Visiting Los Angeles, the world's largest city which also hosts Hollywood gave me quite a few surprises. First the amount of trash strewn along the road sides is amazingly high. For a moment I forgot whether I was in India or in the US. The next surprise was when I visited Artesia. Here the sights and sounds made me forget that I was in the US. The place is completely like India, full of Indian stores offering all conceivable products: jewelery, clothes (ethnic Indian), restaurants offering cuisines from all parts of India, temples and of course people of Indian origin attired mostly in traditional Indian outfits and some in Western clothes.
We had lunch at the Tirupathi Bhima's Restaurant and I don't know what to say. The ambiance and service is completely Indian. But that is where the Indianness stops. The food is atrociously expensive, $7.50 (approx Rs.300) for what is known as "Business Lunch". The food provided is something similar to the Rs.25 thali meal that most fast-food restaurants serve in Bangalore. And I would say the rice used back home in India is much better quality than served here. The food is priced 10 times its price in India and yet doesn't even meet half its standards in taste and quality.
This is not the first time I have been disappointed with Indian restaurants in the US but I have decided to make this the last time. After eating at the Tirupathi Bhimas in Artesia I made a decision not to visit any desi restaurant during my stay in the US. Not only is the price atrociously expensive but the quality is abysmally low. If I eat too much in these places I will forget what original Indian food is like and feel alienated when (if) I return to India.
Here are pictures of some temples I saw in and around Artesia and Pioneer Blvd.
The Sanatana Dharma temple is located right next to the Swami Narayan temple and it looks like a church taken over and converted into a temple. We didn't have time to enter inside any of these places of worship so I had to content myself by just photographing them. It is a little gladdening to see this happening because historically in India it has always been that Hindu temples were destroyed by invaders to make way for building mosques and churches. Here at least Hindus as immigrants have paid for and bought/ rented these places to create places of worship. That is the unique nature of Hindus.
While driving around we also visited a temple in Northridge, this temple is built in a strange shape like an igloo, is apparently a makeshift one. The real temple is under construction in an adjacent site and will be a grand traditional style building.
