A Day in LA
Some days are every day days; some days are forever days.
Last Friday, Natalia and I had one of those forever days while visiting LA for the first time.
We got up around 10 am after a late-night flight from NY, and without any commitments or expectations, the day was ours to do what we wanted.
We took electric scooters from our hotel in Marina del Rey to brunch at a restaurant called 26 Beach. The host told us it would be 30 a minute wait to sit out on the patio. I wanted to go somewhere else, but Natalia insisted that we wait and after just two minutes they gave us a table. Point for Natalia.
I had the Yuki Spicy Tuna burger. Natalia had an omelet. After taking one bite of my burger, she had to agree I had won the ordering game. Point for me.
The restaurant patio where we were sitting was decorated with prints of Hollywood golden age actresses, and I took this picture of Natalia looking very LA chic.
After brunch, we rode the scooters down to Venice beach. We walked around for a while and then rode electric beach bikes on the bike path that leads to Santa Monica.
Without a cloud in the sky and a light breeze moving the palm trees, you could feel the vitality that has drawn people out west for generations. People were playing sports on the beach, exercising, or just hanging out, but everybody was at a level of chill that doesn't seem to exist in New York.
Everyone seemed remarkably relaxed—everyone except for a homeless guy who got rattled by the siren of a passing fire truck. He kept yelling all kinds of canceled words in front of these lovely lululemon ladies who were pretending they didn't see him. Boy, was he lucky this was real life because if this were Twitter, I’m sure they would have lit him up.
We walked around Santa Monica for a bit and then went to get some affogato at a restaurant called Elephante. The place's aesthetic was everything I'd love in a beach house. It was flooded with light and had wheaten walls, exposed wood, and rattan details. The whole atmosphere took you to one of those quiet mental places where nothing matters except enjoying the afternoon.
The only downside of the place was that I was wearing the same thing the waiters were wearing, a sand-colored pullover with jeans. Unfortunately, it looked way better on all of them. They were all great-looking twenty-something surfer dudes who you could tell had taken this job to be close to the water. When I went to the bathroom, I rushed past the other tables without making eye contact so no one would ask me to take their order.
While we were eating and chatting, Natalia mentioned that one of the hostesses had her abs surgically done.
"You can tell right away, even through her dress," she said.
From my confused face, she knew I wasn't following.
"It's the one whose ass you were looking at earlier," she continued removing all doubt about who the subject of our conversation was.
Oops, busted.
All I could do was laugh in penance because even though I hadn't caught her ab surgery, I had noticed her nice rump earlier. Natalia had to laugh too.
The whole day we were fantasizing about what life would be like if we lived here. What street we would live on, and how our life would be. In Natalia's fantasies, she's still a doctor. In mine, I'm definitely not an MBA finance guy. I'm more of a surfer/artist or something like that. Paying rent and bills isn't a part of my fantasies. I'm still a finance guy in Natalia's fantasies, though. Just a more successful one, this new LA life of hers apparently involves a lot of nice, shiny things.
We walked around the Santa Monica Pier for a bit before we ubered back to the hotel and hung out by the pool while the sun was setting. There wasn't much left to say at this point; I just felt very grateful for the day we had.
I had read the following line in a book about LA the week before we went there:
"It might be expressways, beaches, and beautiful people you notice first, but it's the city's energy you'll remember."
When I first read it, I thought it sounded like a hacky load of crap. But it ended up being kind of true.
