L.A. pt 01
I took a friend up on an offer that was made back in November to come out to visit in LA. I've been to LA once before when I was back in high school I was a tag-along of a different friend and it became a complicated back story. Needless to say I had my fill of LA at the time. I was a bit hesitant to come and stay with my friend, but a decade later I figured how bad could LA really be? Thankfully enough, I got a reminder how awesome my friends are because I had a really good time without really doing that much.
Don't get me wrong we ended up doing stuff. I saw the outside world so I didn't just end up staring at the 4 walls of the place I was staying in. We ended up chilling out for the weekend and it was very relaxing. Some of the things we ended up doing things were:
The most "LA" thing I did was that I went to the American premier weekend of a Japanese movie. The movie was called Hausu or "House" and no it did not have an English actor pretending to be a jerk-face American doctor. The movie was released in 77 in Japan and it's a cult film, but it was never released here in America until that weekend. It is rumored that House was inspiration for Sam Raimi's Evil Dead series.
I went to Fry's twice. Once to buy a Toshiba external hard-drive then again to return it for a Western Digital external hard drive when the first one refused to be recognized by my friend's computer. My only problem is that while I've had some pretty good luck with Western Digital hard drives, both my friend @lieumorrison and my boyfriend @ssbohio have had hard drives crap out where they have lost significant amounts of data which put me off from purchasing any of their products ever again, but after much prodding and poking I broke down and purchased the Western Digital one and so far it works with both my friend's Windows Vista machine and my Ubuntu 9.10 box, netbook, laptop, and my Asus O'play.
And of course I can't truly "fat guy it on up" without talking about the food. There were some fantastic places to eat. I must have died and gone to heaven because their was one strip of road where it seemed like every other place to eat was either a Thai place or a Sushi place to eat. I finally had the legendary In-N-Out burger which I now understand why everyone goes on and on about there food, animal style of course. I also ate at a pretty delicious Mediterranean place that beat out Aladdin's like Aladdin's owed it money. The non-diabetic friendly part of the trip was when my friend took me to a local donut shop where I had simple donuts without frosting or anything else and they were the most amazing donuts I've ever had in my life.
We went to Redondo beach and I caused problems. The pelicans were overly friendly mostly because they were trying to get food from the fishermen and there were warning signs all over that said don't feed the pelicans. I am a troublemaker and I bought a bag full of fish bait (anchovies) to feed the pelicans. As it turns out, the only way they sell the fish bait is frozen so I ended up feeding or at least trying to feed frozen anchovies to the pelicans. It was as if they were pelican jawbreakers because they would clatter and clack on the frozen fish, but they could not get them down and eventually drop it only to have an eager pelican try to snatch the frozen morsel away to have the same difficulty. After I played "Dances with Pelicans" we went down to the beach and that is where I got to put my feet into the ocean which was a bit colder than I expected. I also did not account for the sand because I had nothing to wipe my feet off with after the stroll into the ocean and I had to walk the half mile back to where they had "hobo showers" so I could put back on my shoes and socks. We went down to the marina where my friend took me to his favorite bar and I got introduced to raspberry Lambic and it was -> VERY <- delicious. I kind of wanted to stay longer and drink some more, but my friend made an excellent point about how he would have to drive us home so we both could not enjoy ourselves. We walked on over to the arcade and I was actually impressed by the fact that they had a lot of old school games like Off Road and Altered Beast mixed in with the rest of the arcade which had newer games like 5 different versions of beat-dance-guitar-revolution. Soon it was time to go back to my friend's place, but before we could do that we picked up the aft-fore mentioned delicious Mediterranean food.
The one thing that I wanted to do on this trip (outside of hanging out with my friend) is that Corey Doctorow Thanked a comic book shop named Secret Headquarters in his young adult novel Little Brother so I wanted to check it out and see what it was like. I was a little disappointed at the overall size of the shop, but I was pretty impressed with the selection that they had on hand. I wanted to buy my friend the first compendium of The Walking Dead due to being a big horror fan, but he talked me out of it. I did buy him the first Unwritten trade paperback and I think they will like Unwritten a lot whenever they get to sitting down and reading it.
On the way back to the car I did get to see and take pictures of some of the famous Space Invaders graffiti that I've only heard about / read about.
So... Yeah... Not that much right? I guess we did do a lot, but I had fun doing it, not because of the places we went to or the things that we did. I had fun because I was able to do it with my friend and I don't think I could thank them enough.
P.S. If anyone has the soundtrack for Hausu I would be greatly interested.
Don't get me wrong we ended up doing stuff. I saw the outside world so I didn't just end up staring at the 4 walls of the place I was staying in. We ended up chilling out for the weekend and it was very relaxing. Some of the things we ended up doing things were:
The most "LA" thing I did was that I went to the American premier weekend of a Japanese movie. The movie was called Hausu or "House" and no it did not have an English actor pretending to be a jerk-face American doctor. The movie was released in 77 in Japan and it's a cult film, but it was never released here in America until that weekend. It is rumored that House was inspiration for Sam Raimi's Evil Dead series.
I went to Fry's twice. Once to buy a Toshiba external hard-drive then again to return it for a Western Digital external hard drive when the first one refused to be recognized by my friend's computer. My only problem is that while I've had some pretty good luck with Western Digital hard drives, both my friend @lieumorrison and my boyfriend @ssbohio have had hard drives crap out where they have lost significant amounts of data which put me off from purchasing any of their products ever again, but after much prodding and poking I broke down and purchased the Western Digital one and so far it works with both my friend's Windows Vista machine and my Ubuntu 9.10 box, netbook, laptop, and my Asus O'play.
And of course I can't truly "fat guy it on up" without talking about the food. There were some fantastic places to eat. I must have died and gone to heaven because their was one strip of road where it seemed like every other place to eat was either a Thai place or a Sushi place to eat. I finally had the legendary In-N-Out burger which I now understand why everyone goes on and on about there food, animal style of course. I also ate at a pretty delicious Mediterranean place that beat out Aladdin's like Aladdin's owed it money. The non-diabetic friendly part of the trip was when my friend took me to a local donut shop where I had simple donuts without frosting or anything else and they were the most amazing donuts I've ever had in my life.
We went to Redondo beach and I caused problems. The pelicans were overly friendly mostly because they were trying to get food from the fishermen and there were warning signs all over that said don't feed the pelicans. I am a troublemaker and I bought a bag full of fish bait (anchovies) to feed the pelicans. As it turns out, the only way they sell the fish bait is frozen so I ended up feeding or at least trying to feed frozen anchovies to the pelicans. It was as if they were pelican jawbreakers because they would clatter and clack on the frozen fish, but they could not get them down and eventually drop it only to have an eager pelican try to snatch the frozen morsel away to have the same difficulty. After I played "Dances with Pelicans" we went down to the beach and that is where I got to put my feet into the ocean which was a bit colder than I expected. I also did not account for the sand because I had nothing to wipe my feet off with after the stroll into the ocean and I had to walk the half mile back to where they had "hobo showers" so I could put back on my shoes and socks. We went down to the marina where my friend took me to his favorite bar and I got introduced to raspberry Lambic and it was -> VERY <- delicious. I kind of wanted to stay longer and drink some more, but my friend made an excellent point about how he would have to drive us home so we both could not enjoy ourselves. We walked on over to the arcade and I was actually impressed by the fact that they had a lot of old school games like Off Road and Altered Beast mixed in with the rest of the arcade which had newer games like 5 different versions of beat-dance-guitar-revolution. Soon it was time to go back to my friend's place, but before we could do that we picked up the aft-fore mentioned delicious Mediterranean food.
The one thing that I wanted to do on this trip (outside of hanging out with my friend) is that Corey Doctorow Thanked a comic book shop named Secret Headquarters in his young adult novel Little Brother so I wanted to check it out and see what it was like. I was a little disappointed at the overall size of the shop, but I was pretty impressed with the selection that they had on hand. I wanted to buy my friend the first compendium of The Walking Dead due to being a big horror fan, but he talked me out of it. I did buy him the first Unwritten trade paperback and I think they will like Unwritten a lot whenever they get to sitting down and reading it.
On the way back to the car I did get to see and take pictures of some of the famous Space Invaders graffiti that I've only heard about / read about.
So... Yeah... Not that much right? I guess we did do a lot, but I had fun doing it, not because of the places we went to or the things that we did. I had fun because I was able to do it with my friend and I don't think I could thank them enough.
P.S. If anyone has the soundtrack for Hausu I would be greatly interested.