Week 6

 

Week 6: Pasadena 

A location over 30 miles away from UCLA

This week as I headed to the Rose Bowl to watch the Bruins play, I decided to do a little exploration of Pasadena itself. I was in the area deemed South Pasadena and explored the street called Fair Oaks Drive. I encountered many different kinds of diversity on this street. It's slew of ethically diverse restaurants suggested that the area was home to people who asociated with many different backgrounds. Photographed here are pictures of Thai, Caribbean and Italian restaurants, all within a few blocks of each other.

I was able to interact with the restaurant owner of the place I dined, which was a hip Thai place called Saladang Song. She informed me that she herself, and most of her staff were all Thai. It was easy to see how proud the women was of her restaurant, a dream she was able to give life to through tireless effort. Although she was a racial minority, she was able to rise to a higher class through the avenues of Capitalism. She had resembled the America dream in it's original form.

After talking and dining with the Thai woman, I was able to observe social difference on other levels. Although affluence was still observable by the cars passing by, I was able to see a broad spectrum of classes. While walking through a park titled "Central Park" I observed many homeless people. So many in fact, that my mother become uncomfortable and requested to leave. I found this interesting that members of others classes could become uncomfortable by the mere presence of individuals who found themselves living on the streets. This uncomfortable feeling is born primarily out of a fear for one's safety. Yet despite the close proximity of the two classes, there was no interaction. This made me wonder if it was simply civil inattention at play, or if this was an example of Robert E. Park's observation of “The City is a mosaic of little worlds which touch but do

not interpenetrate.”