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 :)
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