Wednesday, October 11, 2006
Grade 12 Place Writing by Dev Darshan Kaur
The Grade 12 English class was given an assignment to write about place, appealing to the five senses. It could be a simple description, or a description as part of a story. Here is one of the results from Dev Darshan Kaur:
As my mother turns the car on, I wait for the digital clock to light up, revealing the time. 11:45. At least I don’t have anything to do tomorrow, I think yawning. I pull my sweater on, prepared for the drive home with the windows down. Early summer nights in Los Angeles still seem chilly to me after the at minimum 100 degree weather in India .
The car is parallel parked uphill on a curved dead-end road, irregular parking being one of the downsides to visiting anyone in the Hollywood Hills. It takes several minutes to pull out of the parking spot, but the street is empty. The house we are parked in front of has roses growing in the yard, and by now the almost sickly sweet smell has permeated the entire car.
As we drive south the houses dwindle in size until they are replaced by apartment buildings. Turning onto Highland Ave. I’m surprised by the amount of traffic congesting the streets so late at night. What should be a ten minute drive has inevitably turned into a twenty-five minute excursion through a world of unequaled superficiality and unprecedented vapidity.
Billboards accost you at intervals of twenty feet and often display borderline pornographic images almost completely unrelated to the subject of their advertisement. Loud music from a multitude of cars blends in a cacophony of sound. Moving at a pace that would humble even the slowest snail, the cigarette smoke drifting in the window makes me nostalgic for the intoxicating aroma of the roses we’ve left behind. Everything here seems intensified. Lights are brighter, noises are louder, smells are more pungent.
The influx of traffic peaks as we reach Hollywood Blvd. The intersection boasts both a large mall and the Ripley’s Believe it or Not museum, as well as the Kodak Theater, familiar to millions of Americans as the home of American Idol. As we pass through this epitome of pop culture the traffic thins, and our driving takes on a more purposeful characteristic. With freedom of movement we abandon our short-lived lives as sightseers and revert back to our natural roles as city natives, without ever having left, I feel the relief of coming home.
The Grade 12 English class was given an assignment to write about place, appealing to the five senses. It could be a simple description, or a description as part of a story. Here is one of the results from Dev Darshan Kaur:
As my mother turns the car on, I wait for the digital clock to light up, revealing the time. 11:45. At least I don’t have anything to do tomorrow, I think yawning. I pull my sweater on, prepared for the drive home with the windows down. Early summer nights in Los Angeles still seem chilly to me after the at minimum 100 degree weather in India .
The car is parallel parked uphill on a curved dead-end road, irregular parking being one of the downsides to visiting anyone in the Hollywood Hills. It takes several minutes to pull out of the parking spot, but the street is empty. The house we are parked in front of has roses growing in the yard, and by now the almost sickly sweet smell has permeated the entire car.
As we drive south the houses dwindle in size until they are replaced by apartment buildings. Turning onto Highland Ave. I’m surprised by the amount of traffic congesting the streets so late at night. What should be a ten minute drive has inevitably turned into a twenty-five minute excursion through a world of unequaled superficiality and unprecedented vapidity.
Billboards accost you at intervals of twenty feet and often display borderline pornographic images almost completely unrelated to the subject of their advertisement. Loud music from a multitude of cars blends in a cacophony of sound. Moving at a pace that would humble even the slowest snail, the cigarette smoke drifting in the window makes me nostalgic for the intoxicating aroma of the roses we’ve left behind. Everything here seems intensified. Lights are brighter, noises are louder, smells are more pungent.
The influx of traffic peaks as we reach Hollywood Blvd. The intersection boasts both a large mall and the Ripley’s Believe it or Not museum, as well as the Kodak Theater, familiar to millions of Americans as the home of American Idol. As we pass through this epitome of pop culture the traffic thins, and our driving takes on a more purposeful characteristic. With freedom of movement we abandon our short-lived lives as sightseers and revert back to our natural roles as city natives, without ever having left, I feel the relief of coming home.
# posted by MPA Student Work @ 3:45 AM 
