The festival life
Junior Diem Dang gains a professional opportunity be attending the Beyond Wonderland music festival.
As someone who had never been to Los Angeles before this semester, I found myself wondering endlessly when and if I’d have my first celebrity sighting. Turns out, it happened within the first hour of me being there. As I stood outside the Hollywood Burbank Airport waiting for my Uber, I looked to my left and found myself standing two feet away from Michael Keaton. That’s right, Batman himself! That’s when I knew I wasn’t in Indiana anymore.
New York may be the city that never sleeps, but L.A. is the city that can never bore you. Part of the excitement of getting to spend a semester in L.A. is getting to do things I’ve always wanted to do or never thought I would, such as hiking to the Hollywood sign and seeing it in person for the first time, going to a Rolling Stones concert at SoFi Stadium, spending a day at Point Dume beach in Malibu and being a regular at a “Star Wars”-themed bar called Scum & Villainy on Hollywood Boulevard.
One of the more surreal moments was going to the Casa Vega restaurant in Sherman Oaks. Although I really like Mexican cuisine, that’s not why it was surreal. The thing about it was that the restaurant was featured in one of my favorite recent films, Quentin Tarantino’s “Once Upon a Time in Hollywood.” It’s crazy to think that I was standing in the same place as Tarantino, Leonardo DiCaprio and Brad Pitt — not to mention that the restaurant itself has now been immortalized on film. It didn’t feel real going to a place that to that point I’d only seen on film before.
All of the fun and entertainment aside, the Semester in L.A. program has given me the opportunity to gain industry experience through my internship, make valuable connections, explore and learn about L.A. and make new friends who share the same passion for film and television that I do.