Los Angeles is so lush. That's the only way to describe it. Austin is beautiful, but in a the way a tree covered plain is pretty. Austin isn't really a forest covered, it's overgrown scrub. The trees are pleasant to look at but, they don't contribute much but pecans and allergies.

LA is lush in the tropical sense of the word. There are flowers and fruit everywhere. Flowers bloom on every corner and trees pop out of the most bizarre places. The little gravel covered lot a block away from my apartment at Yucca and Las Palmas has passion fruit vines growing on the fence. Passion fruit on a fence, an you believe it? The little hotel right next to the lot has a rose garden and vegetable garden. Our building is surrounded by flowering bushes and orange trees. Everyone I know who owns a house has some sort of fruit tree in their yard, lemons, avacados, oranges. It amazes me.

And the palm trees.....every street has them it seems. LA is an oasis, an oasis created by man rather than by nature. This area was desert waste until us humans decided it would be cool place to live. The weather gods still think it's a desert. It almost never rains any substantial amount. The first week I was here, it rained the most it had rained all year. It rained two times in one week, like a monsoon on both occasions. Remember the national gegraphic specials about the desert in Africa (not the Sahara) that floods into a huge lake every year during the rainy season - which is like a whole day? That's how the weather is here.