What We Did for Our Summer Vacation

This post is a little late coming, so if you are sick of reading about what people did for the 4th of July, read no further...

Roo and I decided to take a weekend jaunt down to our favorite little California city, Los Angeles. We were blessed to have a couple of friends, Sarah and Drew, who were willing to take us in and let us stay with them. 

( I unfortunately don't have any pictures of our friends, so I will have to use photos of their celebrity look-a-likes to illustrate...)

Sarah:


Drew:As the weekend unfolded, it felt a little like living in our own little movie. First, Drew, who works as a tour guide for Warner Brother's Studios, gave us a tour of the studios. We saw the all sorts of sets and props and even the back of an actor on TV! 

Hey, is that Ross and Rachel sitting on that couch in the long-abandoned Central Perk!? No! It is Annie and Roo!  Believe your eyes!

Here I am in front of Rory Gilmore's house (of Gilmore Girls), still reeling from the realization that Gilmore Girls is not actually real. In fact, if you walk through that house and go out the other side, the facade is that of a completely different house. It was strange seeing all these places from movies and TV--they are a lot smaller than you'd think. There are a lot of facades in this business.

After our Warner Brother's tour, we decided to go check out Roo's childhood homes in La Habra Heights and Whittier. Going back there was like living in a home movie.

While taking this picture, the lady inside the house came out calling after us, demanding what we were doing suspiciously taking pictures of her house. Roo tried to ignore her, but I made him stop and explain himself. I think she bought our story because we weren't arrested later. Roo lived here as a little boy:

Later, his parents built this house and he lived here until his mission. His parents moved just a couple years ago. We spent lots of happy times here. It felt strange to go back--it looked the same, but it belongs to someone else now. It felt sort of sad to realize that we can go back to the place, but we can never go back to the good times we had there.  

All the sentimentality and bittersweet feelings (plus hours of horrific traffic) left me with a nasty headache, and we knew there was only one cure for that: Mad Wolf Mongolian BBQ. This is almost literally a hole in the wall, and it is run by perpetually annoyed Chinese ladies, but it is ridiculously good! We would go here back when Roo's parents lived in California, and again it felt strange to be back somewhere so familiar while everything in our life's circumstances had changed.   

We made time for some shopping and visiting Roo's siblings in Temecula one day, and then focused on eating some more. Anaheim has one awesome Romanian restaurant. It is run by Romanians and most of the patrons there were Romanian, too. The people all got a kick out of this American guy coming in and speaking to them in their own language and eating their specialty food. They tried to talk to me in Romanian, too, so I just had to smile and nod a lot.

During our stay, Sarah and Drew were house-sitting for an actor friend of theirs who has a super cute little house with a pool, ping-pong, big TV, and video game system. They let us stay there with them, which we were happy about because we got to hang out and swim and play Wii and Playstation. And on the 4th, we barbecued some food and ate outside under a big tree with colored lanterns then listened to the loud booms of fireworks while we lazed in the hot tub. It was idyllic, almost like a movie.