COMMITMENTS : If You’re Ever in L.A., Stop By . . . Then Book a Tour Guide

From time to time, I travel to remote and impoverished parts of the world.

Once there, I invariably meet people who invite me into their homes, prepare elaborate meals and introduce me to the artists, musicians and intellectuals of their country.

We stay up late and talk about life, and I see the world reflected through a personal prism that no number of interviews with government officials can convey.

When it is time to leave, my heart fills with warmth and sadness, and I say: “If you are ever in Los Angeles, please look me up.”

This I mean with great sincerity, which only grows more poignant as I realize that to residents of Ukraine and Albania, visiting America is both their fondest hope and their most unrealistic dream.

These are countries where a plane ticket to America often costs a year’s wages and just acquiring a tourist visa takes persuasion, skill and connections. Surely, I will never see these people again unless my travels bring me back to their little nook of the world.

How wrong I have been.

In the last six years, no fewer than 20 people from my far-flung travels have landed in Los Angeles, brought by junkets, business trips, fellowships and borrowed money. For each of them, it was the chance of a lifetime, and they were determined to make the most of their time here.

Some have been dear friends, others little more than acquaintances. They have stayed three days, two weeks and an entire month. None had much money, a car or any idea of how to navigate the megalopolis, which--let’s face it--offers dreadful public transit.

So I show them around.

That has been all well and good at times and dreadful at others. In some cases, I can heartily concur with Benjamin Franklin, who said that house guests are like fish--after three days they start to stink.

Back when the Berlin Wall still stood, Zoltan from Hungary came to visit me. He was an independent type so I rented him a Ford Escort at $17.95 a day (on my credit card) and pointed him in the direction of San Francisco.

“How was it?” I asked when he returned several days later, exhilarated but exhausted.

“Super,” he replied. “Especially when I drove 100 m.p.h. on Highway 5.”

Then there was Eva from Budapest, a bottle blond who wanted to go to nightclubs where she could meet millionaires. Instead I took her to a Fairfax coffeehouse, a compromise for which she never forgave me.

Just about all my guests want to see Disneyland. I hate Disneyland. It’s expensive and, to me, it’s boring. But Space Mountain and the Matterhorn beckon, reducing my existentialist adult visitors to wide-eyed children.

“If it is at all possible, we really would like to see it, Duh-neeze,” they say.

So how to arrange it? Shuttles cost about $30 per person--too steep. Friends in L.A. volunteer to take them but flake out at the last minute. Finally, after 40 minutes on hold, the MTA comes through with bus numbers and locations.

Recently I put two Bulgarians on a bus to Disneyland, a bargain at $3.35 each way from Downtown Los Angeles. I fretted that something would go wrong before my husband could pick them up that evening on 6th and Flower streets.

It did.

They got on the right bus to go home, but disembarked at the wrong stop, which brought them dangerously close to Skid Row, ripe pickings for urban predators.

My husband spotted them wandering near the Los Angeles Central library about 8:30 p.m. On the way home, they described the homeless people they had seen lighting fires in trash cans to stay warm.

“It’s good for us to see these things,” Marianna told him solemnly. “Not just the beautiful skyscrapers.”

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Visitors from former East Bloc countries are quite charming, but they refuse to believe that anyone has to be at a desk by the uncivilized hour of 9 a.m. Or that I can’t just take three hours off to meet them for lunch.

They grew up under the old Soviet maxim: You pretend to pay us, and we pretend to work. Can you imagine what it’s like trying to get visitors organized so I can drop them off at a tourist site and still be at work on time?

It’s like herding cats, as my husband used to say.

When the first few visitors arrived in the late 1980s, I would knock myself out, spending too much and careening madly from one end of the city to the other from morning until late night.

That left us both frazzled and me penniless.

Over the years, I have succeeded in setting some ground rules. We go to places such as Venice Beach to people-watch, Yamashiro for drop-dead-view drinks, and Hollywood Boulevard for late-night Thai food because those are all things that I like.

But that doesn’t mean we eat out each night just so they can taste all of the city’s ethnic cuisines. I refuse to spend inordinate amounts of money so they can experience the Beverly Hills Hotel, sushi and the House of Blues.

And whenever possible, I enlist friends who don’t have day jobs into showing people around while I am at work. Often, this pays off handsomely for them. My old roommate James ended up going to Budapest to visit one of our guests.

Most recently my friend Mike, who is in film school, squired the Bulgarians around Hollywood Boulevard and took them to a taping of the TV show “Wings” at Paramount Studios, which thrilled them beyond words.

Marianna’s 17-year-old daughter, Elena, also spent hours combing the heavy metal shops of Hollywood Boulevard, looking for a cheap Nine Inch Nails T-shirt. Bulgarians are down with Trent Reznor.

Many of my visitors want to shop till they drop but lack the hard currency to indulge like true Americans. So we skip the Beverly Center but check out Target and Shoe City.

But I think the most fun I had showing visitors around in the past year was when Emilia came to town. Emilia is an anchorwoman on the most popular TV news show in Skopje, Macedonia. We met while I was living there last year, teaching journalism on a Fulbright.

We cruised with Emilia down Sunset Boulevard to the Pacific, which is de rigueur on my L.A. tour. Once ensconced at the Figtree Cafe on the Venice Boardwalk, we not only caught a spectacular sunset but it soon became evident that we had stumbled onto the filming of . . . a Steve Martin movie.

As we sat at an outdoor table, polishing off a bottle of Acadia Chardonnay, extras scurried around, mimicking a real-life Venice boardwalk scene, while technicians adjusted lights and prop people placed poinsettias around the cafe to simulate the Christmas season in August.

Even I, surly L.A. native, was caught up in the moment. Suddenly, I was glad to be showing visitors around my city. It was a whole lot more fun than to have to show them around Fresno.

But then, if I lived in Fresno, maybe I wouldn’t have that many visitors.