Descriptive Writing

Here is an assignment I'm working on:

Mini-Lesson: Description
    a) Read the attached essay, "Where Worlds Collide" by Pico Iyer.

Where Worlds Collide by Pico Iyer.doc

    b) After you have read the essay, read this: Notice that the essay doesn't TELL us how a newcomer may feel. The essay DESCRIBES the environment into which a newcomer arrives (in this case, LAX airport). Go back and re-read the essay. Underline or highlight especially descriptive parts. Write some of them in your writer's notebook.
    c) You are now going to write your own description. You can take something from your Stones in a River assignment -- or anything else. Take at least an hour to just write. You really want to use vivid details to evoke all our senses. Remember to "show, don't tell"!

This is part B "write some especially descriptive parts in your writer's notebook"

they come out, dazed, disoriented, heads still partly in the clouds, bodies still several time zones—or centuries—away, and they step into the Promised Land.

Around them in an unending cacophony of antitheft devices, sirens, beepers, and car-door openers; lights are flashing everywhere, and the man who fines them $16.00 for losing their parking ticket has the tribal scars of Tigre across his forehead.

Just an undifferentiated smoggy haze, billboards advertising Nissan and Panasonic and Canon, and beyond those an endlessly receding mess of gray streets.