Yuri n LA

So, Tuesday was the big day that my good friend Yuri returned to Los Angeles from having been in Brazil since late August. I waited for her at the airport, standing right where the escalator comes down for baggage claim. I held a little sign with her name, and in place of the “i” was a doodle of a flower she frequently draws in margins and papers. I couldn’t help wonder what Yuri would be wearing, as she had left Brazil 30 hours earlier, having caught a connecting flight to LAX via Houston. I could only imagine that she had been wearing bikinis and flip-flops nearly all the time, and here in LA it was freezing as it had rained the previous day--- the mountains surrounding the LA basin were capped with SNOW! I thought I had spotted Yuri coming down the escalator, but it was just some random girl who was about her height and who happened to have a very similar purple shirt as Yuri. And then I saw a pair of legs in green flip flops making their way down the escalator. She spotted me with my YURI sign and stopped in shock, her eyes wide and her hands over her mouth in a I-can’t-believe-you’re-really-here-to-get-me look, and then she and I ran towards each other and hugged it out. Haha. You could feel the emotion in the air and I thought Yuri and I were going to cry---almost, but not quite. Lol.

So, I knew that one of the first things that Yuri had wanted to do when she got back in the states was to go to Coffee Bean to get a holiday latte. So we made our way over to one and she got a pumpkin latte, which she couldn’t stop gushing about, it was that good. We caught up, basking in the sun on cozy cushioned seats outside the Coffee Bean, as Yuri was wearing a black dress, a cardigan-like sweater and a pretty orange and yellow shawl from Brazil, in addition to her neon green sandals. We sat and chatted, shooing the gargantuan, mutant pigeons away from us as we exchanged stories from the past 3 ½ months. Next on our acclimatizing Yuri to America journey we went to Target. We searched for John Mayer’s latest album, tried on rain boots, and bought watches.

By then, we were more than ready for food and headed on over to Souplantation, as Yuri confessed that broccoli—or any other nutritious veggie, for that matter—had entered her mouth since before leaving for Brazil. She said she ate mostly meat, and the only vegetable she really encountered was iceberg lettuce, which does not count as a true vegetable as it is all water, really. We piled our plates high with salad, Yuri choosing straight up spinach and broccoli for the most part, untainted as she went without salad dressing, and I choosing the ready mixed Caesar salad. We enjoyed turkey soup and “pizza” (Souplantation calls it foccacia with cheese or whatever), muffins, macaroni and ice cream sundaes. We must have sat there, eating and talking, for well over 2 hours (and surprisingly, we weren’t kicked out haha). After over-indulging in food and resting our overly distended bellies, we walked across the street to the Beverly Center and perused H & M quickly, as well as Aldo. We then decided to make our way over to The Americana to bask in the seasonal holiday decorations. From the Beverly Center we made our trip to Glendale a small sightseeing tour of LA, as we took Santa Monica Blvd. all the way to Hyperion, passing through West Hollywood, Los Angeles, Los Feliz and Silverlake.

Pulling into the driveway of the Americana to enter into the parking lot, I was in awe. The street between the Glendale Galleria and the Americana is so picturesque. The Rite-Aid looks like it belongs on Main Street in Disneyland. The Americana, like The Grove in LA, is designed to have a small-town America feel, with coble roads and lighted fountains, and an overly tall Christmas tree exquisitely decorated. There’s even a trolley that takes you from one end of the shopping center to the other. The way I describe it is as if it is a mini-Disneyland for shoppers.

It was a fun romp around LA. To drop me off at home we took the 2 South to the 5 south to the 110 South to the 10 west, and so we passed by downtown's skyline. It was a nice treat.