What a hectic thing to do about this moving away. Departing to another side of the globe, that is America, consumed all my energy since the very start. There included the completing of travel papers, the family frenzy, that packing and cargo handling, all that long hour flight of a twenty hour endurance plus transit stop over, and at last the arrival at the LAX, Los Angeles international airport. Welcome to America.

That was the last week of October. Several weeks now living here, I am trying hard to grasp everything the soonest possible in order to adapt and orientate. Even to overcome the total jetlag of 14-hour time difference. Winter is soon coming here, but considering the living experience in a minus ten Celsius temperature before, the family is doing just fine. It is now about living in this city of everyone-has-to-get-a-car for commuting, the second largest in the United States.

But, what we imagine and what is real may not always congruent. Los Angeles, you say, the city brought to the world mostly through movies portraying glamour and glitter, may just be an ordinary place, depending on the angle you see it in actuality.

True that palm trees are standing high all over the city, exactly like the movies. A good angle from several parts of the city will also entertain us with that excessively popular image of Hollywood. Yes, those nine big, white capital letters ‘Hollywood’ arranged at that celebrity hill confronting the city, fit nicely to satisfy the gap between the mind image and the eventuality. Still, jokingly, the imaginary heroes or even real celebrities are not visible just about everywhere. That is why the message to the world should be: "beware O you the people of the world, what Hollywood gives may not what Hollywood embraces". It is just the movie.

Life goes on in Beverly Hills, Melrose or even at the Chinese Theater where premier shows being shown. But everything is just the regular, the usual. It is true that the Governor is a movie star, Arnold Schwazenegger, but he is not playing terminator in this state of California. He is maneuvering policy between party lines, compromising locals for support, and yes he won the second term at the election early this November. The Republican may lose at the national level, yet the Democrat is the local looser here. Arnold did admit that he "love[s] sequel". Remember the catchy expression: "I’ ll be back!" Congratulation Mr. Governor.

Back home in Indonesia this November, it was more about mass demonstration protesting the scheduled official visit of President George W. Bush. The glimpse shots reviewed by news channels really did bring a different feeling, some sort of disproportional perspective---the very feeling coined as the 'CNN effect'. While pundits in the US spurting bitter words of radical Islam and so on [one even goes further by comparing Islam to fascism], there came the contrast with the images of rallies rejecting Bush in Indonesia. Bush, however, admitted that such protest is nothing new for him and after a six hour visit then returned home through Hawaii. Yet, in overall, there stays this gap of mind: that all of us, the citizens of the world, do need to sit together, listen and understand one another, opting for the best. Then again, an exchange of visit is, for one thing, all about that.

Now in LA and joining the Angelinos, my question remains: what can possibly be the contribution, as minute as it could be, to bring the good and to shove away the bad. Mind you, LA is one place in America where the Indonesian community is the largest.

LA, Nov 20, 2006