Insights From Outside--Southland as 7 Million Foreigners a Year See Us

Maybe it’s the same old Clifton’s Cafeteria to you. But to Giovanna Terminiello, an art historian from Liguria, Italy, it’s an exotic sight marked “Don’t miss!” in her Italian tourist guide.

Terminiello tracked down Clifton’s while in Los Angeles to arrange an exhibit honoring the 500th anniversary of Christopher Columbus’ discovery of America. “I like everything that is different from what I expected!” she said through an interpreter. In Los Angeles, she also discovered avocado, kiwi fruit, seedless grapes and potato skins with Cheddar cheese and bacon.

No Complaints

“She likes everything,” confirmed Sim Smiley, the interpreter who accompanied Terminiello on her U.S. government-sponsored tour. “So many visitors complain about the food.”

Terminiello is one of 7 million people who every year leave their hometowns around the world, their tightly knit cities of cool cathedrals or humid military conflicts, and friends and food they understand for brief forays into the vast foreign carnival of Los Angeles.

They are the visitors most of us notice only on weekends: the Italian-speaking diners next to you on the patio of a chic Los Angeles restaurant, the unified group of camera-carrying Japanese at Disneyland, the family in relentlessly upscale South Coast Plaza whose dress, although stylish and contemporary, jars slightly with the prevailing suburban insouciance.

Since foreign visitors stay longer and spend more, the Greater Los Angeles Visitors and Convention Bureau is printing brochures in Japanese, Spanish, German and French to encourage this, said Bill Arey, director of visitor marketing for the bureau. He hopes they will see Los Angeles as a destination resort, a balmy land of swimming pools and cold drinks, relaxed life styles and good food, a place of culture.

Strange Food--and People

What they actually see, according to some of this season’s visitors, are a vast land of hodgepodge buildings and hotel lobbies, surprisingly good air and strange food, a place where the natives are slow, unsophisticated, difficult to communicate with, perhaps dangerous, and prosperous.

“ Bellissimo, bellISSimo! “ murmured Terminiello under a stale, smoggy sky as she wandered past the gardens, Ionic columns and colonnades of the J. Paul Getty Museum in Malibu, a copy of an ancient Roman villa, many of whose art works came from Terminiello’s native land. “The idea of Roman architecture to us . . . we think of ruins. To have a piece of architecture in perfect shape is completely new to me. Almost theater-like!” said Terminiello, 47, a friendly woman wearing sensible clogs and pearls and carrying her flight bag.

She walked into a room whose temperature and humidity are perfectly controlled to preserve the artifacts. She gazed at a 2,300-year-old bronze Greek statue. “I envy the financial resources.” She smiled. “We’re so poor in Italy.”

“First thing they ask, ‘Where is Burt Reynolds?’ Or Michael J. Fox,” said Ted Payne, a guard at Paramount Studios in Los Angeles where thousands of foreign tourists come each year to watch tapings of television shows. “We attract ‘em. They all know Paramount.”

On a recent damp morning, a contemporary variety show, “Solid Gold,” drew tourists from England, Sweden, Switzerland as well as the entire Nicaraguan all-star baseball team.

“We are not political. We just came to play baseball,” said Jorge Pong Roberts, 25, a third baseman from Managua who wore a gold cross and a red T-shirt with the words, “ Che ... Has la victoria siempre .” ( Che . . . always go for victory.) In between games with local college teams, the athletes followed plans made by their sponsor, Bats Not Bombs, a Los Angeles-based citizens’ diplomacy group.

Serious and quiet, the 20 athletes sat in the studio, watching dust curl up into a sea of colored triangles beamed down onto the stage from a ceiling of lights. The audience warm-up man told them when to stand up and clap, to smile and have a good time.

“Where you guys from now anyway? New York? I’ll give you my wallet now,” the man joked. The team members leaned forward, wondering what to do.

Nicaraguans are used to living with daily tension, said Roberts, a civil engineer who learned English at school. Traveling does not make the tension go away. “Anyplace we go, we have to have in mind the situation in our country,” he said.

“Anybody from outta town? Nicaragua? Glad you made it! . . . I speak Spanish,” says the warm-up man. “Reseda. Tujunga. Tarzana.” They smile.

At the urging of the warm-up man, the Nicaraguans start to clap to the country music of the Dwight Yoakam Band: “Gi-tars, Cadillacs, hillbilly music, it’s the only thing that keeps me hangin’ on. . . .”

The team coach laughed and said something to Roberts. “He says we have to pass a hat for money to buy some pants for this guy,” said Roberts, indicating the torn blue jeans of the lead singer. “He says he wants to dance una salsa .” Another player puts on earphones to listen to Mexican music from a tape player.

Because of the intensity of the conflict in their country, Roberts believes Nicaraguans need “mas diverciones “ (more entertainment) like the show they’re watching, which he said is broadcast in Nicaragua.

One evening, some players went out to a night club to dance, Roberts said. “In Managua, we have the same lights, the same darkness. The same bar. Just the people are different.”

Three days after her wedding in Tokyo, Junko Okamura was standing between Tweedledee and Tweedledum at the honeymoon spot of her dreams: Disneyland. She beamed. Her husband Taizo took a picture.

In addition to carrying their two cameras and 10 rolls of film, the young couple had purses with money and calculators strapped to their waists. The travel agent who had arranged their package tour had warned them that Los Angeles is a dangerous place to visit and they should guard their belongings carefully, said Taizo, 27, a computer systems engineer from Tokyo.

The honeymoon had cost them all the money they had and they weren’t going to take chances. No one had robbed them yet, but otherwise, Los Angeles was “the same as expected,” said Taizo. “You know ‘CHiPs’ is our favorite program in Japan. We see freeways and streets and it is the same.”

Another couple honeymooning at Disneyland, Kenji and Miyuki Doi from Fukuoka, were stunned to see individualistic dress and makeup on high school students they saw during a bus tour of Hollywood. Miyuki, who like the others, had worn uniforms in school, said she wished she could have gone to American schools.

In the park, Kenji observed an elderly couple wearing Mickey Mouse ears. “Grandmothers and grandfathers stay so young. In Japan, they don’t do that,” he said.

Able to read but not speak English, the couples spoke through an interpreter, Junko Suzuta. Suzuta, a native of Japan, is a secretary at the Emerald of Anaheim where the Okamuras and Dois were staying. Owned by Tokyu Corp., a Japanese firm, the hotel has a Japanese restaurant with menus printed in Japanese.

Communication is not easy. When Taizo tried to order coffee at an American coffee shop, the waitress brought him a Coke.

The couples already knew Disneyland’s layout since the one in Tokyo is identical. But the park in Anaheim is smaller and unroofed; the rides are more detailed and realistic, they said. Next to Canada and Mexico, Japan sends the most tourists to Los Angeles and in the fall, most of them are honeymooners, said Masato Shinada, a tour guide for large groups of Japanese. The most common complaint is that American food is tasteless and served in too-large quantities, he said.

“Ketchup is amazing. If you put ketchup on the food, you kill the taste of the food. And so, a lot of tourists, they take the taxi and go to Little Tokyo” for dinner, he said.

Television anchorman Philippe LeFait was picturing the sunset/moonrise he had just seen from an airplane over the Sierras as he crossed the Tarmac at John Wayne Airport, squeezed through the chain-link fence and elbowed his way through the crowd to baggage pick up.

Suddenly, another image popped into his mind. “This looks like a Third World airport,” he said. “Mindanao. In the Philippines. It’s exactly the same.”

A veteran world traveler, LeFait, 32, looked tired near the end of his three-week U.S. tour to gather background for a possible documentary. He had attended press conferences in Washington D.C., talked to AIDS experts in Atlanta, the Rev. Jerry Falwell in Lynchburg, Va. and immigration officials in El Paso. After one night’s stay at the Westin South Coast Plaza Hotel, he would spend a half day looking at Asian resettlement programs in Orange County before flying to San Francisco, then back to France and home in Paris’ fashionable troisieme arrondissement , or Third District .

Usually, he said he and his escort/interpreter stayed in downtown hotels--sometimes next door to vacant lots with rats. “In France, the difference between wealth and poverty is more gradual. Here, there’s a sharp contrast between great wealth and abject poverty . . . Are there any ghettos here?” he asked later, strolling through the South Coast Plaza with his interpreter, Anne Jarram.

“In Paris, you see many blacks playing jazz music and beggars, too. I miss the beggars,” he said glancing at the evening shoppers hustling past Banana Republic, Courreges and Gucci. He nearly bumped into a young man in jeans and jogging shoes who stopped, bowed, and with a sweep of his arm yielded the right of way to LeFait.

“Here, everything is the same, everything is clean ,” he said using an English word that he explained has entered the French language meaning not only neat, but also bland.

Concerned his impressions be recorded correctly, LeFait accedes to Jarram to pinpoint nuances in his meaning. “French people are more complicated than Americans,” he explained.

Later over a glass of Italian wine in a French restaurant, LeFait said three images of his trip would explain his impression of America: Liberty University students, formally dressed in required ties and dresses, listening to Falwell; President Reagan mistakenly starting a speech with his back to the camera and recovering with a laugh and a joke; and Rambo fighting the Soviets.

As a journalist, he said he is always surprised at what he finds out. But in America, he said “It hasn’t turned out to be too different from what I expected.”