Weeks Four and Five

Hi everyone! I'm finally having a chance to catch up and write about our past two weekends.

Two weekends ago, we headed out towards Hollywood. Our intent was to go ahead and get that over with, since we don't really care about Hollywood but feel like we should do it while we're here! But we didn't end up making it there. On the way to that side of town, we saw a blimp that was painted like a minion (from Despicable Me):

Next, we went to the LA Farmer's Market, which is part farmer's market, but also has lots of ethnic restaurants and shops. It was very crowded but also a really interesting place to spend a couple hours. One of the shops was a soda shop. I tried a mango soda from Hawaii and Patrick tried an apple soda from Mexico. The apple soda tasted like a green apple Jolly Rancher!

For lunch, we ate delicious Greek food:

And on the way out, we got the biggest cinnamon roll I have ever seen:

Walking from the farmer's market, we passed through the courtyard of the LA Museum of Art. Here is me with an outdoor art piece (made of hanging surgical tubes):

Finally, we went to the La Brea Tar Pits, which was really interesting. Tar pits basically look like bubbling tar coming out of the ground:

Around some of the actively excavated pits, they've built in viewing windows so you can see what's going on. At one time (age 5) I wanted to be a paleontologist. I'm so glad I didn't end up choosing that field.

There's a museum at the tar pits that shows some of the different animals they've found in the pits.

There are no dinosaurs in the pits but there are wooly mammoths, wolves, birds, plants, bugs, and microorganisms. It's really incredible the massive number of creatures they've found there. 

...and then we were too tired to go to Hollywood.

Continuing our Sunday tradition, we went on a bike ride to the north, about 20 total miles all the way from where we live to Will Rogers State Beach. This was a less enjoyable ride because there was a much longer section along the road, and we had to pass through Venice Beach and Santa Monica Beach, which are both very crowded. But! We stopped at the Santa Monica Pier and went to one of the fruit stands I talked about in a previous post! How it works is there's a variety of fruit, you tell the guy what you want, and he fills up a container with a mix of the fruit. At this one there was pineapple, watermelon, canteloupe, honeydew, coconut, and jicama. Then you can ask for salt, lime, and/or chili. A lot of the Latino customers took all three. We decided to opt for the lime and salt, and it was really tasty. The fruit was really good--especially the honeydew. Back home it's hard to find good honeydew, but here every honeydew I've had here has been awesome.

This past weekend was especially low key. We took the car to the shop at 8 on Saturday morning and didn't get it back until 5:30 in the evening, so we could only get around by bike or by foot. We took a bike ride along the Ballona Creek Bike Path. Ballona Creek is a paved runoff creek running from the city to the ocean. Although we saw some cool birds in the creek, we probably wouldn't recommend riding the bike path. It was hilly and not very scenic. But it gave us something to do that day. Afterwards we walked down the street and got lemonade and ice cream from the street vendors and ate it on the beach.

Sunday was church and our small group, and then a lot of rest. I don't know why we were so tired this weekend. We also visited the 99 Cents Only store. Highlight of the week: two pounds of asparagus for 99 cents!

That's pretty much all there is to report from around here! This coming weekend we're planning on spending a day at the beach since it's supposed to be in the 90s (it's been in the 70s since we've been here, so too cold to swim!) and maybe we'll make it out to Hollywood. We have a half-day July 3 then are off the 4th and 5th, so we're looking forward to that weekend--in lieu of a (too expensive) trip home, we're spending the long weekend in San Diego! Any recommendations you have for what to do there are welcome :) 

We can't believe our time here is almost halfway over! We're trying to plan out all the things that we wanted to do and make sure we get to do them. At the top of the list:

- Channel Islands National Park

- Joshua Tree National Park

We've also thought about:

- San Francisco (we'd love to see our friends out there, but we did spend a lot of time there for our honeymoon last year)

- Big Sur

- Disneyland (although we went to Disney World this past spring)

And finally, we're trying to figure out how to get home! The mechanics seem to think Patrick's car is in fairly good shape beyond some routine maintenance, but we don't trust it to get us home since that's what they told us before we left! Patrick's car is at 199,000 miles, so it's just at the point where things are degrading unpredictably. So we've been talking about several options. We could ship our car home, or we could sell it. We could buy a car out here and drive it home, we could fly home, or we could rent a car to get home. Our original plan was to  have a leisurely trip back to see some places like the Grand Canyon, but now we're kind of weighing the options. So prayers for wisdom are appreciated! All the options are expensive so we're just trying to figure out what is the wisest use of our money.

Thanks for reading! Hopefully this weekend will be more exciting to read about :)

week 3 and a little of 4: Venice Beach, The Bike Path, and the 99 Cent Only Store

We've been keeping it pretty low-key on the weekends because every weekend by the time Friday night comes we're too lazy to actually plan something and we decide we'll wait until the morning...then we'll sleep in on Saturdays and only end up with an afternoon to do something. But it's been nice to have some relaxing weekends and to just spend some time exploring where we live.

I have to tell you, though, that my favorite thing we've discovered in the past two weeks is the 99 Cents Only store. When we first moved in here, the lady we're living with told us about it but we thought it was just a variation on the Dollar Tree. But we decided to visit anyhow and it was AWESOME! It carries the typical dollar store stuff, plus lots of groceries, including meat and produce. I had been so depressed to leave Aldi behind since I'm used to getting most of our groceries super cheap there, but the 99 Cents Only store is a sufficient replacement for the summer! Despite the name, not everything is 99 cents--most things are 99 cents or cheaper, while there are a couple things that are over a dollar (gallons of milk, cases of water). But last week we got a bunch of produce for a dollar each: a bag of radishes, two pounds of limes, about a pound of snow peas, five pounds of potatoes, some prickly pear cactus (which I've yet to cook). So from now on that will be our first stop for groceries!

Anyhow. As far as the sightseeing goes, last weekend we made two stops. On Saturday we visited Venice Beach, which is one of the strangest places I've ever been. It's kind of like the kitschiness of Myrtle Beach mixed with the strangeness of California. It was very crowded on the boardwalk where you could see the street performers and shops so I didn't take very many pictures.

Patrick and I stopped for a snack. Patrick got some falafel which was pretty good, but I stopped at a booth called The Wee Chippy. I was the definite winner in this situation. The fries were the best I've had in a long time--fresh cut right then and there, then fried to a perfect golden crisp and sprinkled with truffle salt. Mmmm. Here is a picture of Patrick enjoying our snacks:

Because it's too cold to swim, I guess, there are lots of things on the beach for people to do. For example, at Santa Monica Pier, there was playground equipment, a chess park, slacklining, etc. At Venice Beach, there was a skate park, so it was cool to watch the skateboarders for a while.

Venice Beach is also the home of "Muscle Beach", where the body builders work out. It's kind of neat, just in open air there are all these weights and weight machines where anyone can work out. If I lived close and wasn't shy, I'd work out there--it's a cool idea to be able to lift weights outside!

Here's Patrick outside of the famous Venice Beach Gold's Gym:

We also visited a nearby neighborhood called Abbott Kinney, which is very reminiscent of Charleston. Lots of fancy shops and restaurants. We were thirsty so we grabbed a delicious pineapple coriander lemonade at Lemonade. 

On Sunday we took kind of an unexpected adventure. As we've written about before, there is a bike path that runs along the beach to about 11.5 miles south of us and we're not sure how far north. We decided to take the tandem bike out for a ride on Sunday afternoon after church and small group and ended up going the whole distance to the beginning of the trail in the south! On the way back we stopped at Redondo Beach Pier and grabbed an egg roll for a snack and then continued the remaining eight miles home. It was a really nice ride. We forgot to take a camera with us though :(

In the past couple weeks we've also had two interesting food experiences. We went out with a friend from work to Rutt's Hawaiian Cafe, which was delicious. What I had was very different from anything I had in Hawaii, so I don't know whether that's because of authenticity or regionality or what. But I had the "Hawaiian Royale", which is an open-faced omelette with portuguese sausage and Chinese barbeque pork over white rice with bean sprouts and green onion. It was awesome.

We also went to a restaurant called California Shabu Shabu. Shabu-shabu is kind of a cross between fondue and Chinese hot pot. We started by dumping a plate of vegetables into a boiling pot of water with seaweed for flavoring. We had different seasonings we could add for flavor into the broth, including: soy sauce, ground sesame seeds, chili-infused oil, garlic, green onions, and daikon radish. After the veggies boil for a while, you dip the meat into the pot to cook. It's thinly sliced so it cooks very quickly, in a matter of seconds. Once you're done cooking the meat, you ladle the leftover veggies and noodles into a soup bowl with some beef base and eat the rest out of the bowl. It was an interesting experience, although Patrick and I both were not able to get a very flavorful broth, and it was quite expensive. But we're definitely glad we tried it!

I'll blog about this weekend once we've finished it tomorrow :)

Playa Del Rey: "Beach of the Kings"

I think Lauren is going to post a longer post about what we've been up to these past two weeks, but I wanted to write a little bit about the beach wehere we are.


The condo we're staying at here is almost right on "Play del Rey" which translates to Beach of the Kings or King's Beach.  Here's a picture of the beach.

It looks about like a beach in South Carolina, but with one difference--there's about 3 times as much sand. The sand in the above picture is about a third of the total beach, I'll have to take a picture of the whole beach soon. Also, where we are, the tide changes the waterline about a foot or two, there's not a massive tide.

The sand looks different than our beaches at home--it's much coarser and has multiple colors in it.

Its also hard to walk in.

Almost everywhere near the waterline are pieces of washed up kelp.

It looks like this undewater:

(not my picture)

And it looks like this here:

like little brown carrots

There are also patches of broken shell fragments:

Usually the waves here aren't too big, probably about a foot or two tall

Last week, however, because of some special weather conditions, the waves were towering above my height. It was hard to take a picture of them because I didn't have anything for scale. Here's a picture from the top balcony of our condo. Notice the little people in the corner.

These waves were absolutely huge! Lauren and I went down to the beach one night while the waves were so big and a guy told us that twice a year the waves come all the way up to the bike path. We never saw the water that high, but a few days you could see the high tide line way up the beach. The bike path had been covered in sand in some places (by the previous nights' waves). The bike path, is about 500ft from the waterline usually.

Here's some more pictures of giant waves that have nothing for scale:

And that's the beach here.

weeks one and two in Los Angeles

It's hard to believe that we've already been here for two weeks! In some aspects it seems like it's been no time at all, but in other ways it feels like forever. We've mostly settled down into a good rhythm and have figured out how things work around here, so we're beginning to enjoy our time more than just being in survival mode.

Most work days we arrive at work at about 9am and head home between 5:30 and 6pm. I've been running on the bike trail along the beach about every other day. It's both enjoyable and frustrating to run where you see the finish line the whole time! There is a jetty right at the place we're staying that has an American flag on the end, so the entire time I'm running back I can see that flag and how slowly I'm moving towards it. But overall the running's really nice. No traffic (except bikes) to worry about, so I can listen to music, and there are always interesting things to see. Yesterday was especially nice because it had been raining to the south of us for a little bit so the smog had cleared out and I could see the mountains to our south clearly when I was running that direction.

While I run, Patrick has been reading books on the beach or flying kites. We bought him a new kite this weekend; we'll have to take some pictures of it. It's always windy here so it's perfect kite-flying weather. Besides the wind, the weather is still mostly temperate. Every morning it looks like it's going to rain, but that's just the "May gray" and the "June gloom" that passes by lunchtime (though the haze over the city is persistent). I actually miss the rain a little bit.

Anyhow. I think what we're enjoying the most about this summer is no homework! This means we have our evenings and weekends free. Our weeknights have been pretty low key. The dishwasher here is broken, so by the time we cook dinner and clean it's usually pretty late. But we brought our PS2 with us, and we found a store called Cali Games that sells games for cheap, so we've been playing games for a little bit almost every night. Right now we're playing through Lego Star Wars. Coincidentally, last weekend, I watched a Star Wars movie for the first time! (It was on TV, and I have been relentlessly mocked for the past eight years or so for being a computer scientist but not having seen it.)

Our weekends have actually been pretty low-key too. We want to plan some big trips but so far we've just been exploring the area we live in. Last weekend we went to Santa Monica area. We found an amazing, hole in the wall Korean restaurant around there called BBQ Garden. The food was delicious and cheap, and the couple running the restaurant were so sweet. They kept bringing me more soup and kimchi as I ate what was on my plate.

Here's Patrick at Santa Monica Beach:

You can see the pier there in the background. We just walked around on it. It was very crowded but worth going to. Santa Monica is the official end of Route 66, so there were lots of signs and souvenirs for that. Patrick ate a churro (a very popular street snack around here). I wasn't hungry, but if I was, I would have got something from the fruit cart. You could pay $7 or so for a quart of fruit made up of whatever combination you wanted of melons, pineapple, jicama, and berries. It looked so delicious.

We also walked some on the beach south of the pier. On the beach there is all this giant "playground equpiment" for adults to work out on. Some folks had set up some slacklines, so Patrick tried it out. (He was not very successful, but at least he can say he tried!) Other than that, it was just really good people watching. It really does feel like the movies in some parts around here, because you think to yourself, is this really happening; do people like this really exist?

(sidebar: here's a picture of the most interesting shoes we've seen so far)

The next day we visited Del Rey Church, which we've decided to make our church home for the summer. They share some affiliations with our church back in Clemson, and we've enjoyed the teaching so far. (This past Sunday we also visited a Bible study/small group that we think we'll stick with. It's funny because it's a lot like our small group back home, only fast-forward five years or so because the children are older!) The church itself is a smaller church, and we like that for this particular time, since we don't have that long to be able to get to know people.

After church, we decided to try out a tandem bike that the lady we're renting from said we could use. It was a little scary at first but actually turned out to be fun! I liked it because all I had to do was pedal while Patrick steered. That evening, we celebrated our dear friend Evan's birthday with dinner at Waterloo & City.

For Memorial Day, we mostly stayed in and rested. We did go outside and fly our kites for a while though.

This past weekend we decided to go to the California Science Center, which is a free museum type thing. For one day only, the Deepsea Challenger was on display:

I wish I knew what all this stuff actually does...

That little white pod is where James Cameron curled up and descended into the lowest known point on earth:

And, equally (or more?) impressive, the science center houses the Endeavor space shuttle!

It doesn't look like that big of a deal in photos but this thing is incredible. Learning about how it was assembled, how it works, and how many flights it survived was really interesting. I think the coolest fact I remember is that each of the tiles on the shuttle are specifically made for that point on the ship and its unique heat distribution. Each of those thousands of tiles costs up to $2000 to make. The tiles are extremely heat resistant, but very brittle--the exhibit said you can crush them in your hands.

The museum also featured an exhibit on how the shuttle got there. They flew the shuttle to LAX and then transported through the streets, raising power lines and trimming trees to do so. That would have been an incredible sight to see!

Some of the other exhibits were enjoyable as well. Here is Patrick wearing airplane wings in front of a giant fan to feel the lift effect:

They had some ecosystems and aquariums stuff that was also pretty cool. I also learned something about smog in LA. It's true that the car traffic causes a lot of it, but it's largely visible because of the landforms. The entire city is surrounded by mountains (except for the west side), and the ocean breeze just continually pushes the air inland, where it is trapped by the mountains. 

The museum is in a place called Exposition Park, which has some neat history behind it as well. There are beautiful rose gardens in the middle of it.

There is also a giant dinosaur statue (accompanying the neighboring natural history museum):

After this we drove into Beverly Hills to run some errands, just because we could. We didn't make it to the really fancy parts. But at this mall, everyone was carrying their little dogs around in purses, bags, and the baby seats in shopping carts. (Again, I didn't know places and people like this really existed.)

On Sunday we went to church and small group then visited Redondo Pier, which is on a beach about six miles south from where we're living. There was an old-fashioned arcade where we found an ancient relic:

There was also a fish market--lots of dungeness crabs for sale. We didn't eat or buy any of the seafood but it sure looked and smelled tasty! We did buy an egg roll (one of the best we've ever had) from a Chinese food stand, and a caramel apple. There were lots of other neat shops and stands to see on the pier, and it was neat to watch the ocean crash against the giant rocks along the bottom of the pier.

There's a lot of random street art. Here's a mosaic on a local Wells Fargo:

So that's the fun stuff! I'll save the work update for another post, maybe tomorrow night. But things are going well at work and we're learning a whole bunch. Hopefully I'll have time to post some pictures tomorrow!