Los Angeles: June 24: Driving to and Eating in L.A.

Di Yin and I visited Los Angeles (yet again) from Friday, June 24, 2011, to Sunday, June 26. My main reason for the trip was to play board games with my friend E and to see another touristy sight in Los Angeles. Although I didn't end up really doing either, it was a fun trip regardless.

After an unusually good lunch at work, Di Yin and I drove south. (Lunches at work are usually good, but this was unusually so.) On the way I took out my camera and began snapping pictures. We made good time despite highway 5 narrowing to one lane for several miles, which caused a long backup that took perhaps thirty minutes to get through.

Di Yin, by the way, also took pictures. The link goes to her first picture from this trip (picture #80 in this general album of summer activities). When you see a picture captioned "Visiting Carmel's new baby - Rio!" (picture #133), you're done with her pictures for the day. I'll link the album's other pictures in other posts.

Immediately before L.A. we stopped for a while at Pyramid Lake, a sight that we've admired from afar multiple times from the highway. For reference, Pyramid Lake straddles Los Padres National Forest and Angeles National Forest. We had time to explore it. We had a good time, partially because it was rather nice in temperature, which was surprising because the valley was 90+ degrees F.

Later, we met E at his place and headed out to dinner in K-Town. For our first stop, we dragged him to KyoChon (which we visited before) to convince him the Korean fried chicken there is better than his favorite place, O B Bear (which he had us visit before). I think he admitted that his previous impression of KyoChon was in error, but he wasn't yet ready to admit defeat.

From KyoChon, we decided to walk a ways through K-Town to get to our next eating place. However, as the place we intended to eat the rest of dinner at was closed, we continued straight to dessert at the third place on our itinerary: Hwa Sun Ji, a traditional Korean tea shop. During this walk we passed a cinema makeup school. Only a few places in the world can support such a place; L.A. is one.

Still wanting more real dinner after dessert, we headed back to KyoChon for more. With food in hand, we returned to E's place.