Travel Blog

Friday evening Hania and I and our Polish friends Magda and Ryszard went to downtown Hollywood for ice cream. The server was from Kaunas, and only I seemed to appreciate the unlikelihood of a Lithuanian scooping ice cream in Hollywood for her cross-border neighbors.

Dessert eaten, we took a stroll up to Hollywood Blvd., passing a Spanish, a Romanian and a Greek restaurant. Heading east on Hollywood we walked by an outdoor tacos place, a pizzeria, a Thai restaurant, a Caribbean restaurant, a Polish bar (PRL - Polska Republika Ludowa - with wonderful black-and-white photographs of 1960s Warsaw), and an Argentinian restaurant. We crossed the street and headed west, passing an Irish bar a Peruvian restaurant, a Chinese restaurant, a Turkish restaurant, and a "bar" decorated like a treehouse that served kava from Fiji.

That's 14 nationalities in the space of a few blocks. And there were more (I didn't have my notebook with me). What's interesting in this age of multi-culti is that Hollywood does this without any fuss, as if it's the most natural thing in the world for people to go downtown (a small downtown) and have a choice of over a dozen different cuisines.