Gift Ideas for Friends and Family

As publisher of Curating Los Angeles, I receive countless emails promoting events around the southland. Many of the messages at this time of year are holiday related and of those, a significant number extol the virtues of one gift or another offered up by a bevy of local businesses, museums, and schools.

This year my family agreed to limit holiday gift giving to the children in our lives. The adults just want to spend time together and enjoy the season in a less commercial fashion. That decision has greatly reduced the amount of time we’ll all need to spend searching for just the right gifts, as well as save everyone money.

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Reyner Banham Loves Los Angeles – Esotouric Explores Route 66 and South LA

Tour companies that take you to conventional, well known LA area destinations such as Grauman’s Chinese Theatre, the Hollywood Walk of Fame, Rodeo Drive, 3rd Street Promenade and Universal City, just to name a few, are a dime a dozen. While there is nothing wrong with any of those attractions and I enjoy visiting them myself, there is so much more to greater Los Angeles than those popular sites. You just have to know where to look and who to spend some time with to gain a more nuanced appreciation for the city and its environs.

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Esotouric’s East Side Babylon Bus Tour - Exploring Some of L.A.'s Most Horrifying Forgotten Crimes

I’m always on the lookout for opportunities to spend time with other people who love LA as much as I do. One of the best ways to find these kindred spirits is to take a tour with them, and that’s exactly what I did several weeks ago. On Saturday afternoon, December 11th, I participated in a bus tour called East Side Babylon, run by Esotouric, a local tour company. The excursion introduced me to a facet of local history that I was largely unfamiliar with; namely, local crime tales from communities east of the Los Angeles river, including East LA and the cities of Montebello and Commerce.

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