its a wrap!

at 9:07 am i decide to leave la. i give some hugs, wish some luck and am out the door. at 11:37 i am convincing myself to take the freeway after being lost on the surface roads for the past 2 and a half hours. this is what i have heard about la, traffic and the smog. today they both make themselves real.

at first i thought this layer of "fog" would just burn off, a general haze which kept it a bit cooler in the morning, but by 11am the sun starts to burn through and a scorching starts to happen. today i can see the smog as if for the first time, it disgusts me. it is why i dont like la.

but, being lost for a couple hours on surface streets, always thinking i knew were i was and where i was going was kind of nice. it was the self guided tourist tour. drive by things of interest at a slightly slower rate. i was able to go to venice beach, mar vista, crenshaw boulevard, inglewood, historic filipinotown, and was just a stones throw away from compton.

this all happened because i wanted to take highway 1 through long beach and not have to take the expressway until, well, now. i just got off the expressway but on highway 1 north, this is where i would have had to merge onto i-5 had i my way. everything has worked out. so, let me take this time to wrap up some things, with pictures!

hello kitty land.

hello kitty land.

something striking about tiffany that i had kind of forgotten was her love for hello kitty. upon entering the door of her house a visitor is greeted with a four shelf bookcase chock full of hello kitty paraphenelia. it is a striking entrance. after our memorial day bash we entertained ourselves with some poses around hello kitty land, now presented for your pleasure:

a happy couple

a sad couple

a mean couple

wooly mammoth / tourist trap

after hiking with annie on tuesday, i came back to tiffanys. we (her, austin, and me) hung out for a bit at the house, then took austin back to van nuys. van nuys is a neighborhood in la that is about 30 minutes away on the freeway. then we had the day. one thing i wanted to do but felt a bit silly was see the la brea tarpits. i have seen them in movies, they looked moderately interesting and everyone we had met assured us it wasnt worth it.

they probably meant to museum. we did not attempt an entrance to the museum, but we did stroll through the park and poke sticks into random tar islands that appear all around the park. while i had planned to write 3000 words about our experiences in the pits, i will let these pictures do all the talking: