Good food, books, and plants. What more does one need?
What are vacations for if not eating everything you can get your hands on?
One of my favourite ways to pretend I'm learning about local culture is to stuff my face with local cuisine, delicacies, and trendy snacks. I'm very adventurous that way. While Los Angeles is primarily known for being a health-conscious place, filled with juice, grain bowls, and green food, if you search (not particularly hard), you can find plenty of places to let your gluttony run riot. Well, not run.
Harris and I decided to steel ourselves on Sunday - the lord's day - and tackle LA's Grand Central Market, an increasingly gentrifying medley of food stalls, restaurant stands, and otherwise awesome eateries.
Our first stop at the downtown institution was the most popular spot in the building, and the longest line, Eggslut. We hadn't yet had breakfast, so it made sense to begin our journey and stretch our stomachs at somewhere vaguely breakfast themed.
The egg sandwiches - Harris' with sausage, mine with bacon - truly were spectacular, and funnily enough it turned out, Harris and I actually enjoyed the other's more than the one we ordered. Neither of us mentioned it at the time though. Not that it was a disappointment in any sense.
Next we wandered around, and settled on a pastrami sandwich from a hip deli place, because Harris is Jewish and will take any opportunity to remind anybody who could forget, and I like good meat. We ate our shared pastrami sandwich as we queued up for a taco spot that GQ said was a must for $3 mounds of meat wrapped in tiny tortilla blankets.
We'd planned on hitting a burger place that was dubbed one of the best in America post-tacos, but after actually eating our mammoth meat wraps, we truly weren't sure we could stomach anything else heavy.
However, undeterred, we wandered around some more to pretend we were burning off calories with our movement and thereby making more room for food in ourselves, before settling on ice cream to end our trip. The wacky flavours on offer at McConnell's were super exciting, and both of us tried different combos involving the "chocolate covered strawberries" flavour. After 3 meals and a dessert, we called it quits, and rolled around the corner to a bookstore Lia's friend Katie had recommended to me.
It was easily the coolest bookstore I'd been in. Not only were there books for sale and awesome works of art made from pages and novels adorning the walls and countless rooms, there were also super cool small stores, artist residences, and a gallery also inside the building. If The Last Bookstore was genuinely true to its name, it would be a good one to represent the industry - even if a horrific scenario.
I saw some of Lia and my friends who moved to LA last summer that afternoon while I continued digesting, and hung around with them for most of the late afternoon into the evening. Caitlin needed to go to downtown Hollywood to get some more pants for her swanky new job, so for the second time in two days, I found myself walking past the Chinese Theatre, the Times Square of Hollywood. It was atrocious.
I forgot to mention that after the pie the day before, Jack, Ashley, and I had taken a long way home (past the aforementioned Chinese Theatre, as we thought it would be a good idea to do while we were close. It wasn't) and found the most awesome plant store. I thought I'd already posted far too many photos from that day in the last post, so here are a few from an amazing outdoor plant store we found during our meander.
That night we went back to Eli's house, in a neighbourhood north of Hollywood, where we listened to people sing, bounced on the trampoline, played pickup soccer, and I won a game of FIFA. All in all, the perfect night, in my opinion.
