Well actually, having spent a further 3 weeks in the Playground of the Baby Giants following my week there last march, I have to say that I think I pretty much covered my impressions in the song.
The cars are really giant, and when you drive a normal car, in my case a new beetle, your view is consistently blocked by huge SUVs with tinted windows. Really scary and dangerous. I would empirically guess that at least a third of all vehicles fall in the « huge » category (by European standards at least).
I could have mentioned something about US utilitarian, bare-bones design, but that wouldn’t be specific to the Playground. I’m thinking of how mail trucks are just cubes on wheels for instance (though I did mention the houses in the song).
(a paper house with « a couple of holes cut out for windows and doors ». I wonder if there is a single window sill in the entire Playground?)
I could have mentioned how really crummy the « infrastructure » is. By that I mean the roads, utilities (many power outages), above-ground telephone poles which remind me of rural France in the 70’s, outrageously expensive Internet service (10 times what I pay in France), spotty phone coverage, etc, etc.
Having experienced the Playground in August, I could add something about…the weather. In much of Europe, when it’s hot, it’s hot, even in the shade, and when it’s cold, it’s cold, even in the sun. In the Playground, there’s a constant strong breeze, so either you’re in the sun and you’re OK (but you burn), either you’re in the shade and you’re fucking freezing!
The weather is great if you are staring at it from the inside of a car or a building, and who but tourists would actually venture outside for any length of time?
The place still feels to me like it was hit by a Neutron bomb: so much urban sprawl, yet so few sightings of humans, although I did see a racoon one evening…
OK, so I did see a lot of humans on a couple of occasions. I managed to squeeze-in a concert (The White Stripes) and there again, what impressed me most were the logistics and manpower deployed to handle the massive influx of cars. Same goes for the (quite wonderful) new Getty museum (or spaghetti museum as my children called it until they discovered with great disappointment that they had misunderstood…)
All in all, it was a pleasant vacation. The beaches were pretty much deserted (except for a few jellyfish, a dead and mangled sea lion, and an occasional fellow tourist), the vegetation is quite beautiful, there are free tennis courts that are often actually available. I didn’t have to eat too much American food as I was staying at my Mom’s who cooked and who is French. I did have some good Sushi, some disgusting mexican chicken in a chocolate mole sauce (profiterolles au poulet ?!), a burrito coming back from the concert that must have weighed close to a kilo, and a very nice felafel…
Still, from a purely touristic/beach/ocean standpoint, I’ll take the coast of Brittany (thats a region of France, not a pea-brained pop singer) and the Atlantic over the Playground and the Pacific any-day, regardless of the crowds (or lack thereof) and the weather (which can be really rainy in Brittany, even in the summer…)