Mini-Vacation

Here's my entry about meeting up with my family for their summer vacation.

On Friday, I worked for 4 hours and then left to go to the airport. I got into Los Angeles just as my sister finished getting her rental van, so it was perfect timing. I wish I could've seen more of LA, but unfortunately, none of the plans included being there outside of the airport. Hopefully I will get to explore it before the summer is over. First order of business was to go find the Vietnamese area to get food. My aunt told my sister their was an area called Little Saigon and that's what we were looking for, but we ended up in a different one. So we drive into the parking lot and there's this lady with her van all ghetto rigged out as a Jackfruit stand. Of course my mom and sister went down and bargained for some jackfruit. LOL. We found a restaurant to eat and then I introduced my family the amazing-ness that is Lee's Sandwich. When we got to the hotel, we all went into the hot tub cause it was too cold to swim.

On Saturday, we spent most of the day at the San Diego Zoo. Everyone told me that I needed to see it and I thought it was ok, but not as impressive as the huge zoo in Texas. I did get to see pandas!! After the zoo, we found Little Saigon and ate dinner, then went to the Oriental mart to buy goodies to snack on for the next day.

On Sunday, we headed to Long Beach to take a ferry to Catalina Island. It's sort of like a Mackinac Island...only a lot bigger and a lot prettier....and of course a completely different environment. I had read in the brochure that it is sunny on the island 297 days of the year, but as the boat was heading over there, it was cloudy so I got worried that it wasn't going to be sunny. Then just right before we got to the island, it rose out of the sun....the sun amazingly just shines on the island and no where else around it. We spent the entire day exploring the island and such. The scenery was probably the most gorgeous that I've seen in my adventures thus far. After we left the island, we stopped by this restaurant that sold crawfish and bought some to eat at the hotel. Of course my sister asked them to make it as spicy as possible and it was sooo spicy that I had to sip milk between each crawfish! It was even too spicy for my mom and Thu, who thrives on spicy food. It was still worth it though :)

On Monday, we went to Disneyland. We did the whole Disney World thing a couple of summers ago, so it wasn't anything tooo spectacular, but the kids enjoyed it. I spent about 3 hours there and then my brother-in-law had to drop me off at the airport to come back to San Jose. It's too bad that I have this deadline at work, otherwise I would've just taken the next few days off and stayed with my family for the remainder of their vacation. They are always an amusing lot.

I was suppose to move to my new place today, but Dave has a huge final tomorrow that he has to study for and can't help me move out till tomorrow. Since I had the extra evening, I headed to my favorite Vietnamese restaurant to have one last meal before I had to leave downtown San Jose :(