California Day 1: Manhattan Beach Nights

Just got back from my week-long vacation in California visiting friends and attending ALA 2014! I’m beyond exhausted and aching from a lot of weird skin allergies that are still mysteriously reappearing every day, but I’m excited at the same time to update my blog with more recent content. 🙂 Let’s get started!

After pulling an all-nighter working on my Yuanji cosplay, my mom drove me to the airport to catch my flight at 7:15AM. I’ve been sleeping at around 6-7AM for the past few days while I’ve been on winter break, so it wasn’t too difficult. Our flight was taking off right as the sun was rising, so I ended up staying awake for about an hour just watching the colors shift across the horizon.

We circled around Mt. Rainier and flew by Mt. St. Helens too! There was a point where the pink sun rays blanketed a patch of snow down by the summit, which reminded me of Elsa’s castle in Frozen.

I drifted off to sleep for the rest of the flight and woke up right as we were descending. Having lived in Washington since I was 4, and flying back and forth between Seattle and LA almost every year, you get used to “feeling” the weather differences when you’re 35,000ft up in the air. Washington has this super lush, green, and fresh look to it, while California is incredibly dry, barren, and sandy. I was already shedding (albeit reluctantly) my wool coat and cardigan before the tires hit the landing strip.

Robot Nights picked me up from LAX, both of us haggard and raccoon-eyed from our horrible sleeping schedules, not sure if what we were saying to each other made actual sense, but somehow we dragged ourselves to McDonalds for some much-needed food (which, in the end, I was too tired to even eat most of it. sorry Lex ;~; ) We passed out for a few hours and woke up as the sun was already setting and began our first photo adventure!

Cameras in hand, we set out to shoot at Manhattan Beach for a few hours. It was my first time at this beach, so we got to walk around and look at shops for a bit and enjoy the beach night life (which was surprisingly pretty busy — a huge difference from Washington beaches at night! hahaha.)

This shop was so cuuuute!

We found this awesome brick wall to take pictures by, but it attracted some curious folks, notably a taxi driver who “helped” shine his headlights on us for a better shot… and other company.

The water here was sooooooooooo good — I don’t even know why.

We ended up getting super full super fast, to the point where I was already food coma-ing and desperately struggling to chew the rest of my plate HAHAHAHA. Drove back and passed outtttt after watching Freedom Writers, some Portlandia, and scrolling through reddit.

You can find Lex’s parallel post of this day here. 🙂 !

UNIQLO Wool Blended Duffle Coat

UNIQLO Men’s Lambswool Cardigan

BAIMOMO Crochet Collar Dotted Top

F21 Denim Shorts