Strangelove: how I learned to stop worrying and love Los Angeles

Loft Cafe is still pretty mellow on a Saturday night - unlike the rest of Koreatown. Many of the same restaurants we passed on Friday night at 10:00pm are lively and busy at 9:00pm on Saturday night. There are three groups around us here, one party of four, one couple, and a pair of friends. They are all speaking Korean, so the content is nothing I can decipher, but the music of their language inspires my words. If I relax my mind, just a little, just enough, I will feel like I’m back in Seoul. And it will feel as natural to me as anything else. That is the treasure of a lifetime of traveling abroad: you get used to being without your language. You get used to not understanding the crowds. This doesn’t intimidate you, worry you, or make you feel estranged. The fact of your not understanding is as natural as understanding.

I moved to LA at the age of 17 and left at 21. I am now 29 years old. As an adult over a decade older a great deal mightier and more mature, I am realizing that finally untethered myself from Los Angeles.

I didn’t need LA for money. My job and revenue were coming from somewhere else.

I didn’t need LA for love. I already fell in love and had been happily coupled for seven years.

I didn’t need LA for status. I had already proved myself to myself. Who cares if these people don’t notice me, or like me, or are impressed by me?

I can now walk past a long line of perfectly-dressed people waiting to get into a nightclub and feel no envy as I pass by in my flats and hoodie. I don’t care about looking like them, I don’t care about befriending them, I don’t hope to find a partner among them, I don’t hope to find a profession among them, I don’t hope to find my ego among them.

I can appreciate the beauty in the clothes and style of the people around me without the jealousy that accompanies it.  I can appreciate the music of a hundred languages around me, and I can be comfortable in not understanding. I don’t have to find an apartment or a job or get from one place to another. I can live my favorite life here and savor things as I want to savor them. That is the beauty of vacation, when my responsibilities are only to myself and I am the master of my fate. This is perhaps the compromise between the exotic and the familiar. I cannot experience a vacation this rewarding in other place (like Iceland) because I do not know them well enough to know what I like there. I have not been there long enough to find myself there. So everything is trial and error. But in LA I have a history, I have experiences, I have a map. So when I go I can follow my footsteps right back to my happiest memories, and create new ones as well.

- Loft Café, 9:45pm, Koreantown, January 28th

Greece Instagram Diary

Seattle Road Trip: an exodus in three feet of snow

What do you do when you have planned a weekend road trip with your best friend and it snows three feet in your city?

Go anyway!

That wasn’t the advice I would give. That’s more of the chance I would take.

My friend and I had been planning a girls’ trip up to Seattle for months and when we finally nailed down the date and booked our airbnb, we were stoked. Only one little thing got in our way: Portland was hit by it’s biggest winter storm yet and we were buried in three feet of snow.

After much deliberation we decided to rent an SUV with 4-wheel drive and try to tough it out. This was not an easy task.

Step 1: To get to the car rental location, I had to walk one mile in the ice.

Step 2: I boarded the MAX (light rail) and road it for one hour to the rental location. MAX service had previously been suspended for days due to the weather, and they had only just started running the trains the day before. I had no guarantee that my train would not be derailed en route. Fortunately I made it.

light rail station

Step 3: The car rental agency came to pick me up in a vehicle with chains and drove me to the center.

Step 4: I get the most bad-ass car on the lot, and load up on insurance.

one of the better roads that was plowed

Step 5: I creep along the icy roads and pick my friend up at her place. After a scary could of miles on the war-torn freeway, we made it out of snow-country and it was smooth sailing for the rest of the trip.

at a rest stop on the way to Seattle

 

In Seattle we checked into an awesome airbnb in Capital Hill. Perfect for walking to the restaurants in the international district, and the bar in Capital Hill. Almost as soon as we arrived we treated ourselves to a spa experience at The Hot House, an all-women nude spa in the basement of a lesbian bar. I love Seattle.

our bad-ass airbnb

we made it!

For dinner, we ate the best meal of my life at a Syrian restaurant called Mamnoon.  We ordered:

Moushakal: muhammara, hummus, shamandar bi tahini, baba ganoush

Dolmeh: stuffed vine leaves, sweet and sour rice, parsley, shallots, labneh

arnabeit makli: fried cauliflower, tarrator, parsley

kefta: minced beef and lamb, pistachio, baharat, cherry tomatoes, laban bi khiar

And two desserts, one a tangy custard with pomegranate and homemade marshmellows, and the other an icecream with chocolate and meringue.

The next day, we had a food feast: Chinese hot pot, Hawaiian guava cake, Taiwanese bubble tea. Then walked through downtown, stopping off at Seattle awesome public library and sculpture garden, before visiting the highlight of the day: Chihuly Garden and Glass Museum. This was a very special museum for my friend who is a professional florist, and love’s Chihuly’s glass renderings of flowers.

The day we drove back to Portland, we prepared ourselves for another long icey drive in the snow by stopping off at Olympus Spa on the way. What was supposed to be a two-hour detour at the spa (again, another all-women nude space) ended up being 5+ hours with lunch. This spa was really incredible and you could easily spend the entire day here. One of the best parts was the Korean restaurant in the spa, which made delicious chijimi pancakes and soondobu. I took a photo of us  in the restaurant wearing our spa uniform: a robe and silly pink hair net.

After a long and scary drive, we made it back to snow-laden Portland a little warmer and happier than before we left.

Good friends are hard to find

When you find 'em, you keep 'em.

I made my peace with LA on December, 6^th of 2015. That was the day I returned after moving away six years ago. I swore I would never go back to the city, but cheap airfare tempted me and I am glad it did. Over the past few years I have grown to love LA, and now it has become my routine to go there at least twice a year.

When I go there now, I never relive old memories from my teenage years; I make new memories. I never visit the many friends and acquaintances I know still live there; I do my own thing instead. I never eat at the same restaurants I frequented in my youth; better ones exist now. I spend almost all my time at new cafes and art exhibits which I never saw in the mid-2000s.

Pretty much all my trips have been like this, with one exception. There was one friend from my life in LA who pretty much defined my existence there. That was Emma. We met at work in Orange County and spent pretty much every single weekend shopping at the Goodwill in Huntington Beach, eating Japanese food in Costa Mesa, or bouncing from one house party to the next all over the OC. After she moved back to Osaka, and I left LA for Portland, we kept in touch over the years and had many more adventures together, in Tokyo, Osaka, Sapporo, and Seoul. But we had yet to re-live our adventures in California….

2007: Emma and I, connoisseurs of fine fur

.

Even though the LA I knew has changes so much over the years and I am no longer nostalgic for it, I still dreamed about seeing Emma again in LA and going experiencing this whole new city with her. Finally, in May of 2017, we had just that chance.

2007: Emma and I, amazing by the selection at Vietnamese grocery stores

I made a point to only show her places in LA she had never seen. I knew that many of the places we had experienced nine years ago were obsolete, and I wanted her to see the new city I had fallen in love with.

I made a point to stay in Koreatown, not just because I personally love that place, but it was in a very convenient relative to our itinerary and I knew she had never been there. We reserved this awesome airbnb which matched our style and was in a perfectly walkable location.

Day 1 was spent in downtown LA, where Emma had only passed through during the five years she lived in OC. We visited Verve Coffee, The Broad museum, Grand Central Market, Bottega Louie, and Hauser and Wirth Gallery – all of which opened up after we both moved out of California.

Verve Coffee

The Broad

Mexican food at Grand Central Market

French patisserie at Bottega Louie

Hauser and Wirth Gallery

Day 2 was spent exploring Silver Lake with friends from Japan. Neither of us knew them in California, so even hanging out with them in this setting was new and original. We shopped for clothes at a farmers market, various thrift stores, and my favorite Squaresville store in Los Feliz. We also had coffee at Bia Café, brunch at Bowery Bungalow, and an amazing dinner at Perch in downtown.

Hanging around town

Brunch at the Bowery Bungalow

Sunset at Perch Restaurant, best view in DTLA

Day 3 was spent at the Pasadena Rose bowl, then for a delicious lunch at Senior Fish, and saying some final goodbyes before I left for LAX. Emma stayed one more day after I departed, and while I was at the airport she sent me this photo from Redondo Beach with a message: “I'm so thankful I got to live here.” It seems to capture the essence of our trip: gratitude.

Redondo Beach, the last photo Emma sent me before I left LA

Thanks LA, for making us who we are today.

Summer Wedding

At an outdoor wedding in late summer, I wore a breezy vintage dress I bought in Japan five or so years ago. One sentimental thing I do at every wedding I attend is wear one piece of jewelry I got from my mother-in-law for my wedding. With this outfit I am wearing a gold necklace.

Dress: vintage, from Japan

Belt: vintage

Shoes: thrifted via Goodwill

Bag: Delfonics

Necklace: from my mother-in-law