It's a bird! it's a plane! No, it's knitted sweater SuperMorten!

We’ve been spending a lot of time driving and to prevent herself from falling asleep in the car, Ang took up knitting. Unfortunately, she can only knit straight lines so she ended up with a cape for Morten! Hahahaha

Posing in front of the Hollywood sign

LA has the scariest freeway / highway system I’ve ever come across (worse than driving in Russia!). We came so close to being hit by tailgaters, non-signalers, and crazy weavers in the six to eight lane concrete monstrosities that less than 10 minutes in, I knew I could never live in Los Angeles. We actually considered leaving LA right after dropping Kim off at his hotel for his conference.

The city of angels is stupidly large. It’s really a bunch of big cities meshed into one that takes two to three hours to drive across. I’m sure there are lots of people who love the hustle and bustle of LA, but I’m not one of them. The idea of driving through that concrete jungle to get to work each day is just sheer madness in my books. SHEER MADNESS!

Unfortunately, LA’s metro system isn’t the best in the world and when it takes over an hour to drive from one major attraction to the next, we weren’t about to spend even more time trying to commute it. Our AAA guidebook both warns of the dangers of driving in LA while saying that it’s the best way to get around in the same paragraph.

The crowd at the 4th Annual Taste of Soul in LA

When we stopped at the AAA office for information, we stumbled across a street festival called Taste of Soul. Apparently it’s the largest street festival in LA so we were really lucky to have come across it. We may have stuck out quite a bit (Morten in particular since there was only one other caucasian person in the entire crowd) but no one seemed to care. Everyone was friendly and the food was uber-good!

We walked through the festival for a while before deciding on which food booth to buy from. As soon as I saw the booth advertising authentic Jamaican food, my mind was made up! I haven’t come across any good Jamaican food in Vancouver and I remember how delicious my first Jamaican patty was. It was my last semester at SFU and my professor for International Marketing (June Francis – sidenote: if you’re an SFU Biz student, take BUS 447 with her. Great class!) brought in a few boxes of Jamaican patties for us to try. I LOVED them but haven’t found anything that even comes close to their yumminess since. The Jamaican patties at Taste of Soul were less than adequate. But, we also ordered jerk chicken and it was ridiculously good. The meat was tender, the sauce was flavourful and the outside was perfectly barbequed and smokey.

Posing in front of the famous Kodak Theatre

After Taste of Soul, we drove over to Hollywood and did the Walk of Fame. It was over 30 degrees outside and I didn’t have any shorts so I was melting away under the scorching sun in my jeans and coated with SPF 85 sunblock. I couldn’t take it anymore so I bought a pair of shorts at Zara.

The Walk of Fame is a bit of a joke since practically everyone has a star (including Godzilla) and for the most part the star impersonators look like ordinary folk dressed for Halloween (the Marilyn Monroe we saw was about 50 years too old for the part) – we did see a good pirate and a decent Superman though. We did a bit of window shopping along Hollywood Boulevard, saw some unsuspecting Japanese tourists get mobbed by a group of Zombie walkers, took some cheesy photos, and left for Santa Monica.

Santa Monica pier looks a lot bigger in the movies than it does in real life. It’s still a nice place for an evening stroll though and a refreshing getaway from the traffic congested city. We had dinner at Bubba Gump Shrimp Co. and played Forrest Gump trivia with our waiter. The service there is fabulous by the way. Our waiter was very charismatic, funny and went out of his way to make sure we were happy. We tipped well.

Before we left the next morning, we made sure to visit a lookout point for the Hollywood sign to take one last dorky photo. Visit Morten’s post (when he gets around to it) for directions to the best lookout point.

Bubba Gump Trivia

Ang playing with the drink menu at Bubba Gump Shrimp Co.

(Answers are on the bottom of this post)

1. What was the colour of Jenny’s shoes when she got married?
2. What is the name of Forrest Gump’s home town?
3. Is Bubba Gump Shrimp Co. a real company?
4. Other than running, name two sports that Forrest played.
5. Forrest made two really good friends in the army. What are their names?

Tips for Travellers to LA

1. A GPS is a must if you’re planning on driving in LA. LA has a complicated freeway system – so complicated in fact that AAA has a map just for the freeways.
2. You can find cheap parking in Hollywood at the Kodak Theatre. It’s $2 for the first four hours with validation. You can get your ticket validated if you buy something at any of the stores and I believe the cheapest item is a piece of fruit ($1) from the coffee stand on the parking level one floor below the ticket payment office. They also sell coffee, cold beverages, and a few small snacks at the stand.
3. The cheapest parking near Santa Monica pier is about a block before you reach it coming from Hollywood (just before McDonald’s on your right) – $3 flat fee after 6pm.
4. It’s best to go to LA when you have a reason to go (ex. conference, concert etc). Although LA has many small touristy spots, they’re very far apart so if you don’t have another reason to be in that area, you may be disappointed at how little there is to see or how long it takes you to get from one place to the next.
5. If you plan on going to any of the theme parks or major attractions around the area (ex. Universal Studios – which is fun; I went as a kid), check your hotel / motel lobby beforehand for flyers. They usually have coupons for up to $10 off per admission.

[View with PicLens]

Answers to Bubba Gump Trivia

1. Jenny wasn’t wearing any shoes at her wedding.
2. Greenbow, Alabama.
3. No. The restaurant chain was made after the movie and is Forrest Gump themed.
4. Football and ping pong.
5. Lieutenant Dan & Benjamin Buford “Bubba” Blue.

Hot Pot

We left Canada at the start of Thanksgiving Weekend and are at our cousin Bessie’s place in WA right now. Even at 12:28am we’re still eating! LOL

If you’ve known me for a while or have read my posts, you know how much I’m capable of eating. A visit to my cousins is probably one of the only times where I can get so full that I fall into a food coma for an entire weekend. I actually gained three pounds during one of our visits over just two days! It’s a wonder that they’re not chubby. I think the trick is to be super active – they’re P90X-ers and ‘let’s go training for a half-marathon on Saturday mornings’ and ‘we just came back from climbing Mount Kilimanjaro’ uber-fit people.

We arrived yesterday evening just in time to surprise Bessie at her belated birthday party. Before arriving, we stopped to refill the tank at a gas station beside a KFC where Ang asked “you think we should get something at KFC?” to which I replied “are you kidding me? We’re going to Bessie and Mary’s!” (Bessie and Mary are sisters). Ang said that the party was only going to have “snacks” according to Mary. HA! As if. Mary ended up serving lasagna, seafood pasta, two types of salads, four types of hor’dourves, crackers with cheese and two types of dips, chips with salsa and guacamole, Chinese sticky rice, a Costco sized Greek dessert platter, moon cake, chicken nuggets, fancy cheese filled bread, in addition to Bessie’s signature lychee bellinis and iced tea vodka drinks etc.

Ang and me boxing at 321 Bounce

After “snacks” we went to 321 Bounce to sumo wrestle, box with giant gloves in a bouncy castle, compete through inflatable race courses, play dodgeball, and pretend to be kids at a birthday party. Mary had booked the place for an hour and didn’t think it’d be enough time, but one hour was the maximum allowed. After an hour we were all pooped! Best workout ever! It was so much fun – I was even laughing when Ang hit me square in the face with a giant boxing glove. My nose hurt for a while – she hit me so hard Morten actually heard a smack and thought I’d really been injured.

We got back to the house at around 11pm and spent the next three hours chatting and eating and then woke up eight hours later to meet everyone and start the food fest all over again! We went to a Chinese restaurant for a traditional Chinese breakfast that included salty soy bean soup, green onion pancakes, black bean noodles, Chinese beef pies (best ones I’ve tried), barley dumplings, stinky tofu, sticky rice filled with meats and veggies, fried Chinese donuts, and sticky seafood rice noodles.

It isn’t just the fact that there’s a lot of food around that makes us eat so much, it’s the fact that the food is SO GOOD!! My cousins know how to cook the yummiest foods and which dishes at which restaurants are the best. Tonight we had hot pot at Bessie’s for dinner and went to two different Asian grocery stores to get the right ingredients. Hot pot is always about the sauce, and they had all the stuff: garlic paste, green onion, soya sauce, vinegar, the hot pot black paste (it’s labelled barbeque, but it’s not actually barbeque flavour), and lots of grated daikon. They also had every kind of ball (fish, chicken, beef etc) and veggies, udon, clear noodles, and so on and so forth. For dessert Bessie made chocolate brownies that were crispy on the outside and gooey on the inside. YUM! If I spent a week with my cousins it’d take me a month to list out everything we would’ve eaten. Gobble gobble! Oink oink.

Time to sleep off the food coma…

[View with PicLens]