MY wife doesn't like Los Angeles. "The cars," she says, "the smog  it's a wasteland!" In the decade Nina and I have been married, I have never come close to convincing her that the cradle of global popular culture has any redeeming qualities  but it's always fun trying.  J. Emilio Flores for The New York Times  The expansive Electric Lotus in the Los Feliz neighborhood serves pan-Indian food to mellow crowds.  More than most cities, serious online legwork is a prerequisite to rooting out L.A.'s charms, but they are multifold: even before we arrived I knew our problem would be time, not money.  Still, I'd been given a budget of $500 for the trip, and the weekend would need to be carefully planned. I found a car  critical equipment, of course  for a daily base rate of $15 by lowballing Priceline. It was a utilitarian go-cart of a Chevy, but it got us out of LAX with barely a dent in our budget.  It was a perfect Friday afternoon in January, so we went straight to Griffith Park  among the country's biggest municipal parks at 4,218 acres, five times the size of Central Park  to get our bearings. We walked a chaparral-covered ridge to a glorious overlook: the Los Angeles Basin spread out before us, shimmering in the warm winter sun.  The Hollywood sign shone merrily in another part of the park. In the distance, the Pacific seemed an ocean of hammered gold, and the city, limned with jagged mountains (some of them snow-dusted) was an earthly paradise of lush possibility. A helicopter passed below us, its blades flashing.  The sun was already sinking, so we hurried down the mountain to the nearby Silver Lake neighborhood and the Sanborn Guest House, a renovated 1920's bungalow on a quiet street. We had stumbled across it online and were pleased with our neat and cozy room. The innkeepers were at once available and unobtrusive, giving the place a relaxing weekend-at-home feel that, for $89 a night, was unbeatable.  But we couldn't linger. We would be starting our weekend with overt entertainment-industry tourism: a taping of "The King of Queens" at Sony Studios in Culver City. I had reserved free tickets from TVtickets.com and was anxious to be on time.  I needn't have been. The first order of business was to stand in line for 90 minutes with 350 sitcom aficionados. Eventually, we took seats in a cavernous sound stage before the archetypal sitcom space: a living room, centered around a couch.  An affable comedian named Roger was charged with working us into a frenzy of hair-trigger laughter between takes as well as before the taping. Each take took seconds, but interminable rearranging of cameras and props, and last-second script changes bloated the evening  seven hours to tape a 30-minute show.  As our blood sugar dropped, we became putty in Roger's hands, finding ourselves doubled over guffawing at the antics of the loutish protagonist. And while grueling, I still think the experience is worth considering  once. The show's lack of sophistication belies the elaborate operation brought together to produce it, and breaking the frame of the small screen struck us as something every American should try.  We mulled over the spectacle at Electric Lotus in Los Feliz, along the south side of Griffith Park, joining a mellow crowd for hearty pan-Indian food in a large, moodily lighted space. Sitting on pillows in a semi-enclosed pavilion, we inhaled a mild vegetable coconut curry and a satisfying baingan bertha (creamy roasted eggplant), a rib-sticking meal that came to $30.97.  While we ordinarily would walk off a meal like that, this was L.A., so we drove back to Silver Lake. We were learning that terms like "nearby" have different meanings in Los Angeles. Distances change as the day progresses. At night, with little traffic, more things are nearby.  Once in Silver Lake, we went to the 4100 Bar on Sunset Boulevard for a nightcap. The bar was dim, a cheerful cave packed tight with clean-cut hipsters. We got drinks ($15) and chatted with a couple from the area.  They recommended Akbar, a few blocks away, so we went there for our next drink (free, since the bartender knew the couple, except for a $2 tip). The crowd was lively and mixed, with guy-next-door gay men jamming the dance floor. But bars close at 2 a.m. in Los Angeles, so we were soon back in the chill night air, ready to call it a night.  We awoke to sun streaming into our room and parrots twittering socially in the big palm outside. A long stretch of Sunset Boulevard becomes a bruncher's paradise on weekends, and we slowly made our way to Eat Well, a Silver Lake institution.
The City of Angels is also a city of bargains. TV stars, ocean views and ancient beasts are all free in Los Angeles.