Remember those hiking boots I was talking about earlier? I needed them for the first part of my friend group's spring break trip — hiking the Grand Canyon over three days. It was hard, but really fun and breathtakingly beautiful. After we were done with that though, we moved on to the next phase of our trip: we drove ten hours to Los Angeles up from Tuscon, and stayed there for four more days at a friend's grandparents' condo (they were out of the country). I thought my friend was rich (her brother was getting tutoring for something when we stopped by her house, and she has five TVs!), but I saw some status symbols in LA that I'd be hard-pressed to find anywhere else.
On one day of adventuring we decided to go for a drive through Beverley Hills. The amount of class and snootiness was enough to make some of my friends visibly uncomfortable. We passed an exorbitant amount of fancy cars — Porches, Bugattis, MacLarens, Astin Martins, Bentleys, Rolls Royces — they were all there. We saw three Tesla Model S cars in less than a minute. That's more than I've seen in Baltimore in an entire year. The houses that we saw were basically hotels or miniature palaces, but those were only the ones we saw. For a large number of them, all we saw were fenced-in driveways; the houses were up high on hills and obscured by foliage. These are what Paul Fussell calls the "rich out-of-sight," those so rich that they find others gawking at their wealth a nuisance rather than an ego booster. We didn't have much interaction other than that, but I thought it was a neat experience.
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