Slow Sunday in Downtown
Today we went sightseeing a bit in Downtown. MOCA, The Museum of Contemporary Arts, is located just a few blocks from us, so we decided to go check it out. It wasn’t as great as I expected though. The Modern Museum in Stockholm was actually a lot better in my opinion. Both bigger and more diverse. Besides the MOCA in Downtown, there is also another one down in Little Tokyo. Our tickets allowed admission to both museums, so we took a stroll to Little Tokyo and had a look. This one was slightly better, most of the stuff was just plain boring. Then again, I’m usually not impressed at all with modern art, in fact I found at least 50% of what we saw today to be utter bullshit. Well, on our way back from there we found this awesome wall painting though. Notice the resemblance?
On our way back up to Downtown(yes, down is up) we went by an entrance to a minimall in Little Tokyo that we had seen before but never actually entered, so we decided to eat dinner there. We ate at the Ramen place in the picture, which only had 3 things on the menu… and they were all noodle soups.A funny thing was that after you decided which soup you wanted, you also had to tell the waitress how spicy you wanted it on a scale of 1-7. I picked the Soy Soup with a hotness of 4, which was spicy enough to make me cry and cough throughout the meal… And I consider myself fairly resistant to spicy food. I don’t even want to know what a 7 is.
This is on our back home after the noodle soup, which actually was the best noodle soup I’ve ever had. Here’s looking east on Spring Street, i.e. “our street”. Our apartment building is just beyond the red lights to the right.
Yellow Raspberries
Here’s another nice little curiosity that I stumbled upon. Yellow raspberries! They taste exactly the same as regular raspberries though. It’s interesting how you can fool your brain depending on just the color of what you eat. When your brain is execting one thing and your taste buds disagree.
Trader Joes for the Win
Time passes pretty fast here. Or actually, it works both ways. The 5 weeks I’ve spent here just flew by, yet it feels like I haven’t seen Sweden in ages. There is a lot of stuff I miss back home. First and foremost my girlfriend, and of course my friends and my family. And just the convenience of being able to being fully able to conversate with people without stuttering and brainfreezes, to know what everything in the stores is and what it means, etc.
But what I do not miss is grocery shopping in Stockholm. Neither making a daytrip via at least two-three means of public transportation to Willys only to suffer broken paper bags from the wet snow halfway home, nor paying insane overprices at ICA Alvikstorg för some crappy X-tra fishsticks. Grocery shopping here is first of all really cheap, but the best thing is the huge range and variety of food available. And even the most exotic (contextual… probably applies mostly to Swedes) organic stuff is really affordable. It’s such a relief to be able to walk into a grocery store and just pick whatever you want knowing that you don’t have to eat ramen noodles for the next week if you buy that cranberry/orange bread that just begs to be eaten.
Below is some of the cool stuff I bought from Trader Joe’s on our last run.
Mango/Passionfruit Müsli! Haven’t tried it yet though. And I managed to find Kefir at long last, it’s probably the closest I will get to “fil” ’round these parts.
$5 per pack!!! How awesome is that? I’m gonna get wicked intelligent after my stay in the US…
Dying from awesomeness overdose here. And look at the potatoes, they’re so small! Awesome!!!
I love these. They’re like mutated tomatoes or something.
Pear shaped tomatoes! It doesn’t get much better.
Well, actually it does. Transformers Band-aids!!! Optimus Prime!!!
Bicycle, bicycle
Kirsten and Matt were kind enough to loan us their bikes, so on saturday we headed north to some park we drove by earlier that seemed pretty nice. We went there, sat down in the afternoon sun, chilled and enjoyed the view. Had we known its reputation before going there we probably would have thought twice about going, but it actually was totally fine. The park is closed to the public between 19 and 05, which probably makes sense…
Here’s what we believe to be an ice cream truck, that tune is still stuck in my head…
This is us heading back south after the park hangout. We went past downtown and headed for Little Tokyo to get some döner kebabs, but I convinced Sean that we should first take a little detour in an area we hadn’t explored yet on our way there. We turned a corner around a block and the clean and well lit streets immediately turned into pitch dark alleys with strung out people scattered on the sidewalk. We started to feel a bit anxious while entering the next block, and the first thing we see is a fist fight between 7-8 people in the middle of the street. Me and Sean agreed that it was pretty good time to turn the bikes around, so we went back up to the streets we knew, and then made it to Little Tokyo for the best kebab I’ve ever had, while pondering the importance of not turning the wrong corner. Anyways, a nice finish to a nice day.
Oh, I googled the shady area today by the way, and it turned out to be one of the roads leading into Compton after a few km… We may litterally have dodged a bullet there.
How to Use a Can Opener
I would describe myself as a fairly intelligent and intellectual person. School has always been pretty easy for me, I’ve scored well above average on various IQ test and such, and I would probably survive for at least a while if stranded on desert island.
If it didn’t require me to operate a can opener, that is.
It took both me and Sean 10 minutes of twisting, turning, hammering and cursing before we swallowed our manly pride and searched for “How to Use a Can Opener” on YouTube.
I’ve rarely felt so retarded in my life as when I figured out what was wrong. I mean, I’ve even used this type of can opener before, but something was different with this one. The damn handles were taped together with invisible tape. Thanks a lot IKEA!
How to Ruin a Perfectly Good Sunset
Bonus from Venice:
Visit from my Hyper Island classmates
Monday was a holiday here in the US, Presidents Day, so we had a 3-day weekend. Our classmates who are doing their internships in San Francisco took this opportunity to come visit us down here in LA. Fortunately, the weather is really starting to warm up, and we had nothing but sun for the entire duration of their stay. In fact, I haven’t seen a cloud in a week…
We’re hooked up
Finally we have internet in our apartment! It took us an extreme amount of effort and patience to get it though. We ordered a subscription from 2 different companies and both companies managed to lose our orders. But third time was a charm, and today a guy came to the apartment to hook us up. We now have access to the internet through an, as the ads state, “blazing fast” connection of 6-10 mbit/s! Pretty amusing when you’re, as most swedes, used to having the option of 100+ mbit/s, but it’s good enough for our current needs.
Yesterday night was the monthly Art Walk event here in Downtown. During the Art Walk, almost every building in Downtown is open to the public, and jam packed with arts and crafts of all sorts, alongside live bands and DJ:s. It was really really great, and also really surreal, the streets were all of a sudden really crowded and there were hipsters on every corner… So strange that we haven’t seen any cool kids up until that night. I wonder where they hide during the days.
First time driving in Los Angeles
On sunday me and Sean borrowed Kirsten’s car and drove to IKEA to buy some furniture for our living room. It was my first time driving in LA (and my first time driving a Prius, felt like driving a space ship arcade game), but it all went pretty well, I didn’t crash anything and didn’t run anyone over. The roads here are so wide compared to Sweden, the streets in Downtown are wider than our freeways, and their freeways are wide enough to land Jumbojets next to eachother. 8 lanes in every direction!
Here’s a clip of us making our way back into Downtown LA.
One of the perks of being in the States
One of the big perks of being here is that almost everyday I get to try something that I’ve never done or had before. Yesterday at lunch Kirsten and Matt took me and Sean to a sausage place down in the Art District. As usual, from the outside it just looked like yet another shabby industry building, but well inside it looked more like a updated german beerhall. They had all sort of sausages, and I had to go for the strangest one I could find. So my choice fell on the rattlesnake/rabbit sausage. And I can honestly say it was pretty damn tasty, I could easily order it again.
Today Kirsten took us to a couple of thrift stores to see if we could find any furniture, unfortunately we just found crap and didn’t buy anything. Well, I bought a weird cubic box without a bottom that was split diagonally by a wall. I figured I could put magazines of whatever in it, but in retrospect I guess my old box fetish clouded my judgement once again…
When we were done with the thrift stores we went to Trader Joe’s, an awesome grocery store with only organic and locally grown stuff, and it was probably one of the best grocery stores I’ve ever been to. As soon as we get a car, I might just do most of my grocery shopping there.