My experience, as you can see on my map, was greatly affected by the sun. Perhaps I should have used that as a force in downtown Los Angeles. That, in addition to several hills that I was trying to avoid walking back up, was a determining factor in how I interpreted the instructions. I ended up walking around in circles, hitting many of the same landmarks several times. I did approach them from different directions, which sometimes gave me a new perspective on what I had previously seen.
I don’t think our observational facilities can be trusted to objectively describe a familiar environment–I walk around this area all the time because I work here and take the metro stop that I walked by several times. I found that unless I tried especially hard to be aware of new things, I reverted to the same mindset that I always have when leaving work, which is to keep my head down to avoid interaction with potential harassers and get home as fast as possible.