I spent a year at the University of California, Santa Barbara, and I decided to go up there for a day to see it again. Public transport took, as usual, forever to get to the Greyhound Bus Terminal, and I ended up being dropped off Downtown in the middle of nowhere. I walked purposefully with no idea where I was going before finding one shop that was open and being told that I had eleven blocks to go. I set off and marched through what was pretty much Skid Row: everything barred up, hardly any traffic, gangs of homeless people hanging around or passed out or coming up to talk to me. I got to Greyhound and went in the maintenance entrance by mistake, passing buses undergoing repairs in a dark garage, then stumbled upon the main terminal.

When you 'ride the hound,' or indeed any public bus in the US, you meet people who you would never normally see from the windows of your car. In Europe, people of all walks of life use public transport, but here, it's mainly only those who can't afford cars. It amazes me how in these cities the rich can segregate themselves from the rest in wealthy enclaves and forget that anyone else exists since they don't see them. Geographically, it's not that far from Beverly Hills and Bel Air to South Central and Compton, or even Downtown. I suppose it's the same in most cities, to a greater or lesser extent.

I had forgotten how beautiful Santa Barbara is, and how much I enjoyed living there. It seemed like a calm oasis after LA, and I wandered around the streets, checking out the courthouse where I used to work, and State Street, where I used to potter around. I headed over to Isla Vista, where I lived and where UCSB is located. There were some new buildings and a lot of construction work, but it was mainly the same. It's a gorgeous campus with a lagoon, beach, museum and a big Rec Centre with an incredibly well-stocked bookstore and restaurants, where I worked in a pizza place and a salad bar. It was moving day and all the new freshman and their parents were running around buying things and unloading mountains of stuff from cars (why would you need to stockpile Pepsi?). The students seemed young, spoilt and vacuous - or maybe I'm just bitter? I envied them living in Santa Barbara for a few years and having access to all the things available there. I wandered around I.V., through D.P. (they're into their abbreviations) and the beach, passing lots of surfers, skaters and skinny sorority girls with megaphone-loud squeaky voices ("like, totally, and then, like, she said..."). I walked along the beach to Coal Oil Point, where I used to watch the sunset and I observed all the little pecky birds that run with the tide.

I was sad to leave Santa Barbara and it seemed to take forever to get back to LA. I hadn't slept properly for about a week and had been getting up very early and going to bed late. I couldn't face Downtown at night - it was scary enough during the day - so I disembarked in Hollywood. I went for a cup of tea with a guy I'd met on the bus who was a concert pianist/coffee shop manager. He was obsessed with Chopin and very into a strange form of yoga. He showed me a book about it and it was full of wacky theories about how people came from "Mars Sector 6" and Jesus was from Venus. It was all I could do to keep a straight face, but he was a nice guy and it's always interesting to meet people with different - very different - ideas to your own.

I ended up waiting an hour and a half for a bus. I stood next to Preston Sturges' star on the pavement (I've no idea who he was) and had a long chat with the other person waiting there - a teacher from Inglewood. We discussed all kinds of things and put the world to rights, and when the bus finally came, he helped me figure out where I had to get off to catch the 33 to Venice. I waited for the 33 at a junction and got talking to a guy called Robb and we analysed a car crash that happened as we were standing there. By this point, it was 2.30 in the morning and I was tired after a long day of walking around and not much sleep. I couldn't face waiting for perhaps another hour for a bus and was getting cold, so I decided to get a taxi. Robb told me he'd help me hail one as they were few and far between, but unfortunately they tended not to stop for a huge bloke with missing teeth clutching a beer can. I managed to coax one over and headed back to Venice and the snoring crazy lady in the bed next to mine.