The J-TAC

Issue date: 3/27/08 Section: Opinion

Rebecca Hoeffner [Click to enlarge]

They say that there's no place like home. If the rest of the world is represented by Venice Beach in California, that statement is altogether too true.
I spent my spring break on a mission trip in the Los Angeles area with a group from the First Baptist Church of Stephenville renovating several churches. Before we started working on Monday, we spent Sunday afternoon at Venice Beach. You may recognize the name as the beach where the film "White Men Can't Jump" was filmed. It's without a doubt one of the biggest culture shocks I've ever experienced.
Usually when I go to the beach I prefer to spend my time in the sand and waves. If you've never played in the ocean, it's one of the best experiences ever. This year it was beyond freezing, especially down by the water, so my friends and I headed for the boardwalk.
The thing that stuck out the most at first was the variety of people walking up and down the strip of shops. Every size, shape, color, clothing style, personality was at the beach that day.
There were people selling every sort of thing along the way, and people performing all sorts of different stunts and shows. There was one man who had painted himself gold and standing very still with a bucket a few feet away that read, "turn me on with a donation." Whenever someone put money in his bucket, he would jump around and do a little dance and then go back to standing perfectly still. There was another girl just sitting on the sidewalk holding up a cardboard sign that read "I need money for weed." Well, at least she was honest.
I have never smelled so much marijuana in my entire life. People blatantly smoked it, and were campaigning for it to be legalized (although I wondered why it mattered if they were just going to smoke it out it the open anyway). When we first arrived I noticed a shop that announced custom glass-blowing, and I remembered that I had enjoyed watching it at another place a few years ago, so I rushed inside. When I started looking around it dawned on me that this particular glass blowing was to make things that I wasn't interested in being a part of. I squelched my instinct to run and tried to wander out of the shop as discreetly as possible.

Continued...

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