Weeks 8 & 9: Hollywood & Mitsuwa Marketplace

Pretty soon we'll have an east-to-west adventure to write about so I figured I better catch up on what we've been doing the past few weeks! Time has truly flown.

Week 8
Because everyone would ask about it, we finally made the trek to the Hollywood sign. We went via Mulholland Drive, which is a scenic highway in the Santa Monica Mountains, which run kind of through the middle of the city. It was pretty, in its own California kind of way.

In this picture you can see WB Studios, and I think Disney studios too.

This sign informed us that there is no good reason for people to settle in LA. (I think we already knew that. No offense, citizens of LA.)

The sun is in Patrick's eyes but waaaayyy back behind him you can see the skyline of the city proper.

Note the haze/smog. It's like this all the time.

Here is the Goodyear blimp:

Then we headed to the Hollywood Reservoir. We were going to hike around it, but it actually wasn't that pretty because the reservoir is fenced in. It was cool to see the dam.

And then we finally made it to the Hollywood sign.

It is very hot and dry inland. Where we live on the shore, the wind keeps it cool, but as soon as you go a couple miles inland, the temperature rises fifteen degrees. It never rains here. I think I've seen actual rain once this summer.

Here are some pictures of "downtown" Hollywood. We were underwhelmed, so we just drove through.

After this we had dinner in Thai Town at Pa Ord Noodle. Patrick had a super-authentic dish called boat noodles. It tasted kind of like a weirdly spiced pot roast with noodles.

To finish our evening, we headed to Griffith Observatory, which was probably one of my favorite experiences here. Believe it or not, you can see the stars up here! 

The exhibits were really cool, but my camera's not awesome in low light so I don't have many pictures. One of the coolest things we did was watch the sunset through a pinhole camera, and we were able to witness the phenomenon of a green flash. Because green light bends differently than other light, you can see this little tiny green 'spark' at the top of the sun. It was also a special weekend where amateur astronomers brought their telescopes out to share with everyone. We got to see Saturn through the telescope and we could see the rings on it! That was so awesome. It looked just like it does in the textbooks.

Oh. Here's Patrick hanging out with Einstein at the observatory.

Week 9

We went to test drive a Mazda in the Torrance area on Saturday...not too exciting. What was exciting is that we found a Chick-fil-a and I convinced Patrick to let us eat lunch there. Mmmm. Delicious taste of home. Then we went to Sam's Club and spent the rest of the day laying around and being lazy.

On Sunday, we had the special treat of meeting up with my Aunt Sheila for dinner! Unfortunately I was dumb and forgot my camera, but at least Patrick captured the moment on his phone. 

We went to Mitsuwa Marketplace, which is a Japanese supermarket, and we ate at Santouka Ramen, which, yes, serves ramen noodles. It was delicious--dissimilar in many ways to the instant ramen. It was served with a few thin slices of pork. We opted for the combo, which also had pork fried rice and a boiled egg. After we ate, we spent some time walking around the shops, which was interesting.

Hopefully I'll get to weeks 10 and 11 tomorrow!