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, but 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.

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.