Road Trip Part II: Los Angeles

Some of you may know my friend Andrew. He graduated from UCLA and is now a first-year med student  at USC (let's just ignore his traitor-ade there). Anyways, I've known Andrew since I was in...8th grade. It's been like 9 years of friendship. My best friend Amber is also really good friends with him. So we decided before our road trip that visiting him would be a top priority. Let's see...I left off at the Padres game in San Diego last time. The next morning, Matt needed to finish up some last minute details for his Student Lounge project, so Amber and I decided to go hiking at Torrey Pines. We headed out around 10:30 (since we couldn't get up any earlier. It was a beautiful day in San Diego. We made it through two of the hiking trails. However, since we looked horrendous in our pictures...I decided to borrow some images from Google of Torrey Pines instead.

via http://www.daytrippen.com/

via http://hiking.mattlackey.net/

After our lovely hike, we picked up Matt (and my mini fridge for my brother to take to Santa Cruz for college) and headed north to Pasadena to visit Andrew. Andrew is pretty much living the dream. Very cool one bedroom apartment on his own...going to be a doctor. Well, we finally arrived in LA and found Andrew's place. His apartment is awesome! Well I think I'm more amazed by the fact that he has this entire one bedroom space all to himself. It's a pretty cool achievement. Anyways, we somehow got on the topic of the Father of the Bride house, which happens to only be like 5 minutes from Andrew's house. Amber might love that house more than any other house in the world...I have a feeling she's also going to be a brilliant doctor and will someday own that exact house. We drove over to it and took some pictures and then ran away because we didn't want to get in trouble for loitering. However, a famous house like that should be used to it. Did you know that in the Father of the Bride, they lived on Maple St. in San Marino, CA, whereas the actual house is located on El Molino in Pasadena. Hollywood really does love to "cookie cut" movies. Maple St. is much more suburbia than El Molino. After that house, we also ventured down to the Mr. and Mrs. Smith house, which...believe it or not...was only a few blocks away. You really must see these neighborhoods. These houses must be worth millions of dollars...easily. The Mr. and Mrs. Smith house looks exactly like the movie, without Brad and Angelina though :(

Father of the Bride

Mr. & Mrs. Smith

After our tour of the neighborhoods, Andrew decided to take us to this Vietnamese place that offers a meal called the 7-Course Beef, at a place called Vietnam Restaurant (very clever, I know). It's a very hands-on meal and the whole idea is that you are presented with 7 courses of beef cooked in different ways. The 7-course meal was $14 dollars, but it fed 2 people, so we each made it out the door only short 10 dollars. Our first course was raw slices of beef, which we placed into a boiling water pot they provided for us. With all of the courses came rice paper, veggies, and a special pineapple sauce. The rice paper was used to make spring rolls with the beef. Our next course was a platter, filled with beef sausages, 2 kinds of meatballs, and ground beef rolled in grape leaves. The platter came with these chips, which were delicious with the little meatballs. The next course was also slices of beef, except this time they were precooked. And the last course was a beef soup/broth. They only gave us one bowl, so it became a community bowl. It was a really fun experience, and I definitely recommend trying it if you're looking to have a little fun with your food. Be warned though, it can be tough getting your spring rolls rolled up.

Andrew's handiwork

Course #1

Course #2,3,4,5

Course #6

Course #7

You would think that after all that food, we wouldn't be able to eat anymore. But we did!!! Since Andrew refused to drive us to Diddy Riese (because it was 40 minutes away), we decided to stop at Coldstone's. Usually I'm not a big ice cream person, but Amber ordered Banana ice cream with Heath Bar. BEST COMBINATION EVER. I am soooo getting that from now on at Coldstone's. Matt and I shared a cookie dough combo, because cookie dough may or may not be his favorite thing in the entire world. And Andrew ordered a Love It!-sized ice cream. I'm not sure if you've seen how big that thing is, but to give you a little perspective, Matt and I only shared a Like It! But Andrew's ability to chow down food never ceases to amaze me. Overall, it might seem like a boring night to some people, but it was exactly what I needed...good food and good friends :)

Stay tuned for more about our trip :)

Ps. Meet Andrew