Guess what? LA got some stuff in it. California was easily the most COVID-shutdown place we’d been to on this trip, so it’s fair to say that the LA experience was diluted. Still there was a ton of good food and a few cool things to see too.
We stayed in Rowland Heights, a neighborhood in the valley (outside of LA proper) also known as Little Taiwan. It was chuck full of Chinese restaurants, and in many of these English didn’t get you far. These were not the Americanized Chinese restaurants who served assorted sugary stodge. These were the real deal.
We stayed with a Chinese family, who had a large, beautiful home, in which they let out rooms. Apart from a couple other non-Chinese guests, only the family’s little girl spoke English well. It was nice to be a part of the life here. The house had a large backyard with a tremendous view – it turns out there are a lot of tremendous views around LA!
We especially had a lot of fun staying with a couple of kids whose family were also guests in the house. Here are Ashley and me with Peter and Olgan, and the fun Chinese New Year’s masks they gave us.
We explored the LA by neighborhoods, and so this is how I organized this section:
Rowland Heights – Home sweet home.
Hollywood – All tourists must visit their exactly once.
Santa Monica – Some of the best food of the whole goddam visit to LA.
Filipinotown – Where I ate a duck fetus.
Little Tokyo – It was fine, I guess.
Venice – Full of beaches, hippies, bodybuilders and skaters.
San Diego – We weren’t there long enough to make a standalone section for it so, sorry, San Diego, you’re a neighborhood of LA for the purposes of my website. And most other practical purposes.
We visited one distillery (that was open), which isn’t really in any of these neighborhoods – The Spirit Guild, which makes their gins and vodkas entirely from California citrus. The orangey vodka was so good we bought a bottle.
For Ashley’s birthday, we did go out to a pretty fancy place in Anaheim, California, Anaheim White House. The food was competently made, but the ambiance was phenomenal and there was an extremely talented crooner playing guitar and singing. It makes sense that restaurants would have great talent here, right? Even in non-COVID times, not everyone who is talented can be a star. And now that a panicked America has decided their artists have no value, they must be a dime a dozen.
