Have a nice week, L.A.! We did!

“The Yankees stink!” Spencer Penhart screamed. Except “stink” wasn’t the word he used. We were at Dodger Stadium, at the one game the New York team won during the recent series. After berating shortstop Derek Jeter repeatedly because he “stinks” too, Penhart noticed my 11-year-old son, Ben, all dressed in Yankee midnight blue. “I’m sorry,” he melted. “You know, it’s really a treat to have you guys here.”

Sorry? Did he say sorry?

To my New York sensibility, Spencer Penhart was quintessential Los Angeles, the “L.A. dude” cliche. Sweet-faced, good-natured, easily imagined on a surfboard, the 27-year-old pharmaceutical representative grew up in Los Angeles loving the Dodgers and, of course, life itself. For the rest of the game, in between shouting invectives at the Yankees, he engaged Ben like a long-lost pal.

“Have you ever heard Derek Jeter booed before?” he asked gently. Ben just looked at him. Nothing like this had ever happened in the Bronx. Fans at Yankee Stadium were not nice; nothing was a “treat.” Except victory. Ben was used to the wall of pennants, the steep seats, the raging fans. When my daughter, Louisa, wore a pink Red Sox shirt to a Yankee game during the last pennant race, a guy threw beer at her. At the time, she was 6. That’s New York. If doesn’t matter if you’re 6 or 60; no one says sorry.

Last week I took my “New York, N.Y.” family on a cultural tour of Los Angeles to experience the full weight of the other side of the rainbow. It would be more familiar to call it a vacation, but we were in search of the city’s personality and surprises. We sought it in all the cliched places -- at the baseball stadium, walking around downtown, on a golf cart tour of Universal Studios, riding the little-used subway, idling in traffic, swimming at the beach.

On our first morning, we took a jet-lagged walk at 7 a.m. along Santa Monica’s Ocean Avenue and saw a homeless man in fatigues. There were many such people waking up on the beach, but this guy was doing his stretches. Just then a jogger came by and greeted us. “What’s his problem?” my boy Ben asked. In New York, joggers do not make eye contact and homeless people do not work out.

The next morning at the same hour both kids ran fully clothed into the Pacific Ocean. Ben rode the waves until his lips turned blue. Louisa fought the undertow. Our friends who live in L.A. say they rarely swim at the beach. But we also know New Yorkers who rarely go to the top of the Empire State Building or ride a subway.

This got our family talking about the contrasts between the two cities, their history and architecture. On the way downtown, the handsome Los Angeles skyline was strikingly different from what we are used to in New York. Nothing old about the newer city is visible at that height. But the invention of the elevator at the turn of the last century created the vertical New York, so we see history laced into the modern skyline, in the spire of Trinity Church and the sheen of the Chrysler Building.

Downtown L.A. had changed quite a bit since the last time I walked around, during the 2000 Democratic National Convention. Looking up 1st Street at Frank Gehry’s Walt Disney Concert Hall reminded me of how startling his designs can be standing alone against the big blue sky. L.A. seemed perfect for a Gehry creation just because there was nothing that clashed in the world around it.

I was burbling on about Gehry’s silver-winged sculpture when Louisa suddenly admonished me: “Stop talking so loudly. People in L.A. don’t scream.” I was embarrassing her. What else is new? But I was hardly screaming.

Certainly, Louisa knows from screaming. The other day on Broadway she was stopped in her tracks by a man shouting into his cellphone while casually leaning against a parking meter. He had used up every vulgar word she had ever heard -- and some she hadn’t -- before she said: “Mommy, New York is one of a kind, isn’t it?”

Local versions of history

New YORK school kids studying local history routinely take field trips to Lower Manhattan to visit Fraunces Tavern, where George Washington delivered an affectionate farewell to his officers at the end of the American Revolution. L.A. school kids, in addition to visiting the many missions in the area, inevitably take a tour of the 89-year-old Universal Studios lot, the city’s version of a historic landmark.

On our tour we were struck by the house on what is called “Elm Street,” where over the years many movies have been shot. The Hulk lived in the green house with the big front porch, and his girlfriend lived across the street in a blue house, which had an earlier tenant, it turns out, named Atticus Finch in the 1962 classic “To Kill a Mockingbird.”

That bit of “history” on the Universal lot may be all made up, but the house occupied by the noble Southern lawyer is as significant to L.A.’s culture as the tavern where George Washington drank is to New York’s. (Never mind that a Parisian would probably sniff that anything less than 250 years old barely qualifies for that city’s guidebooks.)

From Universal we took a subway to Hollywood, astonished that it runs on an honor system and that it closes shortly after midnight, when New York’s rails are in full throttle. The subways in New York are so aggressively policed that fare beaters are pursued almost as vigorously as bank robbers.

Nothing during our visit was as true to form -- as much a cliche confirmer -- as the relentless traffic. As New Yorkers, we thought we knew all there was to know about how to beat it. We have elaborate schemes to avoid the Cross Bronx Expressway; we know shortcuts and never approach the East Side if we know a dignitary -- anyone, even the foreign minister from Kamchatka -- is visiting the United Nations.

But in L.A. you simply can’t beat it. Do I dare mention the 405 on a Saturday afternoon? What is that about? Inching our way out of Dodger Stadium after the Yankee game, my husband and I understood for the first time why people would want to drink heavily sitting in a lawn chair next to their car in a dusty parking lot waiting for it to clear. Could any human being, even sunbaked Angelenos, remain laid-back with their children trying to kill each other in the back seat? They could; we couldn’t.

By week’s end we had so worn ourselves out experiencing L.A. cliches that we became one: mellowed New Yorkers. Los Angeles was perfectly cast, and the sprawling city came through for us at every stop, particularly every afternoon. The June fog would lift and make way for shimmering sunshine and purple mountains and deliver the perfect Hollywood ending to each day. We stepped off the plane pale and anxious New Yorkers; we left a week later bronzed and, well, more relaxed. Was this the result of a vacation or the City of Angels?