Road Trip: LA

When we got into LA last night the first thing we did was have dinner with a bunch of our friends here, who proceeded to spend the meal collectively planning our agenda for today. The result was a haphazard yet awesome assortment of LA things that took us all over the city. We started in Manhattan Beach, where we got breakfast at a great pancake house and then spent a long time walking it off along the beach.

Ben on the pier.

We had fun walking on the sand and ogling the ridiculously large beach houses that people have. A lot of them are set up so you can see in to their first floor and admire their beautiful interiors as well as their size and fancy exteriors. The only people we saw actually in any of them were cleaning staff.

Those are individual homes, not apartment buildings or hotels.

Next we drove to Bell for lunch, and had our first experience with cochinita pibil - oh my god I don't know where this dish has been all my life, it is SO GOOD!

I don't yet know what is about to happen

THIS IS WHAT IS ABOUT TO HAPPEN

Lunch was followed by a CHURRO ICE CREAM SANDWICH - as in, they fry two fresh churros, coil them into discs, put a scoop of ice cream in the middle, and hand it to you like it's no big deal when in reality it is the physical incarnation of the meaning of life.

MY FINGERS ARE BURNING AND I DON'T CARE

We were both ready for a walk after that afternoon feast, so next we went to Griffith Park and walked around. We went to the observatory, which has a small free museum about space and a telescope you can look at, as well as a really cool rotating camera obscura of the LA skyline. Plus, you can stand on top and take your picture with the Hollywood sign in the background.

It's small, but it's there!

From the park we went to the La Brea Tar Pits, which look cool but smell awful. Also, they have statues of animals being trapped in the pits, which seemed kind of morbid.

Ben is happy that elephant is dying in front of its mate and child!

We finished the day off with a lowkey sushi dinner and more time hanging out with friends. I will leave you with this store we passed in our wanderings today:

I don't know which part of this store being called VAG I like better - that it's a meat market, or that it has Jesus on it.