The rambling metropolis of Los Angeles sprawls across the thousand square miles of a great desert basin, knitted together by an intricate network of congested freeways between the ocean and the snowcapped mountains. Its colorful melange of shopping malls, palm trees and swimming pools is both mildly surreal and startlingly familiar, thanks to the celluloid self-image that it has spread all over the world. While it has its fine-art museums, California cuisine and a few old-fashioned urban plazas, what people really come to Los Angeles for is to experience the city that has come to epitomize the American Dream – the fantasy worlds of Disneyland and Hollywood, as well as the gilded opulence of Beverly Hills and Malibu. __
