Nick visit - Days 5 thru 12

Nick's headed back to Florida about last week. I didn't get a chance to do proper day to day updates, since we were on the go a lot. To make up for that Here's are some pics from his visit. They give you and idea of how he spent his last week in LA.

We headed back to Chinatown and Little Tokyo in downtown LA. I took Nick to the Orochon Ramen restaurant that I mentioned in an earlier post. We both got spicy level number 3's. That's about half way to the "Special 2" ultimate spice level that'll earn you a Polaroid snapshot on the wall.

One of the cool things was getting to see the new Transformers movie at the Arclight Cinemas. It's probably the nicest theater in LA. When you buy your tickets, which I did well in advance, you get to choose your seats. That way you don't have to get there super early and wait in line. Good stuff. It's a great system, though it's not entirely new. When I was in Sweden 15 years ago, their theaters did the same thing... (not to mention, offering beer at the concession stand.)

Also at the Arclight they had some of the vehicles that were used in the film. It was cool to stand next to the Optimus Prime semi to get a sense of it's scale before we saw the movie.

One of the days in Chinatown we stopped by a tea shop to get some boba. Nick got some green apple concoction that looked liked anti-freeze and tasted like a melted Jolly Rancher. It was intense. He dug it though. I stayed with the usual coffee milk tea....with boba.

We spent his last two days in San Diego visiting Joe and Joli. They're finally moving back to SD after too many years away from California. We only stayed one night in their new place. They didn't have any furniture so we camped out on inflatable mattresses, ate pizza and watched some DVDs. It was nice to just hang out and enjoy everyone's company.

My apologies, to my sister, Joli, for the last picture there. I wanted a pic of all of us jumping in the air. This was the best take out of about 4 attempts. She actually did an awesome jump that hearkened back to her cheerleading days, but unfortunately this photo failed to catch it's glory. Damn technology.