Back in Los Angeles - Day 2

Friday, January 12, 2007

We got up and packed our stuff.. time to set off.

our pt cruiser.. I think of Li Ling everytime I see this car!

We went in search of food as good as yesterday, and we easily found another thai cafe serving super authentic thai food! Le sigh. Only when we later reached the expressway and saw a sign that we realized that we were actually in Thai Town! Ha that explains all the superb thai cuisine.

We (or rather, I) had planned to visit a couple of places like, the La Brea Tar Pits and the Watts Towers. Since we had come to LA before, these were the only places that I was vaguely interested in.. But we thought we'd hit the outlets first in the morning to get luggage bags cos we had ahem, bought too much macadamia nut chocolate and it was becoming a chore to carry. Kinda dumb huh but I guess it's a pretty good investment considering the amount we are travelling.

ended up coercing him into buying a bag for me. Haha! perfect for travelling, can put lots of things in. waterbottle, umbrella, maps, tickets, passport.. Loves it! We also bought a couple of luggage bags but they aren't important. haha. pb also bought a couple of video tapes to record the night's event cos he did not ration the 6 tapes i gave him properly and took silly things all the time. =p

We had planned to at least drop by the tar pits or the Watts Towers after but stupidly, by the time we finished (~2?) there was this stupid massive jam on the highway! bloody hell! We ended up spending alllll our time on the road. LA traffic sucks! We only managed to reach LA at like, fiveish?

luckily i had some leftover padthai which tasted absolutely good even though it was cold.


stuuuuupid jam. luckily i not driving haha!

Korean cafe! We initally wanted to eat some fried seafood nonsense which was really oily but there were no toilets in that cafe so we hopped into this korean cafe instead to use the toilet and ended up eating here. I thought the chopsticks damn cute.

Notice these spices on the table? They all look the same to me! Haha! They remind me of da chang jin, opening these mysterious jars and tasting them hoho.

so glad to have hot tea.

it ended up really cheap cos a meal of $8 + 2 bowls of rice fed us perfectly! Lots of side dishes summore.. the red thing on the bottom right is actually crab! tasted kinda raw though so it was kinda weird.

Next up... what pb bought 2 more sony video tapes for.. a NBA match, LA Lakers vs Orlando Magic at Staples Centre!! Yes, this was what we were staying in LA for.. so that we could catch a good NBA match.

freaking expensive parking! We ended up looping to some ulu alley pretty far away which had free parking! hoho.

Approached 3 angmohs and 2 of them pointed to 1 of them to take the photo for us.. "He does this for a living" they said. hoho. Yea it's nice!

We did have an unpleasant start where we were denied entry because of pb's camera! They were doing their checks and saw his camera, so they said it wasn't allowed. so we said we wldn't use it and the lady said well, ok, you'd better not. So we got through, and I can't remember why the hell we went to ask this 2nd security guard about the camera. Why on earth, I can't remember. And he REFUSED to let us through! Argh!!! Couldn't leave it with them either. Damn retarded. Video cameras aren't allowed yet normal cameras are fine..

Considering we parked so freaking far away, it wasn't possible to go back and come back in time [of course he didn't believe that we really parked like at a 15 min walk away] so we pranced around worrying that we wouldn't be able to go in. We couldn't find another entrance for our tickets. We even contemplated hiding the camera behind some potted plant. Finally we decided to approach a couple with a kid in the car park to see if they minded if we left the camera in their car.

Thank goodness they were really helpful and they decided to smuggle the camera in for us, in their huge diaper bag amidst lots of diapers.. Their kid was realllly adorable and probably distracted the guards a little haha. And they passed it back to us after we got in. We were lucky we happened to approach really helpful pple! And so, we managed to get in.. Stupid thing is that pb bought video tapes specially for this event, but didn't manage to use them! HA.

finally in here. It was a sooooper close match, with either team leading by less than 10 points at anytime! Watching the match here has its pros and cons, well the atmosphere is really fun and fantastic obviously, but the cons are.. you can't exactly see them clearly and still gotta rely on the screen. Haha. I know nuts about sports so I won't be giving any commentary haha but here're some snapshots of that night.

The Start


Dunk!

I was pretty amused by how unsporting americans can get.. Sorry ah I very suaku never see this before.. but the teams not having home advantage is bad enough, they even had to resort to using these tactics to distract them.. Not too fair is it. I know that the same thing happens when the Lakers go to other states, but still it kinda defeats the purpose of trying to have a fair game to see who has the better skills.

at halftime, pb went to get nachos and a beer because that's what american sport is about! Also, lots of entertainment in the form of...

Lakers Girls!

it's pretty long so, well watch only if you're into these things. I thought they were really coordinated considering there are so many of them. No technical throws and jumps or whatever but their dancing and energy is brilliant.

When pb went to get the food, there was also some performance by 2 acrobats from cirque du soleil and they did some gymnastics things in the middle.. really fantastic. I thought i took videos of them but i cant find them anymore grr!

they also had the default kiss me! spycam..

and also, bubble vision which was cute


and and and.. see if you can spot anyone famous in here..



it was so much fun that we refused to leave after the whole match..




enjoyed it!

After the show.. it was FINALLY time to go home. Yea, this was our longest vacation ever. Our plan for the night was to.. spend it at the LA airport. SO SAD right? No more money already mah. Haha, well it was planned that way since our flights were at 6am and if we got a hotel room we'd have to leave at unearthly hours anyway. It would have been alright if the airport wasn't so freaking cold!!! No heater one leh.. so evil. We saw lots of other people camping there too, even families with kids and grandmother [that i don't approve.. horrible chinese dad, should have let them have a better place to sleep in lah.]

and it was time to say goodbye to pb for another 5 months.

left: the family was seated at the chairs along that wall. right: my caramel macchiato! Hoho.. there's this stupid satisfaction in indulging in a nice cuppa starbucks.


left: my newly acquired luggage bag, handbag. taken while i was waiting for my baby solara.
right: the stupid hawaiian cd which has only 1 nice song in it cheat my money

i talked to a doctor who was seated next to me on the flight from denver to akron/canton! He was bringing his daughter over to check out the universities in cleveland. his daughter was reading a biology textbook on the flight, omg. but they were nice people.. he actually did like, emergency rescue stuff.. so noble! That's him and his daughter, sneaky me took them as they walked off while i was waiting for my baby solara.

i got kinda lost around the airport cos i couldn't find the freaking expressway which was actually right in front of the exit from the airport. haiya.

when i finally got back, i was just in time for a laksa dinner by puji which i wasn't really invited for but i popped by anyway. Hahahahoho.