Big adventures in Little Tokyo
Yes! We finally took our all day adventure trip to Little Tokyo, LA. We're making more and more escape trips off campus, and getting mentally ready to leave little suburbia to the big city. So this time - we went to "japan". Awesome!
We started the day by getting into a food store for something to drink. We found just about anything we'd need to make our favorite sushi stuff, a lot of uber cute food wrappings, canned coffee and loads of candy! The boxes on the right are empty. Yep, we ate them all. One is those little egg shaped things that taste like apple pie (supposed to be apple pie with vanilla ice cream, but I wasn't getting the ice cream all that much), and the other like cuppuchino (but if you let it melt in your mouth instead of chew it - there was some caramel inside too!). The center are samples of mini Japanese chocolates, and the left is this trange but delicious yogurt and fruit toffee with mini jelly eggs inside. I swear, those Japanese dudes make the craziest stuff. I'm sure those "magical" snacks are like Hersheys in Japan, but thy are still way cool than that. Of course we got some Pocky too, but that's all gone now.

I'm afraid I was probably behaving like a complete tourist, "ooh"-ing and "ahh"-ing at just about everything. I hope I wasn't too loud being creeped out by the mini snack dried fish and crab (yeachs!). My eyes were automaticlly drawn to anything cute, even if I didn't want to get it.
So the next stop is a book store, where I got this incredible Amigurumi (Japanese crocheted dolls) book! I think I can figure out the basic principals - there are illustrations and photos of hand doing things. I'm goint to look for someone who can make some simple translations, though (just in case I'm missing something dramatic). I think the main thing I'm going to do with this book is use it as inspiration. And there's inspiration galore. Check it out!



Ant got one of the Hayao Miyazaki storyboards books, a book by theis cool comic book/board artist, and the strangest horror film... about spirals. I kid you not. It had potential, but sadly, it was bad... Ebay? I think so.
Than, we pretty much wandered around, walking into touristy and "real" stores, we even went into a couple of supermarkets, which was just cool. We went into a confectinary and bought some Japanese sweets too. These things are insane! There are many shapes, what we had was green, oval and smooth (Ant's description: "like a small child"), and when you bite it tere's something smooth and sweet inside. You basically have no idea what you're eating. What it is, actually, is made of ground rice and those beans, sweetened with all sorts of crazy colorings. They were all called Mochi (like the ice cream), but I'm sure they have different separate names. Oh, am I going back for this one little shop and raiding it. There were more selections, with baked stuff too, but we didn't get anything for the fear of eggs (my love is allergic). May I say, delish?
And in the end of the day, we ate at a cute little local restaurant. We just realized we were eating sushi and/or Japanese on avarage once a week in the past month (Ant took me out for sushi on thursday night, I forgot to mention), not including getting ready-made sushi from TJ's and Whole Foods. I'm re-discovering vegetable and tofu tempura. Some of it is pretty delicious. Ant had a nice platter, that sadly included a squid piece. He should go on Fear Factor. I really don't know how he kept a straight face through it... ; )
And so our adventure day ended on a full-bellied and happy note. Where next time? We'll see. I'm still just happy that we get to look at LA with some joy, before we live in it (or close to) and start complaining. Hey, the traffic does suck. Post suburb, I think our love to ANY big city (where you can actually walk from one place to the other in) is going to be a great relief. And LA is pretty cool, after all.

And, is my Japanese fiesta wasn't enough - I found this cool pattern. Don't worry, baby. I'm not going to make those... ; )