Hello and welcome to my blog!
My first time in LA was on a four-day trip with my family in 2007. The fascination with this city began with pop culture and movies. Shows like Laguna Beach and The Hills, showing picture-perfect streets, sweeping aerial shots of LA, and palm trees against the orange sunset only solidified my dream of moving here. Another corny movie really close to my heart is Crossroads, in which Britney Spears and her friends, Zoe Saldana and Taryn Manning, embark on a road trip to LA from a small town in Louisiana to make their dreams come true.
I was born in Manhattan, New York and grew up in Madrid, Spain. My mother is from the Dominican Republic, and my father is from Spain. In addition to this, due to my father’s job, I lived for short periods of time in Mexico City and Brazil during my childhood and adolescence. My whole family is scattered across the world. You could say we’ve all been bitten by the Travel Bug.
So many of my memories growing up involved being on a plane. After all, my first plane ride was when I was three months old, when my family and I were visiting Spain for the holidays from New York. Other places I frequently visited were the Dominican Republic and Japan, where I went with my family for three summers in a row.
Although I’ve never had plans of becoming an actor, I always knew I wanted to work in entertainment. Every time I was in Mexico, I had the “privilege” of having cable TV, which was something I didn’t have in Spain. I remember binge watching shows like Cribs, The Hills, and the good old mid-2000’s days of Disney Channel sitcoms and original movies.
In September 2015, I finally made my lifelong dream come true and moved to LA from Madrid straight after college in order to pursue a career in Entertainment Public Relations. The years that followed, I had gigs that entailed working for a publicist, a Hollywood celebrity reporter and celebrity event planners during award season. While those jobs were really good training and gave me a first-hand account of the ins and outs of celebrity PR, I knew in my heart that I didn’t see myself doing that every day for the rest of my life.
Having been such a huge fan of The Hills, I realized that this overhyped image of LA was just another idealized Hollywood creation. There’s no denying that there are many beautiful parts of LA, but there are just as many humble or lackluster areas even from one street to the next. This also applies to celebrity culture. While many people in the entertainment industry are insanely talented, many others are just insane. It’s fascinating how media and society see celebrity status as an element of worship. Attending red carpet events and meeting celebrities has given me a first-hand lesson that not everything that glitters is gold. Although I still follow pop-culture, I now see the difference between what goes on behind the scenes and what the world sees through rose-tinted glasses.
After a few years of living here, it never ceases to amaze me how I still keep discovering new places every month — which is why the idea of this blog was a no-brainer. I created MarianaInLA as a means to chronicle my discoveries and experiences in the city.
I’d like to give a big thank you to my teacher from one of my marketing classes at UCLA. He was the one who made the blog an assignment during the semester! Who knew that the idea of this blog would start as a class assignment? At first, I was terrified by the thought of it. “I have nothing interesting to say,” I remember saying to myself as I racked my brain, trying to find something people would find worth reading. Then I thought, “Why not make a blog about my discoveries in LA?”
LA can be pretty overwhelming given the immensity and the sprawling layout of the city, and it takes a certain kind of person to venture out from the comfort of their neighborhood. I’ve met people who rarely leave their neighborhood, and if they do, it’s a drag because they hate to drive. Not to say that I don’t get fed up with my daily commute sometimes, but I love leisurely drives to different cities like Pasadena or Glendale, where I get to discover hidden gems that are not found in most LA tourist guides and blogs.
In this blog, I put my research skills to the test to find the most inconspicuous places in LA.
If you live here, I hope this blog will inspire you to further enjoy this city, and I invite you to join me on my LA journey. If you don’t live here, I hope you enjoy my non-LA related posts like beauty and skincare, and hopefully, this blog will serve you as a guide if you decide to visit LA in the future!
