LA

Los Angeles is about cars. You could easily spend a significantly greater amount of time in your car than in your two-thousand-dollar-or-more-a-month tiny apartment on the west side. It's about traffic. This basically turns out to run your life and it's the biggest reason why you'd end up doing almost everything you possible can (i.e. business, eating, make-up, etc.) in a frikkin automobile. It's about money. There is a significant amount of people who show they have lots of it with the ridiculously beautiful cars they spend so much time in while they're in traffic, as well as a bunch of restaurants, retailers, and grocery stores who make you pay a ton of money by jacking up the price just because thy have a cool name paired with a pretty logo.
A lot of people like to make LA about the beach, the sun, the movie stars, the nightlife, and/or the big buildings. The truth about all that is, the actual closest coastline to the city of Los Angeles is disgusting and probably ridden with meningitis. The sun isn't always out, and if it was we wouldn't have the constant lovely climate that we do. Instead we'd be in the valley, also known as LA County's own Sahara Desert. The movie stars look like crap in real life, and they would appreciate it if you'd pretend they weren't movie stars at least until they're out of ear shot. The nightlife is good, but you experience it only one night a week max. Unless you're a movie star, a young-rich-unemployed-person, or a full on alcoholic. And finally the big buildings you always see on film are actually in east LA, downtown possibly the smog-iest part of town, where many business people work and then come back to the west side anyway. That's the thing though, nothing is generally ever as it seems. And while this could sound like a very cynical diatribe it's not. I love LA. It's the people, really. For instance, while everyone drives like complete douche in Beverly Hills you have to respect the fact that they're driving a beautiful maserati like a douche. And while we all bitch about the traffic every day of our lives, we don't move. Why don't we move? Because LA is amazing despite the traffic. So we deal with it because we know that at the exit after next is an awesome store, restaurant, friend, etcetera that we know of solely because of LA's amazing nature. Mostly though, while LA is about cars, what we tend to forget (because we're awesomely selfish Angelidans) is that the people in the cars are the best part. The people that sometimes go with you just so you can use the carpool lane, the foreign people with very attractive accents, the entertainment people who tend to be quite generous with their connections, the homeless people with their cool signs, the restaurant people and the delicious food they serve, and the people you find to hang out with and choose to live with. There are many douches in LA it's true. But there are also amazing people among them, and these people combined with the amazing nature of the city make everything, even traffic, worthwhile.