the same one we saw online. We pulled into the parking lot which had a makeshift fence made of cider blocks that were stacked on top of each other as we approached the check in counter a man who looked like a drugged out version of our cousin Michael approached the desk. As we were let into what was supposed to be our room we immediately noticed that instead of two queen beds there were twin beds. The towels in the bathroom were frayed, mismatched and looked like they came from someone’s house. The bathroom door didn’t close and one of the bead spreads had cigarette burns. Within ten minutes of being in the room we turned around and decided we couldn’t stay there. The motel manager demanded we show him what was wrong with the room and as we took him through a tour of of the disaster that was our room he had little to offer but a few shrugs. Even after showing him our room he argued with us