Brownies and Zucchini

As I type this I am sitting on a lounge chair next to the pool at our hotel.

The view looks like this:

Not to shabby. 🙂

The weather isn’t quite warm enough for me to actually want to go IN the pool – but maybe I’m just a wimp, because there are definitely other people in the pool.  Besides the fact that it isn’t exactly swimsuit weather, the weather here is really great.  The forcast for the rest of the week looks something like this:

————————————————————

My day yesterday was just a mish mash of wandering around the area that our hotel is in, and finding food.  Because spending basically a whole day flying (and crossing two time zomes) makes for a strange appetite.  I got in around 1:30pm PST, and I was definitely ready for lunch.

Our hotel is a short walk from Venice Beach, and luckily there are many different food choices in the area – not to mention many many more just a short drive away.  For my “lunch” – it was about 3pm here, but I was starving so I’ll call it lunch, because we did eat dinner later – we stopped at The Terrace, which is a cute little cafe very close to Venice Beach.  (I’ll do specific restaurant reviews in their own posts)  After lunch we wandered the area a bit more and decided to get in the car and drive to check out some other things.

First priority: Coffee.  My usual afternoon coffee schedule was super messed up because of the time change, and at this point I was in need of caffeine! We stopped by a Coffee Bean & Tea Leaf that was near a small strip mall.  I had a small iced coffee with a splash of skim milk.  There is no photo because it was guzzled up before I thought to take one.  The rest of the strip mall was not really anything that we were interested in, but we walked around for a bit just to check it out.

After that we headed to a Japanese grocery store that my husband wanted to show me. I don’t know what is so intriguing about foreign foods, but it as super fun to look at all of the different products!  (Some of them did have descriptions in English on the box, so it was easier to decipher what they were.)  We came home with these :

Some random Japanese candies and what are essentially Koala Yummies.  Anyone else remember Koala Yummies from back in the day? They are one of my favorite dessert/snacks ever.  Basically they are a thin vaguely koala shaped cookie filled with chocolate – or strawberry or vanilla – frosting.  My favorite, of course, is the chocolate.

After that little excursion, we came back to the hotel, and then walked over to VU for dinner. Vu is right on the marina, so it was a short and pretty walk.  I would classify Vu as “New American.”  The food that we got there was definitely unique and odd combinations based on American classics.  Full review coming soon 🙂

After dinner we were exhausted!  My body was still in the central time zone and it was way past my bed time.  We headed to bed at a fairly reasonable (west coast) time since the husband had to get up early for work this morning.

So now, he is spending at least part of the day working (yes, I know, on a holiday) and I’m hanging out by the pool, and possibly exploring other parts of the city.  This might be the first Memorial Day in a long time that we have not had some kind of grilled food!  But who knows, maybe we will find somewhere that we can get some for dinner.  Does anywhere even serve brats outside of Wisconsin? 😉

Buffer

Filed under: Travel, Words Tagged: | California, food, Relax, travel