No expensive airplane fare, or alarm clocks! In L.A.: We're sleeping in for a tourist-like summer.

Instead of steeping yourself deep into your ordinary, air-conditioned dwellings, why not step into a new dimension of Los Angeles reality—pointing your feet into tourist territory?

Poking your head down Ocean Boulevard or Second Street will give you a hint: Tourists are already here and will take over.

“It’s a party. Let’s join them!” shouts your traveling heart.

Strap on your walking shoes, smooth a creamy one of those SPF 30 potions and equip your abdomen (fanny pack, anyone?) with a comfy kind of collection of cameras, notebooks and maps.
Transforming yourself into a tourist to your own city may be just the right kind of adventure amid the bitterness of a headline-popular, ruffled economy, anyway.

High ticket prices in consequence to higher fuel prices? Charging an additional $25 or $50 for an extra checked bag? Having to pass through suspicious eyes at the metal detectors, and barefooted? Coping with daylong delays? And then encountering a rotten news that there will be no more complimentary meals on board?

Skip it!

Apparently, airlines are facing financial hardships like many others, but they still expect us to sign up for a reward-racking credit card issued on their credit? No logic there. What’s a more sound logic: avoid the airports and stay local.

Ouf.


IT'S NOT UP THERE. There's more summer magic when you stay grounded at home. Photo by Barbara Navarro.

How to be a tourist in your own city…

1. Get Lost

Without losing sense of where you are, you may never truly achieve the complete tourist experience. Get in your car and make turns onto streets you’ve never used before. Explore a new path. Keep going until you find some place completely unfamiliar, but appealing, like an indie theatre or breathtaking coastline, and take pictures of the new things you observe.

When stopping for a rest, be sure to ask somebody for details of where you are. (You can start a conversation with a mysterious stranger at a coffee shop to serve this purpose, even.) For fun, change your name, for example, from Jack to Giacomo.

2. Timing is Everything

Slip into a new time zone (think seeing the sights of Long Beach’s famous art deco buildings), or halt time altogether (think spending a day in a coffeehouse reading your favorite books).

Whatever you do, don’t let too much time go to waste, but instead opt to take public transportation that’ll allow for a tourist favorite downtime activity: people-watching.

3. Go Out and Play

By 7 p.m., you’ve watched the sunset from a spot on Mulholland Drive. By 8 p.m., you’ve had dinner at one of Lindsay Lohan’s ex-boyfriend’s restaurants (Pink Taco) in Century City. By 9 p.m., you’ve caught Will Farrell exiting from his Hollywood premiere somewhere in Westwood. What else can you do? Become your own star. Dress to the nines and join tanned Euro swanksters in line at ‘it’ clubs dotting Hyperion Boulevard in Silverlake.

It’s summer. It’s hot. It’s time to sleep, eat, dream and disappear. Become your own person, or become someone new. You’re in Los Angeles, so there is a lot of legroom to leap out into “the unknown.”

Yard sales, bargain binges for the young and posh! From glossy Paris to our trimmed lawns.

The phenomenon of the yard sale—also known as a “garage sale” or “rummage sale" or, its modified version, a "sidewalk sale"—first emerged in our neighborhoods. And now, the kiddies of yesteryear are hosting their own yard sales. And these are, to be clear and precise, rather exclusive yard sales easily described as over-the-top.

Culture icon to the young and juicy fashion and music scene of Los Angeles, the sleepy-faced blog star, Cory Kennedy, has nearly single-handily lured the appeal of yard sales back into the mainstream.

A magazine camera crew followed her to Paris last month, in fact, to document bubbly guests with French accents musing over Kennedy’s out-of-date, nearly-new designer dresses and imported robot toys.

“It’s so Hollywood,” gushes one glowing shopper in the video.

Another young girl is shown holding tight onto a nondescript beanie cap, and then, with a cool expression, announces its price of 300 Euro.

The setting adds a twinkle to the scene. It seems perfect for high-dollar spending sprees, even if the goods are second-hand and are sold in what seems to be the bosom of a huge, Parisian tree. The surroundings, however, are picturesque panoramas of tall, cream-colored buildings with teeny, trademark-European windows.

It’s a sunny day at Kennedy’s Paris yard sale. Customers are lined up, and the cashier, Kennedy’s photographer boyfriend, The Cobrasnake, is happily flaunting to the camera the colorful bouquet of Euro bills he’s collecting from the shopping fans. The yard sale, he says, will be coming to a city near you.



So, are these kinds of soirees or, uh, yard sales really yard sales?

There are plenty of twists and fun elements borrowed from an otherwise swanky lifestyle, that it’s only a matter of computable time before these newly defined, new age yard things get christened with a modern, catchy term. But, for now, they are yard sales.

And the idea is smart, and it’s practical in an economy where consumers are “unsettled by continuing recession fears,” explains New York Times fashion writer Ruth La Ferla in a current report about high-end shoppers seeking spending relief at consignment shops.

The situation is unique.

Whereas our parents would prepare the details of their Saturday morning bargain retailing with posters, telling all their friends and neighbors, and then negotiating good deals, the evolution of yard sales dictate that all you need are really nice, expensive things to sell. And some sweet lemonade for the guests!

That’s exactly what art group ISM Community advertised in their sleek ads leading up to their Saturday evening “Garage Sale,” adding some color to the occasion.

“We will be serving lemonade and beer. Bring your iPod and share some songs,” said the signs. Other details suggested the goal of the night was a “fundraising effort to support future community projects.”

Lined up against the gallery walls inside Koos Art Center in the Downtown arts district, where gallery space is shared with the ISM Community, art pieces ranged in size, pizzazz and price—the most expensive item going for $5,000.

“I just wanted to do something different for the art scene,” said Kevin Staniec, founder and executive creative director of ISM.

I say, the new age of poshy yard sales has arrived to Long Beach!