Living my La La Land

November 2025

When La La Land (2016) came out, I forced my cousin (shoutout Shimu apu) to watch it with me in the theatre. She hated it. People left during intermission (musicals are not really the scene in Bangladesh, unfortunately). But I stayed the entire time. Something about the setting and the message hit me, and I knew my life was forever changed by that movie.

My friends all know I am a La La Land snob - a proud one, but a snob regardless. Since that day in 2016, I’ve watched the movie at least a hundred times, probably more. I’m a manifester and a dreamer at heart, and watching a film that so perfectly captures the feeling of having a pipe dream - and the dread that comes with it - spoke to me in a way that’s been ingrained in me ever since. But La La Land was also right about something else: pipe dreams aren’t really pipe dreams. Nothing is unattainable.

So, in a very similar pursuit of living out our dreams, my two best friends, Gareth and Marian, and I found ourselves in La La Land herself - Los Angeles - for Thanksgiving.

We were ready. It was LA, after all. An LA Spotify playlist and a way-too-detailed itinerary later, we landed. Of course, we had to start by playing “Party in the U.S.A.” at the airport - nothing like hearing “Hopped off the plane at LAX” while actually hopping off the plane at LAX. It felt like the opening scene of a movie, the three of us ready to take on a new city.

We arrived late our first night and made our way to Little Tokyo, where we had incredible ramen and robot-delivered gyoza. Wandering through the lights, eating ice cream in very much not ice-cream weather, I felt that familiar excitement build - the kind you get when you know something special is about to happen.

Our first full day was beach day, and we were ambitious: Santa Monica, the Venice Boardwalk, and Malibu. Santa Monica looked exactly like the pictures and movies I had grown up seeing. As I listened to “All I Wanna Do” by Sheryl Crow (shoutout Miles for the rec), we headed toward Venice. The Venice Boardwalk has always felt like the Barbie version of LA to me, and somehow it lived up to that image - people skating, running, dogs everywhere, perfect weather. This is LA, I kept thinking.

We ended the day in Malibu, where I had the worst chai of my life, but the view more than made up for it. The three of us walked along the beach for hours, eventually reaching the perfect spot to catch the sunset - a truly beautiful one. Afterward, we made our way back to the Santa Monica Pier, where the lights were blinding in the best way. We took pictures by the Route 66 sign, drank hot chocolate, and stood by the beach in the dark, talking about how surreal it was that this trip actually made it out of the group chat.

The next day was our “historical LA sites” day, which naturally meant starting at the Hollywood Walk of Fame. It was touristy, exactly as expected, but passing iconic spots like the TCL Chinese Theatre and the Dolby Theatre - places where I remembered watching actors do press for their movies when I was younger - made everything feel undeniably LA. We ordered from the secret menu at In-N-Out (very crowded, by the way) and caught glimpses of the Hollywood Sign from different angles, each one somehow more exciting than the last.

But the best part of the day came next - and it was as La La Land as it gets: the Griffith Observatory. Sitting in a small coffee shop inside the observatory, overlooking the Hollywood Sign, it felt unreal. I was in my yellow dress, of course, and for a moment it truly felt like a scene out of the movie - the three of us as co-stars in our own Friendsgiving film. Later, we found an even better spot overlooking the LA skyline. As the sun set, the sky turned pink, my dress stayed yellow, and suddenly I was standing inside my favorite scene from “What a Lovely Night.”

Our last day was our chronically online LA day. We started on Melrose Avenue, in front of the pink wall. We lip-synced to 2016 songs - “Cheerleader” for me, “Closer” for Gareth, “Boom Clap” for Marian - added the most oversaturated LA filter possible, and did peak BuzzFeed poses. It felt like a love letter to our 2016 selves, and honestly, it was pure joy.

From there, we went to Urth Caffé, an LA classic with amazing coffee (I had the Spanish latte), and it all felt like the influencer life I used to watch on YouTube growing up. Gareth called a Waymo, and suddenly we were in a driverless car, cruising down palm-tree-lined roads straight out of Pinterest, on our way to spend $20 on the Hailey Bieber smoothie at Erewhon. It couldn’t have been more nostalgic if it tried.

What made this trip special wasn’t just that it was my first time in LA, or that I finally got to live inside a movie I’ve loved for nearly a decade. It was that I got to do it with the people who know me best. La La Land taught me that dreams don’t always look the way you expect them to, but that doesn’t make them any less real. Sometimes, they look like a Friendsgiving in Los Angeles, golden-hour skies, bad chai, overpriced smoothies, and laughter echoing through a city that once only existed on a screen.

For a few days, life felt cinematic - and this time, my favorite movie didn’t come with a soul-crushing ending.